A lesson in ignoring the obvious, or what can be known with a little effort, in favor of mysterious, unidentifiable, and imagined woo-woos.
A comedic version of this from Absolutely Fabulous
Eddie: Oh, God. Why am I so fat?
Saffie: You’re not SO fat.
Eddie: I am! Why?
Saffie: Well, for start, you eat too much, you drink too much and you take no excercise.
Eddie: Darling, darling, please. It’s far more likely to be an allergy to something, you know… You know, sort of a build-up of toxins, or something, or hormone imbalance, isn’t it? Hmm? And also, sweetie, did you know I’ve got a very heavy aura? Did you know that? That’s why animals love me, darling.
Saffie: They just see you as something to hibernate in.
Forbes 11/22/16, Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House
Kushner went all-in with Trump last November [2015] after seeing his father-in-law pack a raucous arena in Springfield, Illinois, on a Monday night.
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“I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff,” Kushner says. “They gave me their subcontractors.”
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By June the GOP nomination secured, Kushner took over all data-driven efforts. Within three weeks, in a nondescript building outside San Antonio, he had built what would become a 100-person data hub designed to unify fundraising, messaging and targeting. Run by Brad Parscale, who had previously built small websites for the Trump Organization, this secret back office would drive every strategic decision during the final months of the campaign. “Our best people were mostly the ones who volunteered for me pro bono,” Kushner says. “People from the business world, people from nontraditional backgrounds.”Kushner structured the operation with a focus on maximizing the return for every dollar spent. “We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote,” Kushner says. “I asked, How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?” FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as the Clinton campaign did.
Just as Trump’s unorthodox style allowed him to win the Republican nomination while spending far less than his more traditional opponents, Kushner’s lack of political experience became an advantage. Unschooled in traditional campaigning, he was able to look at the business of politics the way so many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have sized up other bloated industries.
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Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.”
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Jared Kushner as Trump’s “secret sauce,” is no different from what we see/hear every four years. Every Presidential winner from Nixon on has had a secret weapon. Something his/her oppoenent didn’t have or didn’t have a good enough version of. A lot of this is hyperbolic crap for the simple reason that the secret weapon can’t replicate his/her success with a different candidate, and sometimes not with the same candidate.
Team Clinton had most of Obama’s “secret sauce” on board for the primary and general election. Still a virtually unknown septuagenarian came damn close to stealing her crown. After which team Clinton did everything they could to get their hands on what they thought was Sanders’ “secret sauce.” (hint: it was nothing more than a good candidate, running at the right time, and on the fly building a good enough campaign operation.)
Kushner isn’t a genius and reportedly not even viewed as very bright. Ascribing the win to two novices, Trump and Kushner, would be like a couple of garage tinkerers claiming to have cracked fusion electricity generation. (Okay, professional political consultants and operatives are hardly of the caliber of nuclear physicists but still considering experience, expertise, and funding, the analogy is good enough.)
So where was the experience, expertise, and funding in Trump’s win? GMAFB about Russian hackers and bots. Trump was always in the contest before any of that came into play, but was widely and incorrectly viewed as too ludicrous to win (same was true in the GOP primary). The blindsiding, beginning about the same time as Kushner’s “revelation,” is where it’s at.
Remember back to January 2015 — Politico (but most of the media reported the same thing) — The Kochs put a price on 2016: $889 million. Then everybody watched to see what GOP horse they put their money on in the presidential race. And many of those horses begged for it. Walker’s “go big” and spend, spend, spend campaign model likely counted on him being that horse. But the Koch blessing and money didn’t materialize (and he was broke within sixty days). The Kochs aren’t into losers and are savvy enough to recognize that public support from them is not a plus. The word they put out is that they were sitting out the presidential race. More public was that they didn’t like Trump.
Owning and not liking is closer to their criteria. From Lee Fong at The Intercept, Koch Brothers’ Operatives Fill Top White House Positions
IF THE BILLIONAIRE Koch brothers turn to the White House for favors, they will see many familiar faces.
Newly disclosed ethics forms reveal that a significant number of senior Trump staffers were previously employed by the sprawling network of hard-right and libertarian advocacy groups financed and controlled by Charles and David Koch, the conservative duo hyper-focused on entrenching Republican power, eliminating taxes, and slashing environmental and labor regulations.
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The fact that Trump’s political team worked for the Koch network during the campaign adds a new wrinkle to the relationship between the president and the most well-known pair of Republican billionaires.
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Despite the common myth that the Koch network, in the words of Politico, “sat out” the presidential campaign, Koch groups were active in battleground states that proved critical to Trump’s victory. Americans for Prosperity employed 650 staff members during the campaign, with many stationed in Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Missouri. The field staff, using the new data tools from i360, focused on making sure Republican voters made it to the polls.In the aforementioned states, Americans for Prosperity also aired negative ads attacking Hillary Clinton in the last weeks of the campaign, linking her to Democratic candidates and problems allegedly caused by the Affordable Care Act. The ads, which blanketed swing state television stations, held Clinton responsible for healthcare with “higher cost, lost coverage, lost doctors.”
To repeat:
Americans for Prosperity employed 650 staff members during the campaign, with many stationed in Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Missouri.
And that’s just one of the Koch backed operations and SuperPacs and which aren’t without experience, expertise, and funding. (Maybe little Jared and his team of 100 was the difference in Michigan, but the Clinton and Democratic vacuum there made it far easier than it should have.
Expect to see more shuffling out of Trump’s bottom-feeder brigade and more shuffling in of Koch approved operatives. Because the Kochs aren’t in this for a single improbable electoral win. Publicly, unfettered capitalism is their raison d’etre and all other domestic and foreign political considerations are irrelevant to their agenda. The truth is slightly different; it’s unfettered capitalism for the plebes and for them
The Koch family,…, would not be the billionaires they are today were it not for the whim of one of Stalin’s comrades.
Black-gold-hearts.