OK, You've Had Your Fun at My Expense....Please. I mean it. Stop.

April 15, 2011 9:25 PM

What's it like "on the inside" when a politician gets skewered over really stupid comments or actions and the response goes viral?

So, I'm watching this whole #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement twitter thing go viral on Sen. Kyl, as well as the same type of viral response to the Czech President's pen-kleptomania. Watching this, I started wondering about what goes on "on the inside" of one of these viral public responses? Is it even recognized as embarrassing or problematic? Is there snickering going on? Is it even registering with the particular politician involved? What do his/her aides, staff, and hangers on talk about or have to do when one of these things is exploding around "their guy?" Take me inside the bubble.

* Note that I'm not asking about the normal PR damage control mode after the average politicians dumb/insensitive/out-of-context/oops comments that seemingly occur on a daily basis, but the ones where, for some reason, the public picks up on it, the response goes viral and the response, as opposed to the original comment, starts to take on a life of its own.

posted by webhund to Society & Culture (6 answers total)

Best answer: I was working for the Howard Dean campaign when "The Scream" went viral. We were perplexed, mostly because we were watching the same speech from different feeds in which Dean's yelling went completely unnoticed compared to the crowd noise. We were angry, because the media was running with a bullshit story about our candidate, and right before the NH primary. We were, for the most part, discouraged from talking about it to each other or to the public.* Our main focus was mostly on finding something—anything—to take the focus off the incident, to make something other than that scream the most talked-about topic for Dean. But it was too late. Many of us are still convinced it was a set-up by forces that really didn't want him to win, and who pushed that clip harder than any news item since 9/11.

But really, it was mortifying and disheartening every time we'd do canvassing or phonebanking and being like "Hi, I'm from Howard Dean's Presidential Campaign..." and the guy on the other end would be like "BYYYYYAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!" It turned what had been one of the most inspiring political experiences in my life up to that point into a really bitter memory.


*A camera crew from the Daily Show caught me on a coffee run, and tried to get me to say "Not only are we gonna get some dark roast, but we're gonna get some French vanilla, and some decaf, and we're gonna get some hazelnut, and some non-dairy creamer, and some hot cocoa, and we're gonna take it all the way to the State House stay awake all afternoon! BYYYYAAAAHHH!!!!!" but I refused. Would've probably been awesome, but I would've felt personally responsible for losing our boy the election.
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:08 PM on April 15, 2011 [40 favorites]

Anybody at that level of politics has learned how to eat so much shit that it's just another knock from the universe they've chosen. The only question is the level of personal involvement any given one will require.
posted by rhizome at 11:57 PM on April 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

I can tell you what it's like as a civil servant when a minister says something ill considered: some years back I worked as an external consultant to the government in the UK and the minister made a declaration about project X, under pressure, that it would be done in a certain way.

Which sounded great. Except he had no way of making things happen the way he wanted. And it incurred about £5bn of additional pension liabilities which nobody would pay for.
posted by MuffinMan at 12:49 AM on April 16, 2011 [1 favorite]

Best answer: It's not quite politics, exactly, but one day last year I was sitting at my desk at work, when my colleague let out a shriek and said "Hey JS, did you know that one of your authors is on the front page of The Age?"

Sure enough, I open the website to see the name of one of my authors plastered all over the page. He's a health policy expert, who was fired over an incident which lent him the moniker "the cookie monster".

It was kind of a political scandal, though my author isn't in politics himself. I had to run to my boss and the director of my division to explain the situation. They laughed, thankfully, and it shouldn't make too much of an effect on sales of our book. The guy is *the* expert in the subject matter, as well he should be... him and the other author on the book wrote the systems that the book is describing.

We did have to make sure that we stayed away from round shapes on the cover that look like cookies, though, and I had to word up the sales reps in case anyone said anything to them about it.

I never asked him about it - to be honest I dealt mostly with the other author, but I did speak to her about it. She was very distressed for him and angry about the underlying circumstances that led to the 'cookie' incident being his downfall.
posted by jonathanstrange at 3:39 AM on April 16, 2011

I suspect that many of these incidents are less momentous on the inside than we would like. For instance, the presence of ~100,000 protesters in Madison seemed to utterly fail to faze Scott Walker. Once you reach a certain level in politics, there's a necessity to inure yourself to criticism. It's just not professional to respond the way you would in your personal life, and presenting an air of being above it all or laughing it off is a way to avoid the desired overreaction.

I can think of a handful of small-bore political criticism incidents. A particular citizen likes to display local politicians' names on a 30-gallon trash barrel with a pair of jeans sticking up out of them, scarecrow style. When one of our more liberal city council members was portrayed thusly, he called it the "proudest moment of [his] political career".

I think there is often a sense that one's enemies will pass around ridiculous or ugly stories and for some of them it is so habitual that there is nothing momentous about it. It's when things reach another level that you have to take notice. A viral about pocketing a pen? Pfft. A viral about pocketing a million bucks? Lawyer up.
posted by dhartung at 2:24 PM on April 16, 2011

Watch The Good Wife. This comes up a LOT on that show.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:50 PM on April 16, 2011