Surrogate Speaking
Kathleen on Neal Boortz
My favorite talk radio host is libertarian Neal Boortz out of Atlanta. He was very anti-Ron Paul during the 2008 election (which saddened me greatly.) However, the times, they are a-changin’. Ron Paul debuted as a guest on the Neal Boortz Show about 45 minutes ago…and it was a great segment. Very happy for my candidate.
So happy, in fact, I called the show and got through! I got a mini-segment of my own with Neal, talking about the importance of electing a true fiscal conservative who is more concerned about saving the country than about getting re-elected.
I just got the limited-government message out to over 5 million listeners, and all it took was a toll-free phone call.
Anyone can do this! If you have a candidate you want to support, or a point you want to make about the Democrat-controlled media or the Obama Regime, call a talk show with a couple of talking points jotted down. Be polite, be respectful, be engaging, and get your message across.
“What can I do from home to help Governor Sarah Palin?”
Dear HillBuzz,
I’m an Alaskan. I was impressed with Sarah as governor and think America could really use her business sense and executive experience about now.
I also lost my job at the end of June due to the poor economy. With no job offers yet I now have time to volunteer to help this fascinating lady win the WH and save our economy. What can I do?
Anxious to Help in Anchorage
*******************************
How do you debate people who seek to attack Governor Sarah Palin?
Our good friend Patricia sent in the following email exchange that recently transpired between a neighbor, Anne, and herself, with Anne engaging in attacks on Governor Sarah Palin that seem oddly familiar…because they’re almost word-for-word lifted from the media’s usual talking points.
Patricia is no shrinking violet and didn’t take any gruff from Anne. She defended Governor Palin and debated Anne in a calm and reasoned way, which drove Anne into emotional territory where she stooped to expletives and other irrationality that just made her look foolish (more so than usual, according to Patricia).
I’ve reprinted the exchange below to give you an idea how YOU too can counter these tired and familiar attacks on Governor Palin, whether they come to you in email exchanges or happen in the grocery store, at the park, or in the coffee room at the office.
You’re going to keep seeing this same garbage recycled repeatedly for the next year…so it’s important to get in your own mindset to refudiate it.
Wink.
Blue Team Action Item: Find Great Tea Party Videos on YouTube
Here’s an easy Action Item for the Blue Team (Research).
Videos are incredibly powerful when it comes to influencing public opinion. We all have friends and family members we can’t talk to about politics, but maybe we can reach them with comedy. And we all just need to laugh sometimes, too, to keep up our own morale.
We’d like to build a library of pro-America, pro-Tea Party, anti-Leftist videos to include with our Daily Open Threads. They don’t have to be tied to a specific candidate. But they do have to be clever, thought-provoking, and ideally, educational. Something that may demonstrate to a “moderate” or “independent” friend how dangerous BHO and his policies are to America.
So, the next time you’re on YouTube, take a couple of minutes to search for inspirational/entertaining videos, and post them in this thread.
Here’s a good one to start:
http://youtu.be/zF3hbPtCttc
Brainstorming Easter focus group questions – what will you ask Independent and Obama-voting relatives at holiday meal?
There is a line in the sand all of you will cross at some point between now and 2012…when you realize every get-together you go to is a focus group that can be mined for valuable political intel.
All of you are reporters and election consultants, even if you don’t yet realize it.
But, there is a true art to intel gathering that takes practice. It is hard to be a good listener and a subtle questioner. Too often, people who are passionate about politics turn others off by seeming too aggressive…or “spoiling” gatherings by politicizing them.
It is much more effective (and pleasant) to be a subtle questioner instead of a determined crusader.
There’s a story a nun taught my class in grade school about the sun and a storm cloud trying to take a coat off a man…where the cloud summoned all sorts of bluster and power to berate the coat off the man; the guy just clung to it even harder and refused to budge.
The sun just quietly turned up his natural brilliance, in time making it impossible for the man to cling to his heavy coat; the heat was increased on him without him knowing it until it became impossible for him NOT to change what he had been doing.
This is how we are going to win in 2012, with this sunny and non-blustered approach to getting the Obama voters of 2008 to take off their hopeychangey zombie shirts and put down their Kool-Aid.
If you get the chance at brunch or dinner tomorrow with people you don’t see often, take the opportunity to ask them how they think Obama is doing.
Ask them if he has met their expectations or kept his promises to them.
Ask them to look at him as an employee they hired, and find out what sort of an evaluation they would give him.
Then listen.
If they bluster and get defensive, don’t feed energy into the maelstrom. Just ask them why they are so emtional and make them explain themselves.
Keep questioning any blanket statements they make.
If they use pejoratives directed at Governor Palin or other conservatives, ask them to justify the attacks with facts. Ask them why they feel this way…and why they use such words against a wife, mother of five, and grandmother who has never done anything to hurt them.
The way we beat Obama and the Left next year is by getting really good at making the most out of every informal focus group we are part of every day.
SOMEONE has to be the grownup who leads every group and directs every discussion.
Why can’t that be you?
Why can’t this start now?
