Many people in the Orthodox Jewish/Hasidic Communities emailed or told me of a potential protest that is planned to be held on the day the author of an unorthodox book plans to have a public reading of the content. Some internet forums also made mention of such a protest.

Personally, I think that much of it is just talk. Most people, who think of attending the protest, will bail in the last minute. However, if only a handful or a dozen show, it is more than enough to create chaos; this is something that shall not take place.

I fully understand the frustrations members of our community have regarding the book. However, as someone who does Media/Public Relations for a living, I can assure my brethren that by trying to undercut a lost soul’s fifteen minutes of fame, one will only enhance it and it will feed into the negative narrative pushed by the author as to the behavior of the Community.

The correct approach is to the reach out in respectful and professional ways to media outlets and journalists who wrote stories on this topic and implore them to write balanced reports and to correct the record. Anything else is counter-productive to say the least.

Politico Reports: Tea party favorite Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said Thursday that Nazi  propagandist Joseph Goebbels would be “very proud” of Democrats for shifting  public sentiment against Republicans, and he blamed the press for helping spread  their message.

“If Joseph Goebbels was around, he’d be very proud of the Democrat Party  because they have an incredible propaganda machine,” West told reporters in the  Capitol. “I think that you have, and let’s be honest, you know, some of the  people in the media are complicit in this, in enabling them to get that type of  message out.”

West was responding to a question about Congress’s low poll  numbers and the fact that public blame is centered more on the Republicans. A  Pew Research Center poll released Thursday found two in three voters in favor of  tossing out most members of Congress in 2012, with a larger share of the blame  aimed at the GOP.

The freshman Republican, whose district is in heavily Jewish South Florida,  said his reference to Goebbels wasn’t designed to link Democrats to the overall  Nazi party.

“I’m talking about propaganda, OK,” he said. “Don’t start taking my words and  twisting it around. I’m talking about propaganda. And I think that’s a very  important thing. When you tell me that everyone thinks that the only people on  Capitol Hill are House Republicans, it’s because that’s what’s being portrayed, is that there’s nobody else up here.”

“Once again, you guys will take whatever I say and you will spin it to try to  demonize me or demagogue me,” West added. “What I’m talking about is a person  that was the minister of propaganda. And I’m talking about propaganda. So  please. I’ll be prepared to wake up tomorrow and you guys make up some crazy  story. Whatever.”

West added that Republicans “need to do a better job of being  messengers.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70521.html#ixzz1gflKxmMV

(Read More)

I am not in charge of the message for national Republicans, but in face of the country’s economic turmoil, Republicans need to move the debate from Bush vs. Obama, to Republican control of the Hill vs. the Dems’ control of the Hill.

Instead of letting the Dems say that “when Obama came into office, this and this was wrong,” the Republicans need to steer the debate to where the country was when they (the Republicans) last were in the majority, to where it went once the Dems came to power. Following is in one paragraph how the Republican PR message can be delivered. I wonder how the Dems would fight this off if all Congressional Republicans use it. Better yet, I wonder how many seats the Republicans will gain if voters keep hearing the following for the next ten months”

“When the Repubs controlled the Hill until the end of 2006, the economy gained an average 200,000 jobs each month; the unemployment rate was at 4.4%, and we were on the way to budget surpluses again. But within a year of the Dems coming to power, the economy went into recession; followed by heavy job losses (totalling as of now to a loss of aproxx 6 million jobs); a high unemployment rate; and federal deficits that tripled from under $170 billion to $455 billion, and then tripled again to $1.4 trillion. The Stimulus bill which held promises of keeping the unemployment rate down with a monthly gain of 145,000 jobs in its first two years, gave us a 10% unemployment rate and millions of less jobs. Following 9/11 when the country and the economy were hurting badly (due to the attacks, the Clinton recession, and the revelations of corporate corruption), the tax-cutting Republican polices kept a lid on unemployment and the deficits. In fact, the only thing which appears to help the economy in recent months, are the Republican-requested tax-cuts for homebuyers which the Dems approved only half-heartedly.  It’s time to give Republicans a chance at the wheel again, to drive this nation to a real job-growing economy, instead of a jobs-saved-or-created recession.”

How do you like this message?

A candidate I worked for in recent weeks lost his bid this week Tuesday in a 2-1 defeat

The campaign was for a mayor seat of a village that is smaller than three-square-miles and has approximately 10,000 registered voters, some of them not even living in that village anymore. The contest was between the Deputy Mayor of the last eight years who ran on the Democratic and other lines, versus the person who was mayor until eight years ago who ran on the Republican line. I worked for the former Mayor.

“The other side” successfully detached the deputy mayor from the current administration which has almost doubled tax in the past eight years, wasted a $6.2 million surplus they inherited, and quadrupled the village debt in the past eight years, while not even using the money for valuable things.

The voting blocks in that village are mostly minority groups, such as Jewish voters, African Americans, Haitian, etcetera, and the Deputy Mayor being from the Haitian community and my candidate being from the African American community. All this means that sighting facts in your PR work can largely fall on deaf ears because people in these communities to a big extent tend to go with “their own” candidate (along racial lines), regardless how good or bad their own or other candidates really are. In addition, in some communities most voters will follow what leaders were told to advise the voters to do, while the voters will not even asking why or how the leaders came to the conclusion that did, thus giving blindly one candidate hundreds of votes despite that candidate’s involvements in the recent troubles of voters’ lives.

Then there is the issue of finance. One cannot win a campaign on the cheap side, as it was the case with my candidate who was vastly outspent. In addition, a candidate cannot hedge his bets on one popular figure of a specific community hoping that this person will deliver 75% votes needed to win. This is actually a thing which I tried telling to others in the campaign but to no avail.

At any rate, I have learned more than what I have written here, in a campaig which saw my candidate getting only 1,019 votes to his opponent’s 2,236 votes. I am looking forward to do work for other campaigns in the future. It’s work that I love doing, and I do it with passion.

p.s During this election season (and during the primary), I also did a lot of PR work for a Town Supervisor here in this NY area, who won comfortably the primary on both major party lines, and  now in November he won the general election against his opponent who ran on a popular third-party line. In both contests (primery and general) I played a bigger role in the PR work targeting one community, however I was just a small part of a big apparatus, so I doubt my PR work played a role in the outcome of the election. But hey, earning a few bucks on a job you love doing, always feels good.