Not sure where I sit on Platner exactly, but I'll say this as a former Democratic Party staffer: The "leaks" of the last couple weeks are absolutely nuts in a way that might not be 100% visible...
Not sure where I sit on Platner exactly, but I'll say this as a former Democratic Party staffer:
The "leaks" of the last couple weeks are absolutely nuts in a way that might not be 100% visible unless you have a fair amount of experience working in federal campaigns. "Self-opposition research" is not a thing that even "normal" campaign operatives have a lot of exposure to: The basics of it are that you have the candidate, their spouse and maybe even their kids (if they are old enough) do the kind of confessional you would expect to have in like a Scientology run-down - deepest, darkest secrets... anyone from the past that could come up with anything they could say and what they may or may not have to prove it. The point of it is to have "spring-loaded" responses when the reporter calls your campaign with questions about those topics - policy, personal or professional. For obvious reasons, this is often done with just the campaign manager (maybe a Research or Comms director) in the very early stages of the campaign. For super obvious reasons you do not ever leak this to the press. Self-oppo is important and for the same reasons Catholic priests don't share what people say to them in confessions, it's important to "protect the process" and not let that information leak - otherwise candidates and their spouses in the future won't participate in it and their campaigns will be more vulnerable as a result. No matter how "disgruntled" or "disillusioned" you are as a campaign staffer, you wouldn't share self-oppo with a reporter because you know it essentially means you will never work again anywhere near a campaign. And yet (according to the Platner campaign) that's exactly what happened.
The other weird thing to me is that the reporter ran with it. Everyone has this notion of reporters being "sly opportunists" - and in all fairness they deserve that reputation for the most part... But when they are working a beat, there is still some kind of calculus they have to run between "what will make everyone want to read this story" and "what will make it so that no one in politics ever talks to me again". For the latter reason, you don't typically see them mine veins like "what every ex-girlfriend thinks about you". Divorce records where the ex-spouse puts it in an affidavit that they were abused, cheated on, etc.? Sure that's fair game and Standard Operating Procedure to use that... but it strikes me as "weird" that a reporter would go through a list of ex-girlfriends that way... I'm not saying it's never been done, but it suggests that someone "told" that reporter it was OK to cross that line in Platner's case and that they wouldn't be burning their contacts by doing so.
I'm not even 100% saying this was done to hurt Platner, per se. If you look at the timing of the release (at the end of a primary that he basically had locked up) it's at least plausible that it was just decided that this was the best time to burn the oxygen off of those stories so they don't come up closer to the General.
Very weird. Very interesting. This will probably be the race to watch into November.
Not sure where I sit on Platner exactly, but I'll say this as a former Democratic Party staffer:
The "leaks" of the last couple weeks are absolutely nuts in a way that might not be 100% visible unless you have a fair amount of experience working in federal campaigns. "Self-opposition research" is not a thing that even "normal" campaign operatives have a lot of exposure to: The basics of it are that you have the candidate, their spouse and maybe even their kids (if they are old enough) do the kind of confessional you would expect to have in like a Scientology run-down - deepest, darkest secrets... anyone from the past that could come up with anything they could say and what they may or may not have to prove it. The point of it is to have "spring-loaded" responses when the reporter calls your campaign with questions about those topics - policy, personal or professional. For obvious reasons, this is often done with just the campaign manager (maybe a Research or Comms director) in the very early stages of the campaign. For super obvious reasons you do not ever leak this to the press. Self-oppo is important and for the same reasons Catholic priests don't share what people say to them in confessions, it's important to "protect the process" and not let that information leak - otherwise candidates and their spouses in the future won't participate in it and their campaigns will be more vulnerable as a result. No matter how "disgruntled" or "disillusioned" you are as a campaign staffer, you wouldn't share self-oppo with a reporter because you know it essentially means you will never work again anywhere near a campaign. And yet (according to the Platner campaign) that's exactly what happened.
The other weird thing to me is that the reporter ran with it. Everyone has this notion of reporters being "sly opportunists" - and in all fairness they deserve that reputation for the most part... But when they are working a beat, there is still some kind of calculus they have to run between "what will make everyone want to read this story" and "what will make it so that no one in politics ever talks to me again". For the latter reason, you don't typically see them mine veins like "what every ex-girlfriend thinks about you". Divorce records where the ex-spouse puts it in an affidavit that they were abused, cheated on, etc.? Sure that's fair game and Standard Operating Procedure to use that... but it strikes me as "weird" that a reporter would go through a list of ex-girlfriends that way... I'm not saying it's never been done, but it suggests that someone "told" that reporter it was OK to cross that line in Platner's case and that they wouldn't be burning their contacts by doing so.
I'm not even 100% saying this was done to hurt Platner, per se. If you look at the timing of the release (at the end of a primary that he basically had locked up) it's at least plausible that it was just decided that this was the best time to burn the oxygen off of those stories so they don't come up closer to the General.
Very weird. Very interesting. This will probably be the race to watch into November.