Well, this is true. CNN actually had a decent segment (sort of) about the 2020 Democratic field and their unpreparedness for the onslaught that is about to be unleashed against them by Donald Trump and the Republicans. So far, there is not one candidate who poses a serious threat. Yes, Joe Biden, but he’s navigating through some Me Too drama, which he made worse by making jokes about it at a union conference last week. The former vice president is being accused of inappropriate touching, one of which included smelling an accuser’s hair, which is super, super creepy. These things were well known. We’ve seen the memes and the photos of creepy Joe Biden. This was an open secret, but now—it’s problematic. Yet, back to the memes, the Left has no secondary protocols on how to combat these highly effective forms of communication. They just don’t know what to do about them. And that’s something that former top Obama adviser David Axelrod said in an interview with Brian Stelter (via Real Clear Politics):
Former Obama advisor David Axelrod speaks with CNN's Brian Stelter about the president's use of memes and tweets and how the political media can prepare to cover campaigns in the modern social media environment.
Stelter asked Axelrod about this headline from Mother Jones this week, "The Left Can’t Meme": How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors, and wondered: "These are the meme wars in action. Do you think Democrats understand what they are up against?"
Axelrod said Democrats are in "uncharted waters" when it comes to responding to Trump's use of the new generation of social media. "You have a president who is going to be live tweeting the opposite party's primary -- you better believe when anything happens in the Democratic race, he will have a comment. He will advance a meme like this and Democrats are going to have to figure out how to deal with it."
Yet, the segment enters ‘are you kidding me territory’ when Axelrod discusses reporters getting out of their bubbles, their silos, and covering the electorate and not the polls. Granted, he did throw in a mea cupla in there, saying he was guilty of not listening to certain aspects of the 2016 election cycle that ended with a Trump victory. Axlerod also said that it was important for writers to make every story as if it’s the next Watergate, quit hyping it up, and sometimes a bland story is just that—bland. But they’re critical in covering elections. Still, for a network that is anti-Trump, biased, and hyped the Russian collusion myth—well, excuse me if I have a laugh over this.
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