If you have a HotAir.com account, 'Quotes of the Day' focuses on Rand's plan to save Detroit

[WD-NY]

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/07/quotes-of-the-day-1578/

Both the articles selected and specific sections quoted by Allahpundit are definitely not the most favorable (which is honestly surprising given Allah's past writings on Rand, which were on the whole fair and favorable).

So if you have a HotAir account, please take a few minutes to comment (with quotes from other articles that are far more positive about Rand's plan/effort than those selected by Allahpundit). I can't figure out how to join/create an account, but if I had one, I'd definitely quote the following from Breitbart's report on Rand's plan to save Detroit (which features some of the most brilliant 'messaging' Rand has ever laid down...srsyly, if Frank Luntz focused grouped the statements in this article, they'd be "off the charts"):

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/05/Exclusive-Rand-Paul-to-Detroit-for-conservative-anti-bailout-minority-outreach-mission-of-inner-city-Economic-Freedom-Zones

Paul said this kind of a plan would be able to save Detroit without a federal government bailout — something that he had previously told Breitbart News would never happen on his watch. “And the thing that makes this better than a government bailout or a government stimulus is that if we take let’s say a billion dollars from Houston and we send it to Detroit by way of Washington, some of it gets squandered and lost in the bureaucracy of Washington,” Paul said. “Somewhere in Washington, some central planner needs to figure out who to send the money to in Detroit. He sends the money to his friends. They aren’t necessarily the best people in business; they just happen to be friends of the president. So that’s what happened when the president sent out a trillion dollar stimulus a couple years ago. It turned out each job cost about $400,000 and it didn’t significantly improve unemployment.

"The difference is with this is if you leave your money in the hands of successful businesses, you’re not deciding who the winners and losers are; the customer is," Paul said. "So those who are better succeeding, those who are gaining the votes of customers, they’re the ones who get more of the tax rebate. It’s a much easier, quicker and more efficient way of creating jobs than actually trying to start de novo and saying ‘hey John Smith, we can get him making solar panels and making money.’ Instead, what we say is Smith has a welding shop and employs 10 people there. Maybe he’ll hire two more if we don’t force him to send so much money to Washington.”

Paul views this as a way to kill two birds with one stone: Prevent federal government bailouts of major cities like Detroit, while serving as a form of conservative minority outreach for the GOP by showing conservative policies in action. In addition to economic empowerment policies for failing inner city communities, Paul plans to increase his focus on criminal justice reform and on school choice issues.

“I don’t think Democrats have served people well in the big cities,” Paul said. “School systems are in the pits. We’re going to talk about school choice. The criminal justice system is unfair; you have many blacks and latinos who are rotting away in prison often for nonviolent crimes. So we have to talk about criminal justice, school choice, economic empowerment. This is a message that we’ve not done a very good job at trying to reform. But if we come in with a reform message and set up a presence in Detroit, I think the upside potential is unlimited for us.”

Overall, Paul thinks the GOP should not pander to the Democrats when doing minority outreach—something he believes is a priority for the Party moving forward. Instead of pushing policies that are just a little bit less liberal than the Democrats’ ideas, Paul thinks the Republicans should flip these issues on their heads; all while getting results with true conservatives economic policies in the inner city.

“There’s a big debate going on in the Republican Party right now about how we should dilute our message and become the Democrat-lite party, that that’s how we’ll get new people in the party,” Paul said. “Or, it’s whether or not you believe like I do, that we should just be more passionate about our message and find parts of our message that we really haven’t presented well enough. That’s why I think the youth vote is open to us if we passionately defend the right to privacy. I think that much of the urban city vote and sort of metro vote is open to us if we can come up with solutions that are plaguing our cities: problems in education, economic empowerment. I don’t think we have to be that the Democrats are for a trillion dollar government stimulus and we’re for a half a trillion. It shouldn’t be being for half of what of the Democrats are for, it should be being for the stimulus that comes from the private sector and for action that may have a chance of actually working and stimulating the economy. I think that our possibilities really are great and people can sense when you are really sincere about a policy as opposed to just pandering. So I believe with all of my heart in all of our message and the message is the message of capitalism, the message of free enterprise. If talked about and brought to people of any walk of life, I think it can and will be received.”

Paul said he thinks Republicans need to go out into these communities and actually talk to people, like he has done. “I think one of the best examples of that is Jack Kemp,” Paul said. “When you talk to people who worked for Jack Kemp and you talk to people who knew him, whenever he went to a city anywhere around the country, he always tried to go meet people where they lived, where the problems were. He didn’t just go give a message on the rich side of town. He tried to go into the impoverished neighborhoods, visit soup kitchens, visit the community centers and find where there is a place where you connect with people.”

