Politics & Communication with Joshua Gee

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Pretty much as soon as I decided to start blogging again I decided that this would be a good first post. Last week I spoke to the BU chapter of the Public Relations Students Society of America. Acting against type, I put a bunch of effort into the presentation, which you can see embedded below.

It is a pretty good picture of what I did on the campaign and gives some hints as to where I think New Media is going. Parts of it are hard to understand without context, so just imagine a guy in glasses pacing back in forth in front of it, waving his hands around, and talking too fast.

Though no one ever said anything, I felt it best to avoid blogging while actually working on the campaign. I still tumbled and tweeted plenty, but not in the same why I (attempt to) blog. My tumblr isn’t as overtly political and I used Twitter partly for fun and partly in a semi-official campaign capacity.

I avoided blogging for two reasons. The first is that, while I think we are at the point where political staff are allowed to express their own opinions online (though generally it is good to avoid discussing the campaign they are on), I didn’t have any thoughts that are outside the campaign microcosm. So, while working as the New Media Director of the Deval Patrick Campaign, I had lots of thoughts about Politics and Communication, but very few of them could be expressed in terms that didn’t relate to the campaign or to Massachusetts politics. I doubt anyone was “spying” on me, nor that anything they would read on this blog would give an edge, it was probably better to avoid the situation entirely.

The second reason I didn’t blog was a lot more practical: I just didn’t have time. In fact, you could probably ignore that BS-sounding first reason entirely. Campaigns just don’t give you the time for anything like that.

But I find myself with more time and the desire to write a bit more, so here we are. No idea how often I will write, but I am going to try to do a post per day and one of those del.icio.us autoposty thingies for other links once per day (if I can get it hooked up). We will see how it goes once I use up all the ideas I saved up over the course of the campaign.

Joan Vennochi devoted today’s column to one of the major subtexts of the Senate race – gender. I agree with her general sentiment: that we need more female politicians in Massachusetts. However, the column tries a little to hard to make political disagreements into major gender divides.

David Brooks has a great article today highlighting President Obama’s often-overlooked successful work on education reform. However, near the end, one sentence bugged me.

Brooks:

Over the next months, there will be more efforts to water down reform. Some groups are offering to get behind health care reform in exchange for gutting education reform. Politicians from both parties are going to lobby fiercely to ensure that their state gets money, regardless of the merits. So will governors who figure they’re going to lose out in the award process.

What groups could he be talking about? I can’t think of, off the top of my head, a group that would have any kind of significant interest in both issues and the clout to make any kind of offer like that worth considering. Teachers unions? They are already solidly behind health care reform. Medical teachers associations? I don’t think they even exist. If Brooks knows of any groups offering a craven deal like that, he could have used his nationally-read column to call them out.

It is too bad he didn’t, because some people say that pundits often use the “some groups/people” convention to create straw men that artificially increase the drama around an issue for the sake of the argument.

According to the Political Wire, there have been 29,000 political television ads aired in Virginia and 20,000 in New Jersey; both states are in the middle of close elections. Here in Massachusetts, I have seen dozens of campaign commercials for the various Senate candidates. Okay, I have seen dozens of ads for Steve Pagliuca and one for Mike Capuano. However, the only two commercials I saw this month that really caught my eye weren’t from any of these races. Find out what they were, and the stories behind them, after the jump.

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