DG has an idea for what he can do to get attention
He's always in the news, because he's always making news.
September 23, 2015
Daniel Greenfield
41
What Trump does differently above all else is engagement. He's always in the news, because he's always making news.
Trump bashes reporters, but keeps coming back to them. He takes on FOX News and then goes on FOX. He understands that feuds are a way that famous people make news.
Contrast that with Hillary's attitude to the media, the rope lines and the refusal to appear on programs or give interviews. Trump rants about the media on Twitter and then goes off and does more interview. Hillary offers a fake smile and then has her toady David Brock run up a book denouncing the New York Times as a right-wing conspiracy.
Trump's attitude is not only healthier, it's more effective.
Hillary's refusal to give the media material helped tip them into reporting on her scandals. Hillary tried to imitate Obama in freezing out the press, but Obama's people generate a constant flow of fluff viral material for the media to report on. Hillary failed to generate much material and what she produced was painful and awkward.
Trump's Twitter rants, which critics pounce on, are radically different from the other candidates in the race. Trump personally engages in everything, right down to retweeting supporters. It's hard to think of another candidate with the same kind of social media presence that you just can't buy. Where a lot of candidates offer sound bites on Twitter, Trumps offers large doses of his personality and constantly engages with people.
It's so simple that it works.
Scott Walker, a good conservative candidate, who had taken an early tough position on immigration that Trump later arguably imitated, was campaigning using an old playbook. He was there as a stealth conservative at a time when conservatives so mistrust politicians that stealth is not an option. And that liberals who talk conservative can actually beat out conservatives. His candidacy was long on electability and short on engagement. His media strategy deliberately avoided feeing scandals with ambiguous answers. It was a competent and doomed strategy.
Walker failed to stand enough. Trump and Fiorina, both Type A business figures, understood that the only way to win in a crowded field was to be as aggressive as possible in standing out.
They were to some extent following the Giuliani playbook from an earlier election, a politician whose politics they tend to share. While Scott Walker though about campaign strategy, they focused on the most aggressive messaging possible. And it paid off. Walker left long before campaign strategy became an issue. Trump and Fiorina are winning purely on messaging.
The standoffish campaign style no longer works. Candidates who are uncomfortable can try the Obama approach, but without a friendly lapdog media and your own SuperPAC running your Twitter (one of them anyway), generating viral material to manufacture a sense of engagement is a lot harder.
The challenge today is breaking through past the noise, the distraction and the information overload. This is where Trump does best. He can't and won't be ignored. No one can remain apathetic about him.
Trump engages constantly on media and on social media. He maintains an outsized presence and finds ways to stay in the news. Fame was Trump's asset long before this race. He knows how to use it.
The nature of the campaign has fundamentally changed. The structure hasn't, but the need to reach people has. It's become too easy to sabotage an establishment candidate, as Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush have found out, by being louder or more populist. Money alone no longer buys elections. Engagement does.
Topic: Ask JTF for September 20, 2015 is ready, baruch Hashem (Read 2357 times)