Paul said, if Republicans follow this strategy, they can begin chipping away at the Democratics' urban strongholds. “States like Ohio and Illinois become Republican states if we can attract 20 percent of the African American vote to the Republican Party,” Paul said. “I think that’s doable. There was a time in the United States where the black vote was over 90 percent Republican—until about 1928, and then it slowly slipped away. Actually, quite a bit slipped away as FDR changed people’s allegiances. But for a long time, really, the party of civil rights, the party of abolition, the party against Jim Crow, was always the Republican Party. In fact, in my state of Kentucky, if you look back at all of the terrible discriminatory laws that were passed, they were all done by Democrats. They were all done by majority Democrat state legislatures.”

Besides the last paragraph about DEMs being the real supporters of Jim Crow (which is unabashed, stick-in-the-eye schadenfreude #trolling by Rand), every single bold (and/or underlined) statement in the Breitbart article quoted above is a walk-off HOMERUN not only to conservative primary voters (and readers of conservative blogs like HotAir), but also Moderates and Independents.

By comparison, the HotAir article doesn't include a single universally popular #homerun statement until the LAST SENTENCE in the FINAL ARTICLE quoted:

“Today’s opening of this office is the beginning of a new Republican Party,” Paul said. “This is going to be a Republican Party that is in big cities and small cities, in the countryside, in the city. It’s going to be about bringing a message that is popular no matter where you’re from, whether you’re rich or poor, whether you’re black, white or brown.”

What's more,
#1 - the very first article quoted by Allahpundit highlights an element of the plan I hadn't even read about it before and seems almost intentionally designed to rile up HotAir's most hard-core anti-immigration posters:

The taxes that would be reduced include the income tax, the corporate tax, payroll taxes and the capital gains tax. The bill would also lower the economic threshold for immigrants who want to start businesses in these areas to $50,000.

#2 - the second article quoted is from Politico (aka Obamabot central) and features a quote from a ridiculously biased unbiased partisan hack former Clinton official that

“Enterprise zones are not especially effective at increasing overall economic activity or raising incomes for the poor,” said Len Burman, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a former Clinton administration official. “They just seem to move the locus of activity across the zone’s boundary — reducing activity outside the zone and increasing it inside.”

#3 - the third and fourth articles highlight Rand's frequently expressed views on the need to "expand the GOP", "be a more diverse party", etc. are perfectly fine in most cases, but do sometimes come off as patronizing/insulting to well-read tea partiers and conservatives who find the liberal framing of the their views, ideas, solutions, etc. repulsive.

Specifically, the comments by Rand featured in the third article come off as particularly patronizing and almost even cross the line into Rick Perry "Those Against In-State Tuition for Illegal Aliens Don't 'Have A Heart'" territory:

“We need to be a more diverse party if we’re ever going to win again. We need people with tattoos, ponytails and earrings,” he said. “The Democratic Party is more diverse than we are. We lose all the big cities. We have to change or we won’t win nationally again.”…Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican from Kentucky, said Republicans have to do more than just show up.

“It’s about economic empowerment, education and school choice … and criminal justice,” he said. “It’s important that we talk about this, because I don’t think we’ve treated people fairly.”

That all said, if Rand keep pushing the talking points quoted and focused on in the Breitbart article, then his plan to rescue Detroit could be an absolute GRAND SLAM (politically) .

 

[Warlord]

stop worrying about comment sections there or elsewhere

 

[WD-NY]

stop worrying about comment sections there or elsewhere

Sigh... this is terrible advice to be offering fellow RPF-ers (who = many of the "mavens" that are critical to helping Rand 'cross the chasm' and win the support of a majority of Republican primary and general election voters).

Honestly surprised to hear youre not a super active commenter on other sites/blogs give not only how active you are on RPF but also how much you seem to enjoy bantering about the more meta/strategic/Machiavellian side of politics.

Anywho, quite a few studies say exactly the opposite (see article quoted below).

Obama's propaganda media team realized the strategic value of the comment sections early (re: early in the 2008 primary against Hillary), won all the early battles (by way of overwhelming + rhetorically ruthless force) and as a result not only dominated the digital armies of Clinton, McCain and Romney campaigns, but demoralized them almost completely well before the end of each race.

So no, let's definitely worry about the comments on HotAir and most every other political blog and/or website... because that's where the war over the hearts and minds of the "early majority" followers voters is won and lost (through battles with the 'mavens' of other candidates).

re: Popsci.com "Why We're Shutting Down Our Comments

But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randomly assigned condition, they read either epithet- and insult-laden comments ("If you don't see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you're an idiot" ) or civil comments. The results, as Brossard and coauthor Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a New York Times op-ed:

- Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant's interpretation of the news story itself.

​

- In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.

​

- Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought.
​

​Another, similarly designed study found that just firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers' perception of science.

If you carry out those results to their logical end--commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded--you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch.