Here’s Dan Pfeiffer with a super-interesting newsletter about the Biden team’s message.
[T]he concept of a “message box” … is an exercise every campaign should do at the outset. It’s a simple quadrant filled out to understand the message your campaign and your opponent’s campaign will communicate.
While a little lost to time, a message box is still the fundamental building block of a successful campaign strategy. The best campaigns run every ad, tweet, speech, and statement through this filter to ensure they advance their message and undermine their opponent’s.
For nearly a decade of running against Trump, Democrats have struggled with the lower left quadrant. We never really settled on a consistent argument about Trump. One of my maxims for politics (and life) is that the only thing worse than a wrong decision is no decision at all. That was the collective error our party made when it came to our anti-Trump message. We never picked one.
He goes into the fact that Trump is notoriously difficult to define because he’s just such an asshole (my word not his) on every level. As he says, “it’s like ordering dinner at the Cheesecake Factory with their War and Peace-sized menu. Is he a crook, a clown, a dictator, an asshole, an idiot, a racist, or a Russian sleeper agent? All of these have elements of truth, but they also conflict. Trump has unpopular policies, committed crimes, overturned Roe, tried to overthrow an election, and says and does incredibly crazy things all of the time. Connecting those in a coherent, compelling, believable way is a challenge.”
But the Biden campaign has found the way to do it and Pfeiffer thinks it’s excellent:
They settled on an essential truth that is obvious to everyone who has ever seen or heard Donald Trump — he only cares about himself.
Trump the Selfish Narcissist
Referring to the ad, one Biden adviser told the Washington Post:
It is about why he is a felon. He doesn’t care about the harm that he causes as long as he serves himself.
Pfeiffer writes:
I think it works for several reasons. First, the best messages are the true ones — and Donald Trump putting his interests first is true to all but the willfully blind. Trump is a classic grievance politician in the mold of George Wallace and Pat Buchanan. But with Trump, more often than not, the grievances are personal. The Deep State is after him; the press is unfair to him; the courtroom is too hot; etc. If elected, Trump has pledged to go on a revenge tour against the people who wronged HIM. It’s always about Trump.
Second, it connects Trump’s personal foibles with his policy agenda. Yesterday, the Biden Campaign released another ad that shows how you can use the
”Trump only cares about himself” frame to explain his economic policies.
He’ll always choose himself. Always. The mere fact that he chose to go ahead and run for president in the midst of all these legal problems and the history of January 6th hanging over his head is a perfect example. Anyone who gave a damn about this country would have laid out rather than choosing to put the nation through all this.
Finally, I will bring this back to the message box exercise for a second. The best contrast messages are the inverse of positive messages. In other words, you want to exploit your opponent’s weakness while amplifying your strength.
Joe Biden is not perfect, but he is a decent, empathetic man more interested in helping others than himself. I saw this up close for years. Biden’s empathy — even in the face of immense personal tragedy — is his political superpower.
I totally agree. Trump’s silly “Crooked Joe” nickname and his endless attempts to paint him as a criminal mastermind are ridiculous and they don’t work. He is a nasty, mean, aggressively hostile piece of work and the contrast with Biden’s innate decency is glaring.
I think this message is good too. It encompasses all the things I loathe about the Trump so I’m sure I’m biased. His narcissism, his endless, overwhelming whining and crying about everything being rigged and unfair drives me up the wall.
Nothing matters to Trump except Trump. Some people apparently find that to be very appealing. But anyone on the fence wondering whether he should be back in the oval office tweeting his grievances all day should be reminded of just was a self-centered head case he really is.