If you are the Republican official in charge of making sure that your party’s nominees didn’t end up becoming the next Richard Mourdock or Todd Akin, what would you do? Yeah, yeah, I know—you’d look in the mirror and wonder where your life went wrong. But apparently in the non-hypothetical world of the GOP in 2014, the answer is to start a school teaching campaigns how to handle media in the digital age, and they invited CNN inside:
Night after night, Republicans are going back to school in an effort to build a new army of communications operatives for the Twitter age.
The courses at “Comms College” — the GOP’s secret training ground for social media-savvy communications staffers — are taught in a sterile conference room on Capitol Hill. Students are instructed that the modern news cycle, fueled by the disruptive power of the web and constantly-filing reporters, has no patience for old political playbooks.
So their prescription is less about rebranding the GOP by adopting modern ideas, it’s about rebranding the GOP by getting better at Twitter, Facebook, and maybe even Snapchat. And how are they teaching GOP campaign staffers about this? By adopting slogans like this:
On a recent evening, two dozen operatives — most of them in their 20s and some in need of a shave — filed into the RNC conference room. Lockwood opened the lesson with a slideshow. It included a picture of boxer Mike Tyson in the ring, accompanied by his famous maxim: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Here’s two pieces of advice for whatever GOP “professor” came up with that slide. First, the GOP’s problem isn’t that Democrats or the media are punching it in the mouth, it’s that it keeps on punching itself in the mouth. And second, maybe the next time you want to teach your party on how to avoid becoming the next Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock, you should avoid quoting convicted rapists, especially when you’re presenting yourself as an expert on optics and spin.
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