Filed under: Republican Party, Videos That Make Me Want To Gouge My Eyes Out
I don’t know him, but RNC Chairman Mike Duncan seems like a genuinely nice guy.
But with all due respect to Mr. Duncan, this video just isn’t the way to blow up the stereotype of the GOP as the party of boring, old white guys.
I don’t want to say this video is boring, but if it were any more effective at curing insomnia, the FDA would have to approve it.
In any case, here are four unsolicited suggestions for how to make a video like this a little more effective at rebranding the party and attracting new voters to the cause:
1. Burn the tired law-office backdrop. In fact, get out of the stuffy old studio completely. Maybe lose the tie.
2. Shorten it way up. Nobody in the real world is going to watch a ten-minute video. You’ve got 60 seconds… three minutes tops. I understand this video is supposedly targeted at RNC committee members, but shouldn’t the real audience be every American citizen who may vote at some time in the next 50 years?
3. Don’t try to claim that this election didn’t result in “gloom and doom” for the party. Did you see the returns? Pretty much the definition of gloom and doom, in fact. Instead, at least pretend to have learned some lessons and lay out a grand vision for the future.
4. Check out Obama’s YouTube page for inspiration. Steal his methods shamelessly.
Check out this still from President-elect Obama’s televised statement in response to Gov. Blagojevich’s arrest:
Is it just me or does his lower, seated, almost submissive positioning plus the wood paneling in the background make it appear as though he’s on a witness stand?
Is this the first botched photo op of the Obama presidency?
The U.S. Conference of Mayors knows exactly how to get the economy moving again. No – not tax relief for small businesses that create jobs. An income tax holiday for wage earners? You’ve got to be kidding! An 800+ page list of pork projects? You betcha!
Because when you hire one guy to dig a hole and another guy to fill it back it — presto, whammo — you’ve just created two jobs!
In all seriousness, though, the list that was released by the Mayors on Monday represents a golden opportunity for grassroots taxpayers to expose wasteful spending in a way we rarely see. Usually the House or Senate Appropriations Committees ram through pork-barrel spending with little, if any, advance public notice, leaving little time to scrutinize the individual projects.
But with Congress not expected to act on a stimulus plan until January, and with the Mayors very helpfully breaking the projects down by locality, it’s easy for taxpayers to find the proposed projects in their communities. It’s very likely that the next Bridge to Nowhere — or the next dozen Bridges to Nowhere — are on this list.
Now it’s just up to us taxpayers to find them, maybe shoot and publicize a few short videos like the one we did at Americans for Prosperity from the original Bridge to Nowhere – and clearly expose this sham “stimulus plan” for what it largely is – wasteful make-work projects that will do little, if anything, to provide a real and lasting economic stimulus.
Check out these simple — yet very effective — videos from the Obama Transition Team’s website, Change.gov, and contrast them with anything that’s been done by Republican elected officials.
In this first video, which was posted on Nov. 18, we get a sneak peek behind the curtain at Obama Transition HQ as Carol Browner meets with the Energy and Environment Transition Team and they pretend to discuss what their first steps should be when they take office in January.
Of course, they don’t actually discuss any real strategy on camera or even announce anything new. But the viewer is left feeling as though he’s getting exclusive behind-the-scenes access to a meeting he’d never been invited to before. And the brilliant b-roll shot selection is almost voyeuristic in nature — a shot from the hallway into a staffer’s office, a shot over another staffer’s shoulder in the conference room, etc. And at the end of the video, a call to action: a plea for people to submit their ideas through the Change.gov website. Smart, smart stuff:
Now check out this video that was posted three days later – on Nov. 21. It shows Heather Zichal, a member of the Obama Transition’s Energy and Environment Policy Team answering questions that viewers of the first video submitted through Change.gov. This is so simple — just a woman answering questions in front of a webcam or a tiny camcorder. Yet as of today, the video’s been viewed more than 80,000 times. And more importantly, it’s given those 80,000 people another seemingly vouyeuristic peek behind the curtain and left them with the feeling that their ideas and suggestions are being heard — probably for the first time.
Finally, here’s one more behind-the-scenes video from the Obama Transition Team — this one illustrating how they’re offering real people a “seat at the table” for the first time and transparently posting all policy suggestions from every outside group they’re meeting with. Again, there’s brilliant voyeuristic shot selection on display — through the conference room window, for example — that gives the impression that you’re seeing something you’re not really supposed to have access to.
Of course, this is all scripted to give the illusion of access where little, if any, actually exists, but even a jaded political hack like me felt a little twinge of hope that I might get the chance to sit down with the transition team and politely yet persuasively explain to them how higher taxes, unlimited government spending and extreme environmental overregulation will destroy what’s left of the American economy. I’ll let you know how that turns out. In the meantime, check out this last Obama video:
Now contrast those creative, engaging videos with the ones our elected officials on the right have posted. Most of them consist solely of unedited news conference footage and speeches from the House and Senate floors, which is ok, but the last time I checked, C-Span wasn’t exactly challenging Dancing With the Stars for the top spot in the Nielsen ratings. There are a handful of relatively unscripted, made-for-Internet videos that show lawmakers looking into the camera and explaining why some legislation or issue is important, but there’s often no real call to action or effort to engage or connect with the viewers.
The only truly outside-the-box video I found is this one by the RNC, which manages to achieve a very, very modest level of humor by attempting to tie Obama to the stereotype of cheesy, uber-trendy Europeans after his campaign speech in Berlin. But the video fails because it doesn’t really send a clear message. What is the message, exactly? That a lot of relatively normal-looking people in Germany and other nations around the world really like Obama? Gee, we can’t have that, can we? And while Obama’s online videos explain to people how deeply concerned he is about their skyrocketing health care costs, the RNC was comparing him to David Hasselhoff? Seriously?
So while Obama and his team are producing easy, cheap, but extremely effective videos that give the American people a feeling of access to the levers of power for the first time, the right is either posting boring Congressional speeches or videos that feature lots of people saying how much they love Obama. It’s little wonder that Obama’s videos routinely rack up hundreds of thousands of views, while most videos posted by Republican elected officials only log a few dozen or a few hundred views.
The good news is that it’s really not that difficult for the right to replicate what Obama is doing with online video. The vast majority of his material isn’t something we need George Lucas or Steven Stephen Spielberg to produce. There aren’t any fancy special effects or elaborate editing techniques in the videos above. All it really takes is a basic camcorder, a tripod, a basic video editor and just a little bit of creativity.
So let’s get going…
As I draft this inaugural blog post, America stands at an extremely challenging crossroads.
Homeowners continue to watch the values of their single greatest assets plummet. The majority of American households that have money invested in stock markets has seen the value of their retirement accounts and portfolios drop by roughly half in less than a year. Unemployment is rising sharply, with more people losing their jobs last month than at any other time since 1974. And if that weren’t bad enough, entire industries are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy or insolvency. In short, we are facing the greatest economic challenge in at least three decades, perhaps longer.
At the same time, our public school system is largely broken and unaccountable, which is dooming yet another generation of American kids to mediocrity in the competitive global marketplace. Our dependence on foreign sources of oil continues to threaten not only our economic security, but also our national security. The same kind of uncompetitive, outdated and bankruptcy-inducing union model that has crippled Detroit is about to be foisted upon many more American businesses by taking the secret ballot away from rank-and-file workers in union elections.
And on top of all of that, there’s a ticking demographic time bomb that promises trillions of dollars in entitlement benefits to millions of Americans who really don’t need a check from the taxpayers.
The big question facing our nation right now is how we deal with this mess.
Well, despite all the inside-the-Beltway punditry about this supposedly “post-partisan,” “post-ideological,” “pragmatic,” “centrist” era, the fact is there are still essentially two schools of thought about where we should go from here.
One on side are collectivists who think we need a dramatic expansion of government control over the economy to address these challenges. That we need a so-called “New New Deal” that will redistribute billions, perhaps trillions, of taxpayer dollars from the so-called “wealthy” to create new government jobs – building new bridges and highways and windmills and the like. That we need significant government expansion into the health care sector. More taxpayer money for — and government control over — essentially the existing public school system. That the government should force a costly transition from fossil-based fuels to alternative (and in many cases currently unviable and untested) energy sources – even if that means a significant hit to the economy.
And on the other side stand those who think that for capitalism to work, there need to be consequences to bad decisions – not an endless series of taxpayer-funded bailouts. That the best way to improve the economic security of the greatest number of people for the longest period of time is for the government planners to largely get out of the way of the private-sector entrepreneurs who start and expand new small businesses, create good new jobs and actually make the national economic pie larger as opposed to just redistributing pieces of a same-sized pie. That we need to let private entrepreneurs develop all kinds of new domestic energy sources – including oil, natural gas, shale, clean coal and nuclear power – and that the government shouldn’t subsidize winners and losers based largely on how politically correct or politically connected they are. And that we need to get control of entitlement spending before it completely bankrupts this nation.
If you haven’t already guessed, I fall squarely in the latter camp.
One of my goals with this blog is to contribute to the national debate on these issues – not so much by airing my own two-bit opinions about each day’s developments (although there will be some of that, to be sure,) but by actually adding new, politically relevant, newsworthy information to the debate.
On a related note, there’s been much written this year about how far behind the Right is when it comes to online activism, and much of what’s been written is absolutely correct. My personal belief, which is not necessarily original to me nor exclusively mine, is that the right side of the blogosphere has been far too focused on personal punditry and simply linking to the opinions of other like-minded bloggers in a virtual echo chamber, and that we instead need to become more engaged in actual activism and investigative journalism.
Which brings me to my other major goal for this blog: to highlight best practices in the world of online political activism and marketing – both on the left and the right.
On that front, I’ll say upfront that while there’s no shortage of new online tools that can educate, energize and mobilize the grassroots, I personally believe that the single best online tool is one that may seem archaic to some hardcore online aficionados: video. That’s obviously not to say that Twitter, Facebook, or the many other online networking tools are without merit. But the fact is the vast majority of existing and potential conservative activists and voters simply don’t have the technological skill or interest (not to mention the time) to use all of these sites for effective political mobilization.
But just about anybody can and will click “Play” on an online video that’s embedded on their favorite blog or news site. And I’m convinced that many of those folks can be trained to use their home camcorders or even their point-and-shoot digital cameras to create videos that expose their local elected officials’ hypocrisy, stupidity or corruption to the world. Or at least to the mainstream media and voters in their local communities, which can cumulatively have a powerful impact on the nation as a whole.
The road ahead is unclear and likely to be very challenging for many of us. Likewise, I’m not sure exactly where this blog will go, but I intend to make it a blog about politics, online marketing, and occasionally the intersection of the two. And sometimes about neither politics nor marketing nor anything too serious whatsoever. Because in these trying times sometimes we just need to see a crazy-ass cat engage in a death match against an HP Laser Jet printer.
