Alla läsare tillönskas ett riktigt Gott Nytt År!

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Humor: När politiker avgår!

  Bild: The New Yorker. Fler teckningar med politiskt tema här.

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Media: Rivaliteten mellan Newsweek och Time!

RIP | Sista numret av Newsweek är här. Fr.o.m. januari blir det bara digital utgivning. Helt enligt tidsandan sätter man punkt med en hashtag.

Sista numret av Newsweek daterat 31 december 2012

Första numret av News-Week daterat 17 februari 1933

Från första början var Newsweek och Time varandras huvudkonkurrenter. Två veteranter – Evan Thomas och Jim Kelly – minns rivaliteten mellan de båda nyhetsmagasinen.

Thomas: For a reporter, writer, or editor, switching between Time and Newsweek was regarded as a Cold War defection. In 1986, when I left Time, where I was a writer in the Nation section, to become Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, I was given 24 hours to clear out of the office, and Henry Grunwald, the ­editor in chief of Time Inc., refused to shake my hand (we later became friends, and I wrote his obituary for Newsweek in 2005).

The Time I left in the mid-1980s was a mighty (and wealthy) empire. Newsweek was less grand, but scrappier. At Time, the managing editor, Ray Cave, chose covers and photos in a darkened room where the images were projected onto a big screen. When I arrived at Newsweek, I walked into the office of then–executive editor Maynard Parker as he was squinting at a photo negative he was holding up to a ceiling light. Maybe that’s 
one reason why Time’s photos seemed to be bathed in rich painter’s light while Newsweek’s somehow looked flatter and duller. We consoled ourselves that Newsweek looked “grittier” 
and “newsier.”

Kelly: If I had a dollar for every hour we at Time would sit around wondering what Newsweek would do, I’d be writing this from Hawaii. We even called Newsweek Brand X, as if it were some generic version of us. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Newsweek folks called Time Brand X as well. Any intelligence about the other magazine’s plans was always eagerly sought, and the shrewd publicist knew how to play Newsweek against Time. The frantic cover competition resulted in a very dark Monday in October 1975, when both Time and Newsweek featured on their covers a little-known musician named Bruce Springsteen. The only winner there was Springsteen; in one week, Time and Newsweek shredded their claims that they really were different from each other. Decades later I still ran into people who would ask why Time and Newsweek always had the same covers, and they would cite Springsteen as their evidence. In 1998 the publicist for Oprah Winfrey tried to persuade both magazines to put Oprah on the cover the same week for her role in Beloved and used Springsteen as the model. I felt like hanging up on her.

Läs mer: Andrew Losowskys ”Review: Newsweek, Part One – The History”. Se även 100 tidskriftsomslag.

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Politisk kommunikation: Effektivaste tv-reklamen i valet!

KAMPANJ | ”Stage” var den mest effektiva tv-reklamen under valrörelsen 2012. Detta enligt Ace Metrix, ett företag som analyserar reklam i tv.

Shorr, Johnson, Magnus producerade videon för Priorities USA, en pro-Obama Super PAC.

När Mitt Romney valde att inte besvara attacken gjorde man ett av sina stora strategiska misstag under valkampanjen.

Jane Mayer skriver i The New Yorker:

”I’m a big Frank Capra fan,” Saul Shorr, one of S.J.M.’s partners, said […]. “And in this campaign Romney was the Edward Arnold character, the wealthy authority figure in several of Capra’s films, like ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ and ‘Meet John Doe,’ who’s not looking out for the little guy.”

[…]

When ”Stage” first aired in Ohio and other battleground states, in June, ABC News called it ”the Brain ad that Romney should fear most.” And, on Election Night, Sarah Palin singled out S.J.M.’s ads as among Romney’s biggest problems in Ohio.

