I have to thank Jonathan Shurberg at Maryland Scramble for serving once again as a perfect foil. Today, he writes about Jamie Raskin’s fabulous “Because” video:
Raskin’s gotten more than a little carried away. How much? So much so that he gushes “seriously, you can’t buy this!” right under the word “sponsored” on the Facebook post. . .Seriously, you CAN buy this. And you just did. Seriously? “My money good, theirs bad” remains a remarkably bad persuasion technique. Seriously.
Shurberg is correct in his reaction to Raskin’s “you can’t buy this” statement. It’s cheesy and not exactly accurate, since Raskin paid to have the video made and again to have it promoted on Facebook. But (as I just posted on Scramble):
Shurberg consistently misses the point: it’s not that some money is good and some bad. One can’t run a modern campaign without cash. It’s that any candidate (Trone) who is only about money is bad. A candidate (Trone) who has been paying bad guys for access is bad. A candidate (Trone and Matthews) with no record of working for the public good (in a legislature or elsewhere) is bad. In Shurberg’s efforts to set a level playing field between Raskin/Barve/Guitierrez, on the one hand, and Trone/Matthews on the other, he obscures not only decades of accomplishment, but also the importance of likely outcomes in Congress.
MD-8 has the luxury of having good guys to choose from who will actually make a proactive positive difference in Congress. Neither Trone nor Matthews fit into that category and, therefore, neither deserves serious consideration. Seriously.
©2016 Keith Berner
