Mediaboss Marketing

Last year was a very bad year for Vogue. The magazine seemed to grow thinner and thinner, to the point of looking like a campaign flyer for the DNC.

Increasingly, Vogue mingled its usual stories on fashion and facelifts with blogosphere agitprop bashing conservatives and long, badly-done soft-focus pieces on feminist figures, for which the word gushing' is only too kind. In February came the puff piece on Hillary Clinton; in August, the flattering one about Huma Abedin; in October, the ground-breaking endorsement itself.

Then came the blow, with those hardest hit being Huma and Hillary, who face unemployment. Not to mention Anna Wintour, the magazine's editor, a prominent fundraiser and bundler for the one-time first lady, who was said to have been Clinton's selection to represent American interests in at the Court of St. James.

Now comes the bid to recoup in the reverent story about Cecile Richards, the Claire Underwood look-alike who is head of Planned Parenthood, and whom Vogue seems to see as the last woman standing in a bleak and a frightening world. "Planned Parenthood had 'big dreams,' as Richards puts it, at the prospect of the first woman president,' the magazine told us. But fate held otherwise.

What Vogue doesn't say is that Richards (and Vogue) are far out of touch with most of the country, that their promotion of Hillary probably did her no favors. In fact, the person who destroyed the dreams of Vogue, Planned Parenthood, and Hillary Clinton was most likely Richards herself.

"Cecile Richards will campaign for Hillary Clinton in Battleground States," read a headline last August. That was the problem right there. Battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan have large numbers of Catholic voters, who tend to differ with Richards and Vogue.

"Hillary Clinton lost the overall Catholic vote by seven points," Thomas Groome wrote in the New York Times on March 27, "after President Obama had won it, [and] lost the white Catholic vote by 23 points...In heavily Catholic states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, she lost by a hair...A handful more of Catholic votes per parish....would have won her the election...If Democrats want to regain the Catholic vote, they must treat abortion as a moral issue, work for its reduction, and articulate a more nuanced message than 'We support Roe Vs. Wade.'"

Abortion is a hard issue to get right with the voters. Although the parties are clearly divided on it, a vast cache of voters are split in themselves, with polls showing that many who don't want abortion outlawed completely also think it "immoral," while more than half of those who want it kept legal during the first trimester also want it outlawed by month five.

On the national scene, this is a nightmare for most politicians, who attempt to tread lightly, balancing the demands of their base with the center's suspicions, with George W. Bush and Barack Obama acknowledging the issue's complexity, and Bill Clinton coining his very effective and once-famous mantra, "Safe, legal, and rare."

But with Richards' embrace and endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the party went in for "safe, legal, and limitless," stoking the zeal of the partisan activists while, in the words of Democratic pollster Doug Schoen, "pushing the party away from the American public, which fundamentally is center-right, and channeling the concerns and priorities of the Democratic coastal base." No base is more coastal than that of the fashion-world activists, who turned very hard left in the recent election and may have mobilized Hillary out of her White House ambitions, a casualty of partisan zeal on behalf of her most fervent backers, and a true fashion victim at last.

Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."

See more here:
Vogue, the fashion victim - Washington Examiner

If she was looking for a quiet night on the town, she must have been wildly disappointed.

Hillary Clinton received a standing ovation as she and former President Bill Clinton made their way to their seats for a performance of the Tony Award-winning play Osloin New York City on Sunday night.

The former secretary of state and presidential candidate was quietly walking down the aisle when audience members caught sight of her and broke out into applause and cheers.

We love you, Hillary! several people were heard shouting as others began chanting her first name.

With what appeared to be the entire house on its feet, Clinton turned to wave at her supporters as her husband reached her side.

It was far from the first such welcome received by the former first lady and New York senator since she conceded the presidential election to Donald Trump. She has been met with similar receptions while attending other Broadway productions, including Sunset Boulevard, In Transit and The Color Purple.

In contrast, Vice President Mike Pence was booed by audience members at a performance of Hamilton, shortly after Trumps election win.

Read more from the original source:
Theater Goes Nuts As Hillary Clinton Appears In The Audience - HuffPost

Joint Chiefs of StaffA new study attributes Donald Trump's victory last year to communities hit hardest by military casualties and angry about being ignored. These voters, the authors suggest, saw Trump as an "opportunity to express that anger at both political parties."

The paperwritten by Douglas Kriner, a political scientist at Boston University, and Francis Shen, a law professor at the University of Minnesotaprovides powerful lessons about the electoral viability of principled non-intervention, a stance that Trump was able to emulate somewhat on the campaign trail but so far has been incapable of putting into practice.

The study, available at SSRN, found a "significant and meaningful relationship between a community's rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump." The statistical model it used suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had suffered "even a modestly lower casualty rate," all three could have flipped to Hillary Clinton, making her the president. The study controlled for party identification, comparing Trump's performance in the communities selected to Mitt Romney's performance in 2012. It also controlled for other relevant factors, including median family income, college education, race, the percentage of a community that is rural, and even how many veterans there were.

"Even after including all of these demographic control variables, the relationship between a county's casualty rate and Trump's electoral performance remains positive and statistically significant," the paper noted. "Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties that shouldered a disproportionate share of the war burden in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The president's electoral fate in 2020 "may well rest on the administration's approach to the human costs of war," the paper suggests. "If Trump wants to maintain his connection to this part of his base, his foreign policy would do well to be highly sensitive to American combat casualties." More broadly, the authors argue that "politicians from both parties would do well to more directly recognize and address the needs of those communities whose young women and men are making the ultimate sacrifice for the country."

The most effective way of addressing their needs is to advance a foreign policy that does not see Washington as the world's policeman, that treats U.S. military operations as a last resort, and that rethinks the foreign policy establishment's expansive and often vague definition of national security interests.

"America has been at war continuously for over 15 years, but few Americans seem to notice," Kriner and Shen write. "This is because the vast majority of citizens have no direct connection to those soldiers fighting, dying, and returning wounded from combat." This has often been cited as a reason that wars don't have much of an impact on elections. The war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, wasn't mentioned as a policy concern in any of the three Clinton-Trump debates last year. The Trump administration's internal deliberations over whether to institute a troop surge have garnered little media coverage.

When President Barack Obama campaigned for reelection in 2012, he bragged that he'd brought the Iraq war to an end and promised to do the same for the war to Afghanistan. In fact, Obama did not end the war in Iraq, a fact he admitted only after Republicans blamed the rise of ISIS on the end of the war, and the conflict in Afghanistan outlasted his tenure. His claims nevertheless received little pushback.

Meanwhile, the principle of non-intervention, when articulated by politicians like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), is often dismissed as unserious. "Simply being pro- or anti-intervention is not a useful way of thinking about foreign policy," Foreign Policy's Paul Miller wrote in 2014.

Paul did not make it far through the 2016 election cycle, though it probably wasn't his antiwar ideas that sank him. His father, the far more radical Ron Paul, performed a lot better in the 2012 Republican primaries, never wavering on the position of non-intervention. Rand tried to stake a position on both sides, hedging his non-interventionism for a base he assumed might not accept it.

As I warned in April 2015, Paul's shift toward Republican orthodoxy risked "driving away the kind of supporters probably no other mainstream candidate could attract" without convincing anyone in the establishment, which continued to call him an isolationist. Trump, meanwhile, slammed George W. Bush for the Iraq war and 9/11 at a debate in South Carolina, a miliary stronghold that nonetheless voted for Trump in its primary. Trump's on-again, off-again skepticism about America's wars led some to believe he might be a non-interventionist, though he was no such thing.

The paper by Kriner and Shen should be ample evidence that there will be space in the 2020 election cycle for a principled non-interventionist not just to run, but to win.

Related: Check out Reason's special foreign policy issue.

Continue reading here:
Did Endless War Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency? - Reason (blog)

Rep. Dave Brat, R-7th, removed a post from his Twitter and Instagram accounts in which he endorsed the idea of sending former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya to be the ambassador.

Brat said a new staffer made the post without his approval.

The picture was taken at a gun show in Fredericksburg on Saturday; Brat later posted that he had taken it down.

In the photo, Brat stood smiling next to a man holding a sign that said "Hillary for U.S. ambassador to Libya."

Brat's comment read, "Sign says it all."

Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans were killed in a raid on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi in September 2012. Many conservatives blame then-Secretary of State Clinton for their deaths. The House Select Committee on Benghazi issued an 800-page report following an investigation.

Brat took heat from critics on social media over his post.

Brat said in an interview Monday that a staffer made the post.

"Ive got new staffers on board and theyre constantly putting posts up on Facebook and whatever, so I didnt vet that," he said.

Brat said he told his staff to remove it because a staffer told him "people are interpreting it in crazy left, far-left-land logic thats going on right now across the web."

Brat has repeatedly said he strives to not speak ill of anyone. And he said if someone looks at his Facebook page, they'll learn that it's the left that's using the vitriol.

"Who actually is using the vitriolic language? Me or the hard left? And the answer is right now online," he said.

See the original post here:
Rep. Brat removes online post calling for Hillary Clinton to be sent to Libya - Richmond.com

When youre not working, you have no shortage of time to spend on activities of your choosing.

And for Hillary Clinton, that means plenty of reading (in addition to writing a book about her failed 2016 campaign for the presidency).

Heres what she recently told a gathering of the American Library Association she has been reading:

I finished Elena Ferrantes Neapolitan Novels. I devoured mysteries by Louise Penny, Donna Leon, Jacqueline Winspear, Charles Todd. I reread old favorites like Henri Nouwens Return of the Prodigal Son, poetry of Maya Angelou and Mary Oliver. I was riveted by The Jersey Brothers and a new book of essays called The View from Flyover Country, which turned out to be especially relevant in the midst of our current health-care debate. And Ive enjoyed making my way through the growing stack of books people have sent me, often with notes that say things like, This one helped me; I hope it will help you.

The Jersey Brothers, published in May, is the true story of three brothers at key moments in World War II and the efforts of the two oldest to save their youngest brother. It makes Amazons list of the best biographies and memoirs of the year so far. The View from Flyover Country is a collection of essays from St. Louis journalist Sarah Kendzior published in 2015 as an e-book.

Clinton said losing herself in books plus long walks in the woods and the occasional glass of Chardonnay has helped get her cope with losing the election.

Read more:
Hillary Clinton signs off on a summer reading list - MarketWatch