Susie Dent Quotes
Super Tuesday is the day on which most states hold their primaries. Its darker partner is Dirty Tricks Thursday: the Thursday before an election when candidates release scandalous stories to garner bad publicity for their opponent: the timing means the accused will have little time to refute the allegations.
Dent, Susie. "Susie Dent on US Election Jargon." Radio Times, 3 Nov. 2016.
In 2011 and 2012, there were several candidates vying for the Republican Nomination for the Presidency. The contest was close, and the candidates unleashed on each other the negative advertising and outrageously false accusations which they had previously only reserved to attack Democrats. They were so good at it, that they all drove up each others’ negatives—so much so that the potential Republican Candidate would be permanently scarred in the minds of the public. More mature and senior Republicans like McCain urged an end to the face to face confrontations of debates.
_0_PostageStamp_47x47.jpg "Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen gives an interview to John Dickerson during the CBS news program Face the Nation in Washington, D.C., July 5, 2009. During the interview, Mullen discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, North Korea's recent missile tests and his recent visit to Russia. (DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley, U.S. Navy/Released)"){kind=small}
In this dirty technique some people who knew the candidate at one point in his/her life “organize” and “independent” organization with funding from a partisan individual or organization. They then create attack TV and web ads against the candidate that include serious untruths as well as misleading accuracies. When the candidate is asked about the lies and exaggerations, he/she refuses to comment and only says that he/she cannot be held responsible for anything that anyone says against his/her opponent or anyone else. The candidate adopts a policy of not commenting on any political ads other than the ones he/she is responsible. This produces viscious false attacks on an opponent with the candidate completely shielded from responsibility.
His older brother was running for Consul—the highest elected office of the Roman Empire. The Handbook, was his advice to his brother as to how to conduct his campaign.
Msny critics agree with him observing that, with his rough and tumble campaign tactics, he made them that way.
In 1934 writer Upton Sinclair won the California Democratic gubernatorial nomination. The Republicans spent three times the funds that they had committed against Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election to defeat Sinclair. In particular, they used the first "media consultants" in American political campaigns to comb through all of Sinclair's novels finding dialogue of the villains which were then ascribed to Sinclair in a series of cartoons distributed throughout the state:
A few weeks before his election his opponent accused him of sexually molesting a woman two decades earlier.
Describing political advertising of the era:
In February of 2004 a story started circulating that Democratic Candidate John Kerry had engaged in an affair with his Intern. It was untrue.
Susan Francesca Dent, is an English lexicographer, etymologist and media personality. She has appeared in "Dictionary Corner" on the Channel 4 game show Countdown every year since 1992. She also appears on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, a post-watershed comedy version of the show presented by comedian Jimmy Carr. She has been Honorary Vice-President of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) since 2016.
