| I have to admit, I've been operating under the assumption that Harold Ford's press people are the same beltway-insider grossly overpriced consultant types that typically attach themselves to campaigns where the candidate's ego and pocketbook trump strategic sense. After all, anyone with a sense of honesty and an IQ greater than that of a fencepost could have told him that his campaign rollout was not going smoothly.
But apparently the consultants do know enough at least to recognize that his interview with the New York Times, despite the Times being friendly to him, still turned into an unmitigated clusterfuck.
The obvious solution would be to talk to the candidate, get some kind of message going, and determine whether the candidate's beliefs really fit the constituency.
Oh wait, silly me. That would be the right thing to do. No, in the world of overpaid political consultants with a win/loss record worse than the Buffalo Bills, the solution is simply to not talk about the issues.
From Edsel's latest interview in the NY Daily News, emphasis mine:
The interview - granted under the condition that the questions be limited to his rationale for running, and not issues - comes at the end of a rocky first week of buzz surrounding his potential candidacy.
Then Edsel has the actual brass to say this:
"This race isn't about feet, it's about issues," he said of ribbing he has taken on the web and elsewhere of his regular pedicures.
There can be only one response to this.
You mean the issues you refuse to discuss? I can understand your impulse--if I possessed your deeply held religious beliefs that abortion is evil, that gay people are second class citizens, and your support for unlimited bank bailouts and a downright Ayn Rand style system of non-taxation for the ultra-wealthy, I wouldn't want to admit to those things either.
But Harold, that black cloud of doom that's hanging over the head of your still unannounced campaign? That's not going away any time soon, and this sudden swerve in strategy just adds to the feeling that some of us are familiar with when we see a campaign in crash-and-burn mode. Except that your campaign didn't even get off the runway: it caught fire in the hanger. |
