🤔Anti-woke guy starts a crusade against plagiarism, not realizing that this would destroy his wife's academic reputation.

🤔Anti-woke guy starts an inquiry into Walz not going on deployment, not anticipating that this re-opens the conversation on his running mate's draft dodging and insulting gold star families and POWs.

🤔 Anti-woke guy starts an investigation into crowd sizes, not anticipating that people will point to his many empty stands.

They're genuinely surprised by equal treatment.🤷🏿‍♂️

I'm not even talking about the fact that all three attacks were bad faith. That's too obvious.

I'm talking about the failure to think even one step ahead, and realize that the next step after their feeble attack, is a knockout counterpunch.

This is like those courtroom dramas where a lawyer gets a cocky witness to slip and introduce a key piece of evidence that opens a door to a line of questioning that turns the case.

@mekkaokereke The military service issue has extremely strong parallels to the Swift Boating from 20 years ago - remember those purple band-aids at the Republican convention? Then, as now, it was projection to compensate for their objectively weaker record of service. It's even the exact same person pushing it. And certainly no better press and information environment. So what's different? That's a serious question, though of course I do have some ideas.

@raph

1. Better media literacy. As in, the typical Dem voter now knows that the NYT, and WaPo print nonsense half the time. 🤔 Maybe more than half the time...

2. Better counter-punching strategy. "When they go low, we go high," doesn't work. That's a great way to lose. And just pointing out the hypocrisy was also a losing strategy. What Harris-Walz does is much better.

@mekkaokereke @raph
2 is big.
We progressives have figured out how to play, in an arena where the press, the TV, the radio, and the socials are all in the opponent's pocket.
It took a while.