[…]

Andrea Johnson, another of the firm’s partners […], described the team’s approach. “We’re really trying to capture the person we work for, so that the ads feel authentic, and we often do that by telling stories,” she said. Because  the firm was working with a small budget compared with its opponents, Adam Magnus, a third partner, said, “we had to maximize our throw weight” and focus on only one theme-Bain Capital. Bill Burton, of Priorities USA, said that poll testing indicated that Romney’s Bain record had the potential to define not just his résumé but his character. Focus-group participants were angered by the idea that private-equity companies like Bain could profit while breaking promises to fund workers’ pensions and health-care plans.

[…]

By midsummer […] internal research showed that, in areas where S.J.M.’s ads aired, Obama had an eleven-point advantage over Romney in “trustworthiness,” compared with a five-point lead in places where the ads had not run. In October, an Ohio focus group showed that “Stage,” which by then hadn’t aired for a month and a half, was one of the few political ads that people remembered. Burton said, “Not answering those attacks was the biggest strategic mistake of the Romney campaign.”

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Politik: Abraham Lincolns betydelse för Obama!

HISTORIA | Steven Spielbergs film om Abraham Lincoln är baserad på Doris Kearns Goodwins Team of Rivals från 2005.

Inför valet 2008 bad Katie Couric, på CBS News, presidentkandidaterna nämna en favotitbok. Obama valde Goodwins bok.

If you were elected president, what is the one book other than the bible you would think is essential to have along?

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book ”Team of Rivals.” It was a biography of Lincoln. And she talks about Lincoln’s capacity to bring opponents of his and people who have run against him in his cabinet. And he was confident enough to be willing to have these dissenting voices and confident enough to listen to the American people and push them outside of their comfort zone. And I think that part of what I want to do as president is push Americans a little bit outside of their comfort zone. It’s a remarkable study in leadership.

Och när Time intervjuade Obama om hans agenda inför andra mandatperioden kom man återigen in på frågan om Lincolns betydelse.

I wanted to ask you, Mr. President, about the film Lincoln. We know that you gathered a group to see it here. And for me watching that movie, it was as if I had spent three hours with Lincoln. And I wondered how — it was a very emotional experience. And I wondered how you felt watching that movie. What was it like for you to spend that time with Lincoln?

[…]

I do think that there are lessons to be drawn. Part of what Lincoln teaches us is that to pursue the highest ideals and a deeply moral cause requires you also engage and get your hands dirty. And there are trade-offs and there are compromises. And what made him such a remarkable individual, as well as a remarkable President, was his capacity to balance the idea that there are some eternal truths with the fact that we live in the here and now, and the here and now is messy and difficult. And anything we do is going to be somewhat imperfect. And so what we try to do is just tack in the right direction.

And you do understand that as President of the United States, the amount of power you have is overstated in some ways, but what you do have the capacity to do is to set a direction. And you recognize you’re not going to arrive with — you’ll never arrive at that promised land, and whatever seeds you plant now may bear fruit many years later.

So being able to project across a very long timeline while still being focused on the immediate tug and pull of politics I think is a useful lesson, and an accurate portrayal of how I think about my work day to day.

[…]

I’ve heard talk of you keeping a diary but never heard you talk about it. Are you keeping a diary?

[…] 

Well, I don’t have as much time to write as I used to, but in my life, writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are; that there’s — that the process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions.

And going back to Lincoln, probably part of the reason he’s my favorite President is he’s also one of the best writers in American history. But you see the power of his writing evolve and shape what his policies are. He has to work through things. How does he think about slavery? How does he think about union? How does hethink about the Constitution? How does he think about the role of popular opinion? All these things are just completely formed at the start of his political career.

The Lincoln who is a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois isn’t the same Lincoln as the one who addresses Gettysburg. For that matter, the Lincoln who’s elected President is not the same as the Lincoln who delivers the second inaugural. They’re different people. And part of it has to do with his ability to filter these extraordinary debates and these conflicting forces into some coherent vision of what America is and should be. I’m also not as good a writer as him — (laughter) — to state the obvious.

Bild: Amerikanskt frimärke från 1959.

