Thursday, August 18, 2016

KELLYANNE CONWAY'S PAC MADE THE WEAKEST AD ABOUT TRUMP'S BAD LANGUAGE EVER

Law Newz reminds us that before Kellyanne Conway became Donald Trump's campaign manager, she was a Trump-basher and Ted Cruz backer:
... it turns out Conway wasn’t exactly always the biggest Donald Trump supporter. According to Federal Election Commission filings examined by LawNewz.com, in September, Conway maxed out her donations to Ted Cruz, donating $5,400 to Cruz for President. Records indicate that Conway’s husband, George Conway, a lawyer, also maxed out his legally allowable donations to Cruz around the same period. According to filings to date, Conway has not donated any money to Donald Trump or his super PAC.

The news isn’t entirely surprising as Conway was hired as a consultant in July after serving as President for a super PAC, Keep The Promise I, that supported Sen. Cruz, and ran ads highly critical of Donald Trump.
Trump hired an old antagonist? Well, that's not really surprising -- as we learned from The New Yorker, Trump asked Tony Schwartz to collaborate on what would become The Art of The Deal after Schwartz wrote a rather unflattering article about Trump:
In 1985, he’d published a piece in New York called “A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story,” which portrayed him not as a brilliant mogul but as a ham-fisted thug who had unsuccessfully tried to evict rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants from a building that he had bought on Central Park South. Trump’s effortsn -- which included a plan to house homeless people in the building in order to harass the tenants -- became what Schwartz described as a “fugue of failure, a farce of fumbling and bumbling.” An accompanying cover portrait depicted Trump as unshaven, unpleasant-looking, and shiny with sweat. Yet, to Schwartz’s amazement, Trump loved the article. He hung the cover on a wall of his office, and sent a fan note to Schwartz, on his gold-embossed personal stationery. “Everybody seems to have read it,” Trump enthused in the note, which Schwartz has kept.
Trump seems to think that no publicity is bad publicity, and maybe he thinks the same goes for bashing by a super PAC.

However some of the bashing by Conway's PAC wasn't very effective. One ad the PAC ran attacked Trump on his bad language. Other Trump antagonists have done this also -- and they've done it effectively. You've probably seen this ad from Hillary Clinton's campaign:



Before that, there was this, from anti-Trump Republicans at the American Future Fund:



And there was this radio ad from Jeb Bush's campaign:



All very similar, but all very effective.

Now look at the ad Conway's PAC made:



It's terrible. It omits Trump's most profane moments. The only remotely bad words are "damn" and "hell." The mother's acting is awful. And I was confused when I first watched the ad: The child asks, "Mommy, why does Mr. Trump keep saying the 'h' word and the 's' words?," and I thought, "The 's' words? Trump doesn't say 'shit' in this ad." Then I realized that the kid is referring to "stupid." By why "words" instead of "word"?

Maybe Conway thought this ad couldn't include genuine curses, even bleeped, because it was meant to run in the Bible Belt. But Jeb ran his ad in South Carolina with all the (bleeped) words in there.

Kellyanne Conway is best known as a pollster. Maybe she's not very good at politics otherwise?

7 comments:

AllieG said...

Conway is a pollster the same way I play third base for the Dodgers. She's a veteran talking head on the cable news circuit and that's about it.

Victor said...

Was she one of the pollster's that Mitt and Rove depended on back in 2012?

She's a nasty piece of work, which is what I suspect t-RUMP loves about her.

jsrtheta said...

You know, I have been wondering why, as the kids say, she is even a thing?

She has been polluting the airwaves for years, and is treated like an ultimate insider by the likes of Matthews, and I have yet to read even one thing she has actually achieved. She's a pollster? I've never read of, or heard of, any actual polling she has done that anyone saw fit to mention. She's a Republican heavyweight? Since when? I have yet to hear her say any intelligent thing about anything, political or otherwise.

She has always impressed me as nothing more that a glorified auto-show model, tossing her locks, lowering the collective IQ.

Betty Cracker said...

Wow, that is a putrid ad! Amateur.

Feud Turgidson said...

Jeff, the same thought is in my head since news today Manafort resigned as Campaign CEO (Mission Accomplished TOO quick.).
Reasons for Conway: available, cheap, and tough like raised in a tanner; will work outrageous & any hours, on unenforceable promises of future compensation; will never go public or whine about work conditions no matter how unpro or even horrifying (She has done this before, with she or her husband being compensated in kind not specie, including credit with groups like Heritage, or even in IOUs), fire her & she will leave quietly with neither fall-out nor fuss; she is a member in good standing in the WDC local of the Bizarro World service union; will leap on live grenades as everyone in WDC knows she will so it never hurts or works against her; is disingenous to most extremes; what goes in her ears never escapes from her mouth; she fills a niche created by Katrina now having trouble coping (Note the recent flurry of ludicrously incompetent spokes nuggets.); she is part cover for the Manafort exit ploy; and MOST of all she is part of what made it look like Trump had A Good Week when all he did was the uncharactistic move of moving the spotlight off himself briefly.

Bannon is no campaign manager. Bannon is there because Trump has turned once again to a form of Earned Media by trading a bone of MSM cred thrown to Bannnon for Bannon doing what Bannon has already been doing for months: coordinating the Breitbart front page to, and essentially substituting for, the Trump Campaign website.
Because Make America Grate Again is real, people, and no one - NO. ONE. - grates against Dems, libs and progs like the Breitbart tribe of related extremist rightwing media (where Ace of Spades HQ is RIGHT THERE, and Stormfront a mere finger distant - plus literally hundreds more: just look to the right side of Hot Air or the left side of AoSHQ).

Here is my hypothesis: that AP story on Manafort and Gates and the various failings to register under FARA, with the related name-dropping of the Podesta and Mercury lobbying group, was likely as not off a tip to AP originating with the Podesta Group (and no I am not taking them to task for it). Podesta KNEW what M & G were up to because they tried to launder their pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarch work and some funddthey received for it thru Podesta. Podesta would be in t position to pass on to AP that they just came from the NARA offices and BTW it may just be possible that the FBI is about to contact M&G for a little ice cold 302 poured over steaming hot triple espresso and a faceslap.
So, the AP stringer sidles up closer to Manafort - easy to do: just call Charlie Black - for a little trade of early heads-up for some exlusive. And what follows is a Mr. Creosote special, cooked up as a positive flurry of airless activity involving Manafort getting a title (SIR Paul to you, bub), Conway getting THE title every one knows is really filled by Trump and only gets offered as sop, Bannon coming out of the closet on how Breitbart has run the Trump campaign headline ops for MONTHS, and that Ailes, not that he has nothing better to do and is monsterata non grata to anyone other than Trump and hard core, is agreeable to maybe helping Trump on how to call Hillary, on national TV, as Malcolm Tucker would put it, an EFF YOU STAR STAR C**T.
This whole week from Trump Grates America has been a misdirection, sleight of hand by a grifting magician.

jsrtheta said...

@Feud Turgidson:

This has brought to mind many memories of the Clinton Wars. I missed, lo these many years, the origin of her surname, Conway. Your post reminded me to check.

Her husband, George Conway, was one of Ann Coulter's "elves," those despicable right-wing manipulators who engineered the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Back in the "day," I became close with Julie Hyatt Steele, the woman who was victimized by the mendacious opportunist Kathleen Willey. (During this period I also began correspondence with Gene Lyons and Joe Conason, two of the most wonderful people I know.) Ken Starr went after Julie, bankrupting her for saying that she had lied about Willey's account of Clinton groping her. Julie had been a lifelong Republican until Starr's goons showed up on her doorstep, threatening to undo her adoption of her son. These people were lower than low. They cared nothing about the truth, only the destruction of the Clintons. If that had to be accomplished through perjury, so be it. Horrible, unethical fuckheads. (Fortunately, the American people sussed this out from the git-go.) Starr indicted Julie for failing to back Willey up, and Willey lost everything she had. (I also spoke with her attorney, a damned nice person, who despaired of ever being paid in full, but stuck with Julie. N.B.: I can personally vouch for the fact that some lawyers stick by their clients long past the point that there is any hope at all of getting paid. More, in fact, than anyone will acknowledge.)

Anyway, George Conway, for whom I hold no particular brief, is a horrible man. He is almost legally blind. How that relates to his marriage to such a worthless human being as Kellyanne Conway I will leave to others. (Yeah, I really did that.) But it does point to one of the weaknesses of partisan politics on all sides: The willingness to hire famous failures simply because they are on your side. (I'm looking at you, Bob Shrum. Have you ever won anything? And who did you blow to run John Kerry's campaign? There was a guy who should have won, and you managed to fuck even that up.)

As for Manafort? He is simply the kind of capitalist, anti-American whore that populates today's Republican Party, a party that justifies treason under the banner of trickle-down economics. These people spend their lives undermining this country under the rubric of "advancing business interests." Same as Trump. His absolutely anti-American history is lauded as shrewd business practice. Sorry, asshole, if you wanted to help this country, you would have been doing it your entire life. You didn't. So you're just scum. And a lying hypocrite.

kobrien33525 said...

KellyAnne Conway is nothing but a hired mouth. She did Troy Aikins. She's done Ted Cruz. Now she's doing Donald Trump. Hell. She is the reincarnate of the DC Madam.