Our Brand is Crisis -- and Hillary Clinton

[JDPriestly]

Buyer Beware. Our Brand is Crisis is a movie about how James Carville defeated Evo Morales by selling the Bolivian people on "Goni" whose Christian name is Sanchez de Lozada. Never mind that Goni wasn't at all the product that Carville presented to the public.

Here are a couple of paragraphs of a movie review on this film in New York

It’s hard to know whether to marvel or weep when James Carville goes into his Bill Clinton–meets–Looney Tunes act in Rachel Boynton’s knockout documentary Our Brand Is Crisis—the context is so morally topsy-turvy. As a high-priced consultant to the 2002 Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (“Goni”), Carville gives a dazzling demonstration of how a politician should field an “oddball crap question” and steer it, in as few words as possible, back to the campaign’s message, which in this case is, “We’re in a crisis—and I’m the guy with the know-how to fix it.” The problem is that the blinkered patrician Goni doesn’t have the know-how to fix a stopped toilet, much less a country on the verge of economic collapse, with a disenfranchised indigenous majority howling to be recognized.

The process of “framing” Goni to look like something he isn’t could be the stuff of a rambunctious campaign comedy like Primary Colors or, for that matter, the documentary The War Room, which made Carville a political rock star. And parts of Our Brand Is Crisis are darkly amusing. But Boynton has done her own framing: This campaign is a precursor to tragedy. She opens with footage of an anti-government riot that came less than a year after the election. When the gunfire stops, the camera moves in on a boy sitting on the steps of a building, his head partly covered by his coat as if he’s grabbing a nap. It’s only when the camera is on top of him that we see the pool of blood. The image of that boy haunts Our Brand Is Crisis, so that the U.S. strategists who do a bang-up job of getting the wrong man elected to the wrong place at the wrong time look like agents of catastrophe.

These consultants, who work for the firm of Greenberg, Carville, and Shrum, aren’t the ultrasecret fat-cat right-wing corporatists of most muckraking documentaries. They even give lip service to progressive ideals. While acknowledging the immense profits to be made, they argue that with the export of American-style democracy comes the need for would-be leaders to market themselves to their people as well as to the rest of the economically globalized globe.


http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/16116/

I ask all Hillary fans to watch this movie carefully and reconsider their devotion to their candidate. Are they being sold a bill of goods? Bill Clinton was a much better president than either Bush, Reagan or, God forbid, Nixon. But we have some real choices in this campaign. Buyer beware. To some extent, all campaigns have a marketing and distribution aspect. Campaigns have to be organized at some level. There are themes and focus groups and polls and listening tours.

This video is available from Amazon
http://www.amazon.ca/Our-Brand-Crisis-Rachel-Boynton/dp/B000GDIBSO

No, I don't get a commission.

Here is another article about Our Brand is Crisis.
http://www.reelingreviews.com/ourbrandiscrisis.htm

[JuniperLea]

1. Hiding all Hill threads... pro and con... sick sick sick of it all... eom

[IndyOp]

2. "Our Brand is Crisis" goes very, very well with...

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas though our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.



Klein's book is a revelation and I am pleased to be reminded of "Our Brand is Crisis" and to make the connection. The DLC and Republicons don't just share an insane devotion to corporate power - they also "understand" the power of using shock to grab power away from the people. Morality: F.

[LSparkle]

3. Excellent recommendation

The Democrats have fielded a stellar slate of candidates for '08 -- it sickens me to think that some are calling this race over before a SINGLE VOTE has been cast. With all these talented individuals to choose from, we have no excuse for letting the sucky mainstream media pick our nominee. OUR VOICES DO COUNT!!!!

[zulchzulu]

4. Carville is on a 1992 Presidential Race DVD talking about the "laugh"

I'll find the section where he talks about how you laugh at your opponent/newscaster/whoever to disarm the question's intention. Fast forward to the recent usage of laughter...however done for spin. The "tip" might also be in the flick "War Room".

Our Brand Is Crisis is a good flick for anyone interested in political campaigns no matter what candidate you support.

[OKNancy]

5. A two year old documentary is supposed to make Clinton

fans reconsider "their devotion"?

I think most Hillary Clinton fans are smart enough to know that consultants put the spin on their candidate...ALL consultants, not just Carville ( who doesn't work for Hillary's campaign btw)
Obama has consultants that shape his image and encourage themes. ("We're more interested in looking forward, not backward" "And the American people feel the same way." Edwards, Dennis...all of them.

Carville is a successful spinmeister. He makes a good living doing what he does.
I'm sure this is a good documentary and it stands on it's own... but it has nothing to do with Hillary specifically. It has to do will ALL political campaigns.