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Opinion: (M) tappar rejält medan (MP) ökar!

VÄLJARE | Senaste opinionsundersökningen från Skop uppvisar en rad märkligheter.

Det svårt att se väljarmätningen som något annat än en anomali.  

De största förändringarna ser vi hos Miljöpartiet, som gör den starkaste framryckningen, medan Moderaterna gör det största procentuella tappet.

Men mest glädjande är nog mätningen för Kristdemokraterna som för fösta gången i år hamnar över fyra procent.

Moderaterna (29,1 %) och Socialdemokraterna (31,5 %) tappar rejält, 3,1 procent respektive 1,8 procent.

Å andra sidan tar Miljöpartiet (10,3 %) och Kristdemokraterna (4,7 %) rejäla skutt och ökar med 2,8 procent respektive 1,5 procent.

Tillsammans med Sverigedemokraterna (7,8 %) noterar dessa två partier sina högsta siffror under året.   

Än märkligare är att Kristdemokraterna och Centerpartiet byter plats som Sveriges minsta riksdagsparti. Med sina 3,9 procent klarar Centerpartiet inte ens riksdagens fyraprocentspärr.

Trots att alla partierna utom Centerpartiet uppvisar förhållandevis stora förändringar på mellan 1,3 och 3,1 procent är det bara Miljöpartiets förändring som är statistiskt säkerställd.

De rödgröna 47,1 % och Alliansen 40 % (exklusive Centerpartiet).

Socialdemokraterna 31,5  % (-1,8), Miljöpartiet 10,3 % (+2,8) och Vänsterpartiet 5,3 % (-1,4).     

Moderaterna 29,1 % (-3,1), Folkpartiet 6,2 % (+1,3), Kristdemokraterna 4,7 % (+1,5) och Centerpartiet 3,9 % (+0,3).                   

Sverigedemokraterna 7,8 % (+1,4).

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Reklam: ”Klart tjejen skall ha en dammsugare!”

ANNONS | Har alla fått de julklappar man önskade sig? Här är en som är nöjd. Åtminstone om man får tro marknadsföringen.

Annonsen från The Hoover Company lär ha varit publicerad i Life, december 1953.

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Strategi: En fråga om förtroende!

KAMPANJ | Tidskriften Time har utsett president Barack Obama till ”Person of the Year” 2012.

I huvudartikeln beskriver Michael Scherer varför Obamakampanjen bestämde sig för att låta förtroendet för presidenten bli huvudtemat i valrörelsen.

To understand how he kept his job, the best place to start is where he did. In early 2011, David Simas, a former registrar of deeds in Taunton, Mass., who had become a senior White House aide, switched on what might be called one of the largest listening posts in U.S. history. For months on end, two or three nights a week, Simas and his team secretly gathered voters in rented rooms across the swing states, eight at a time, the men separated from the women. The Obamans poked at their guinea pigs’ animal spirits, asked for confessions and played word-association games. (Among swing voters, Democrat often elicited Barack Obama, and Republican would yield words like old and backward.) Live feeds of the focus groups were shown on computer screens at campaign headquarters in Chicago. The first discovery Simas made held the keys to the kingdom. “Here is the best thing,” he said of Obama when he went back to home base. “People trust him.”

In an age of lost authority, Obama had managed to maintain his. In group after group, the voters told the researchers they believed the President was honest, lived an admirable personal life and was trying to do the right thing. “Here’s what I heard for 18 months,” Simas says. “‘I trust his values. I think he walked into the worst situation of any President in 50 years. And you know what? I am disappointed that things haven’t turned around.’ But there was always that feeling of ‘I am willing to give this guy a second shot.’”

