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Gringo Side Hero Username: Gringo Post Number: 3066 Registered: 10-2014 Posted From: 72.15.229.180 Rating: N/A |
http://townhall.com/columnists/brucebialosky/2016/01/10/is-t rump-the-new-jfk-n2101007 Many of you may be stunned by that question. After all you may be thinking what Donald Trump may have to do with John F. Kennedy, other than one wants to be president and one was president. The only other thing may be that in Trump’s mind that his looks are as enduring as JFK’s. But there is one way the respective presidential campaigns of the two men have something in common. You may remember not many people took seriously Kennedy’s campaign for the 1960 nomination. He was the junior senator from Massachusetts who, for seven years prior to running, had quite an undistinguished record in the U.S. Senate. But he managed to meander his way through the competition to garner the nomination backed by his father’s copious quantities of cash – and I do mean cash. What Kennedy was able to grasp and thereby became the first president to do so was the age of television. To refresh your memory, when he had the first televised debates with his opponent Richard Nixon, those who listened to the debate on radio (not everyone had a TV yet) gave the debates to Nixon. The TV audience was astronomical for the time and they carried that image to the polls. That and Kennedy’s father spreading cash around in Illinois turning that state put Kennedy in the White House. Flash forward to 2016 and we have a totally different time. It has been said that President Obama and his team made great use of social media in his two campaigns, but Mr. Obama is not the first candidate to really grasp the new era of social media. Mr. Obama has no idea how to communicate in this new era of shortened attention spans. I was reviewing a recent Obama press conference and was stunned to find out he had answered just five questions in an hour presser. We all know the President can drone on in a professorial manner that sometimes loses us all. This is not how a person communicates who grasps new media. Trump not only uses Twitter as a major form of communication; he seems to think and speak in that manner at all times. He puts his positions in short, distinct statements and people understand what he means. The chattering class keeps on asking for details, but the masses just want the bullet points. It is not just what is said, but more importantly how he says it. He understands the art of modern communication. |