Mike Huckabee Running a Positive Campaign: The Press Conference — No Floating Crosses
Charmaine in the arena Tim Russert walked in smiling and shook a few hands. He was traveling alone. (No Security!) This was the presser not to be passed up.
135 members of the press showed up at the Marriott in downtown Des Moines for the Huckabee press conference. Beginning at noon, there was news to be made and reported and editorialized. (Sometimes hard to tell the difference. MSM sometimes read like a blog.) (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)
It was New Year’s Eve and there was celebration in the air. Huckabee was going to come out swinging. He was going negative. There was gonna be a fight. Politics as bloodsport. Fight! Fight!
There comes a time that campaigns must go negative. Bad form, bad feelings — but negative sells.
Huckabee flew down from Des Moines to Little Rock and taped three ads on Sunday the 30th. Two were the good positive pieces. One was ‘going negative.’
The fastest, easiest tactic to get a few polling points is to get nasty…or so the political scientists would lecture. A typical politician can win big by going small.
Charmaine and her (modest) team were up past midnight getting the posters, the banner, the handouts, the fact sheets, the power point powered up. The ad was produced and loaded on the projector.
But Mike Huckabee changed his mind. He wanted a clean campaign.
He pulled the ad from the TV outlets.
Thank you (foot)notes:
There was no ‘floating cross’ super brilliant move, or “triple bank shot,” as one reporter suggested, when the audio didn’t work right at the press conference. The press conjecture was of the planning and foresight and manipulation and maneuvering of the audio problem. There was a story in there somewhere.
The truth was simpler, as Occam’s Razor would remind us.
The ad was tested some four times through the complex cabling to service the dozen news cameras placed on line.
But more cameras and press kept a-coming and a second ‘mult box’ was set up to accommodate the added hardware — the box was added seconds before Huckabee took the stage.
But the additional box was not tested with the current configuration. And the demon-gremlins worked their evil.
And the evil tried. But good prevailed. The skeptical press later suggested, off the record, that the not-going-negative campaign just might work.
And make political history.
With Reagan’s 11th commandment.
Too Conservative
See more Huckabee video at huckabee08
Good research at The Huck Report.
ElephantBiz gets it right.
Full Disclosure: Charmaine is the wife of Your Business Blogger
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