In politics part of the trick of getting it right is not just knowing when to go on the attack, or knowing how to play defense, but knowing how to mount an attack that doesn’t backfire and strengthen your foes, or mount a weak defense that compounds the problem. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has just provided political junkies of a classic case of someone not thinking through how an attack could backfire. The Week’s Jeb Golinkin gives a detailed analysis. Here’s part of it:
Mike Bloomberg has never been fond of firearms and after Newtown, the outgoing New York City mayor threw what remains of his national political clout behind gun-control measures.
Now, Mayor Bloomberg is a very bright guy, but no one is ever going to accuse him of modesty. And he’s been extremely vocal about gun control. Bloomberg put $12 million behind an ad buy pushing for tighter regulations. Bloomberg’s ads have run in 13 states and target both Democratic and Republican senators who Bloomberg apparently believes did not listen to their constituents during the gun votes.
The problem? The people Bloomberg is attacking have begun wearing his condemnation as a badge of honor. On Friday, Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas — one of the Democrats the New York City mayor has been targeting with his gun control ads — launched an ad in which he brags about Bloomberg’s condemnation. Yes, that’s right. The fact that Mike Bloomberg does not like Mark Pryor is something that Mark Pryor believes makes him more electable.
Read the rest of it by going to the link.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.