In different rooms, behind different one-way mirrors, Republicans made the same discovery. “There was almost nothing that would stick to this guy, because they just liked him personally,” Katie Packer Gage, Romney’s deputy campaign manager, said after the election. Most of those who had voted for Obama in 2008 were still proud of that vote and did not see the President as partisan or ideological. When Republicans channeled their party’s many furies, attacking Obama as an extremist, it backfired among swing-state voters. “The kind of traditional negative campaign that the Obama campaign did was not available to our side,” explained Steven Law, who oversaw more than $100 million in anti-Obama advertising for American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS.

So even before the first ad ran, Obama had an edge and a way of framing the race. While Romney tried to focus on Obama’s weak economic record, Obama made his race about confidence. The most important poll question in Chicago was, Which candidate is looking out for voters like you? “What we saw these undecided voters doing for literally a year,” Simas says, “looking at two very different people outside fundamental message, tactics and strategy, is, they were making a very trust-based assessment between Obama and Romney.”

This became the through line of the brutal and at times unfair Obama attacks on Romney — the cracks about car elevators, the specious mention of his potentially felonious Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the false claim that he supported an abortion ban without a rape exception, the endless harping on a Swiss bank account once held in his wife’s name. It all spoke to a central message built around trust: One man, despite his failures, had voters like you in mind. The other man, by contrast, knew how to make a lot of money for people you will never meet.

Of course, Romney turned out to be Obama’s biggest ally in that narrative. But back at campaign headquarters, Simas slapped a poster on his office wall that told an even bigger story. It had three lines: two showing the rise of per capita GDP and productivity in the U.S. since 1992 and one flat line showing household income. He opened all his presentations with the same chart. “Above it was just a phrase from a focus group — ‘I’m working harder and falling behind,’” Simas says. “That was the North Star. Everything we did and everything we said was derivative of that sentiment.” The words of the faceless focus-group participant passed from the rented room to the computer screens in Chicago and eventually right into the President’s stump speech. “As long as there are families who are working harder and harder but falling further behind,” Obama told crowds, “our work is not yet done.”

Bild: Tidskriftsomslagets foto är taget av Nadav Kander. Numret är Time den 31 december 2012 – 7 januari 2013.

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Alla läsare önskas en riktigt God Jul!

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Strategi: Kärnväljarna ratar Annie Lööf!

OPINION | Centerpartiet förlorar sina kärnväljare. Raset bland kärnväljarna har intensifierats under Annie Lööfs tid som partiledare.

Centerpartiets strategiska beslut att göra om sig till ett nyliberalt storstadparti har inte imponerat på väljarna. 

Om ett parti förlorar kärnväljarna innan man övertygat nya kommer man alltid ha problem med opinionen. Och detta kommer att påverka valresultatet.

Jens Kärrman har i Dagens Nyheter intervjuat Johanna Laurin Gulled på Ipsos.

– Centerpartiet ligger riktigt risigt till, säger Johanna Laurin Gulled, opinionsanalytiker på Ipsos.

Det är inte första gången i år som Centern hamnar under fyraprocentsspärren. Mer allvarligt för Centerpartiets del är att kärnväljarna tycks överge partiet.

– Tittar man på den grupp som kan definieras som kärnväljare, så ligger den siffran nu på 44,7 procent. Det innebär att av dem som röstade på partiet 2010 är det bara 44,7 procent som säger att de skulle göra det om det vore val i dag, säger Johanna Laurin Gulled.

Motsvarande notering för Moderaterna är 83,3 procent och Socialdemokraterna är 87,9 procent.

– Så det är en väldigt låg siffra Centerpartiet har, säger Johanna Laurin Gulled.

Eftersom Centern är ett litet parti är de statistiska baserna små, men enligt Ipsos är partiets ras bland sina kärnväljare statistiskt signifikant. Under Annie Lööfs första år som partiledare pendlade andelen tidigare centerväljare som uppgav att de skulle rösta på partiet om det vore val i dag mellan 60,8 och 78,6 procent.

– Man kan se att det hoppar lite månad för månad, men minskningen är säkerställd, säger Johanna Laurin Gulled.

Bild: Framsidan av Dagens Nyheter den 22 december 2012.

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