Anyone have any great tips and really effective strategies for being a skilled, sunny questioner of Obama voters like this?
Governor Sarah Palin stands up for GOProud’s right to be at CPAC…what else can we say to refute attacks against her that call her anti-gay?
Here in Boystown, there’s a concerted effort underway to paint Governor Sarah Palin as the second coming of Anita Bryant.
Even though few in Boystown remember much about Bryant, other than that she was Harvey Milk’s nemesis in the 2008 film “Milk”.
And most of them only saw that because they heard from a friend James Franco is fleetingly naked here and there throughout the movie.
The largest and most popular bar here in Boystown is Sidetrack, which is owned by two gay men who hate Governor Palin with a passion. So much so that on the “Thursday Comedy Night” immediately after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in January, Sidetrack ran a 20-minute hatefest against Governor Palin, showing clips from SNL mocking her, and culminating with a weird and violent parody of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” where Kate Gosselin and her children pick up assault rifles and begin a Hatfield & McCoy gun battle with Governor Palin and her brood.
I’m proud to say that so many people thought it was disgusting and in poor taste, immediately after the Tucson shootings, that they got up and left the bar.
Today, BreitbartTV has a bit about Governor Palin standing up for gay conservatives who want to participate in CPAC, but are being shunned by idiots in the Cocktail Party.
Governor Palin consistently stands up for gay rights, in much the same way Dick Cheney, Laura Bush, and most recently, Barbara Bush, have done.
And yet, places like Sidetrack continue to promote their agenda of villainizing Governor Palin into an Anita Bryant-esque nemesis, out to get gays and harm us…like Cruella de Vil tooling the country after dalmations.
This is the meme the gay community wants to run against Palin, tapping into a reservoir of anti-woman and anti-conservative sentiment in places like Boystown, where low-information voters parrot what the media and people like Anderson Cooper, Tina Fey, Kathy Griffin, Margaret Cho, and Dan Savage tell them.
For those of you who don’t care what the gay community says or does, think about how the Left uses gays to shape popular culture. Each of the Democrat constituency identity blocs is used for a specific purpose. None of these blocs are particularly liked by the Left, but they are tolerated because they are useful to the Left’s cause. Jews are kept on the Democrat reservation because they can raise money the Left needs to fuel its agenda. Blacks are kept on the reservation so they are forever able to scream RAAACISM! to shutdown debate and intimidate conservatives, who are terrified of being called racists. Gays are used for creative, pop culture, and humor attacks on conservatives…since what happens in Boystown doesn’t ever stay in Boystown, but eventually trickles down to YOUR TOWN in the form of whatever new fad gays have concocted that penetrated the mainstream.
An effective use of our time this week is to compile the standard attacks the gay community most often makes against Governor Palin…and refudiate all of them, point by point, in debate team style form.
If we work together to assemble this, and we note the times Governor Palin has stood up for the gay community, we can create debate cards that we’ll have ready on an ongoing basis as people across the country prepare to surrogate speak for the Governor in the 2012 election.
The new HillBuzz.org site that’s coming in a week or so will have a special page devoted to this sort of debate prep…so that when entities like Sidetrack here in Boystown engage in 20-minute hates against the Governor (driving their own customers away, because they go so far to villainize her), people will have an easy way to refudiate them. Our hope is to make the Debate Prep page so easy to use you could just pull it up on your phone if ever you are in a situation where you would need to.
It’s going to be a lot of hard work researching all of this and putting together an easy-to-use resource that will help people become confident and capable surrogate speakers for not only the Governor, but for conservatism in general. Having the facts at ready access, and being practiced in debate, will enable you to shut a lot of haters down…since they don’t know the facts, only what they heard Anderson Cooper or Kathy Griffin say “on the TV”.
Either chime in on the thread below with good examples of attacks you’ve heard the gay community make on Governor Palin, or other standard attacks made against her, along with concrete facts that refudiate them.
Or, you can email us your research at HillBuzz@gmail.com
Let’s set a goal of having this resource completed by Friday, as our gift to Governor Palin and her supporters at large during “All-Palin-February”.
ACTION ITEM: Create debate team style flashcards to help people better counter the Left’s talking points when surrogate speaking
How can you help people better debate the Left?
Here’s something else you can do to help counter the media and Left’s (redundancy alert!) talking points against the Tea Party and conservatives: if you ever took debate in school, are a teacher, or are just great at organizing information, you can help collect all the instances of the Left’s hypocrisy you are seeing emerge right now into debate team style flashcards that people can use to better counter any Leftists they encounter in the world.
What we’d like to create are simple, easy to follow, easy to memorize cards with solid facts that can be ready to go any time the Left gins up its propaganda machine in the media and attempts to politicize a tragedy to attack the Tea Party, Governor Palin, or other conservatives.
We’ll create a page here at HB where we will keep these available on an ongoing basis so the resource will always exist online somewhere. You can print these cards and keep them in a recipe box at home so that you can practice your debating skills if you are a person who finds her or himself in frequent situations where Leftists are spouting the latest talking points off MSNBC or CNN. These people rarely have any facts, and they have never done any personal research on the topic. They just parrot what Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, and Chris Matthews say on TV. If you have information available already queued up and practiced, with cold hard facts, you’ll leave these Leftists sputtering and stammering…and more likely than not cause them to get irrationally emotional and stomp away, maybe even in tears. Don’t laugh, I’ve seen this happen.
Here are two ways you can assist this project right now:
(1) Chime in on this thread with any statements you hear the Left make on a regular basis. Such as, “The Tea Party is racist”, “Sarah Palin is the new Anita Bryant”, “Conservatives are responsible for the shooting”. List things the Left tosses out as fact that aren’t.
(2) Create a fact-based, sourced, rebuttal to these common Leftist statements…with an emphasis on creating easy to remember verbiage and witty turns of phrase that would work well in a debate.
That’s the key to ultimately putting the Leftists in their place: treating these encounters as debates you are prepared to win, instead of casual chance encounters in a bar or grocery store where Leftists expect to have the upper hand and take people off guard, or never in their wildest dreams imagine they would be challenged on something.
The reason the Left dominates this country despite only 20% of the population being Leftists is because conservatives have not invested the time and effort into being well-prepared and organized for these debates.
Let’s change that.
Heaven knows the Cocktail Party GOP establishment is not going to do this yeoman’s work, or any work at all, or be good for anything, so it’s up to the grassroots amateurs like all of us. As usual.
If you have been sitting at home sick to your stomach over what the Left has done to politicize this weekend’s tragedy for Democrat gain, and you have been wondering how you can help, this is a free and easy way for you to use the critical thinking and reason God gave you to help the conservative cause.
5 Things to Tell Your Leftist Relatives at Christmas When They Start Attacking Governor Sarah Palin
Please chime in with things that have worked for you in your own lives in the past, as this thread is a brainstorming session on good comebacks when Leftists decide to turn Christmas dinner into an attack on Governor Sarah Palin. Because Obama the Lightbringer, the god-with-a-small-g the Left and media delivered unto us all in 2008, has failed so miserably — and the Left cannot defend him at all — your Leftist relatives will instead say terrible things about Governor Palin. It is the only thing the Left knows how to do. The amount of time they spend assailing Governor Palin is a good measure for just how insecure they feel with Obama in the White House.
If he delivered on any of his promises and was even 1/10th the messiah they sold him as in the 2008 election, these people would spend Christmas praising him instead of attacking the Governor. Why focus on her if the president really lived up to their expectations.
Here are the five most common attacks on Governor Palin I hear from the Leftists in Boystown and the quick, one or two sentence responses I give on a regular basis that never fail to shut the Leftists down and make them change the subject:
(1) Sarah Palin is a quitter and quit her job in Alaska:
A: Governor Palin held elected positions in Alaska for longer than Obama was a US Senator before he ran for the presidency. Obama quit his job as Senator to take on another job, just as you have left positions you have held and gone on to other things too. Governor Palin was actually attacked on a daily basis by the Left, since Democrats funded a nonstop campaign of frivolous lawsuits against her. The way Alaskan law worked, she had to personally pay to defend herself from all of those frivolous suits…and Alaskan law said it had to come out of her own pocket and that she was not allowed to raise money via a legal fund. So, she had to leave her position to earn money to defend herself against frivolous attacks Democrats deliberately made on her to bankrupt her. She took a job writing a book, giving speeches, and working for FOX and after a year was able to pay off everything Democrats cost her. That law in Alaska has since been changed so that Democrats can never do the same thing to another Governor.
(2) Sarah Palin is stupid:
A: Sarah Palin got better grades in college than Obama did. Obama was a D-average student all through college. He turned in his assignments late for almost every class, and for many classes he didn’t even complete the work requirements. He was just given a pass because of his “exotic personal narrative”, which the Ivy League loved promoting to show how diverse they were in all aspects of their admissions and recruitment policies. Harvard had to waive the academic requirement in place to make Obama president of the Law Review — prior to him, that was awarded to the student with the best grades, but Harvard wanted Barack Obama to be the “historic and unprecedented” first black Law Review president because they wanted to be in the Barack Obama business. His whole life has been like this, with everything handed to him on a silver plate. Governor Palin put herself through school, had to work hard, and was never given anything. She earned good grades and rose from a reporter, to a City Council member, to a Mayor, then an Oil and Gas Commissioner, and then the Governor of her state. All through hard work and achievement. She produces any corroborating documents requested of her, unlike Obama…who still refuses to release his college transcripts, personal records, and all sorts of other vital documentation. If you don’t believe he was a D and F student who was only advanced through affirmative action, then please produce his college transcripts and begin the process of refudiating that.
(3) Governor Palin is a b****, a c***, you fill in the blank with the Left’s misogynistic epithets against her:
A: I put this in here because, honestly, this is actually the most frequent thing that the Left hits at Governor Palin with. It’s a non-substantive, nebulous, two-minute-hate against her that has nothing really to do about her. It might be that she’s just hated because she’s a successful woman who doesn’t shut up when told and never retreats, only reloads. She’s beautiful, has an awesome family, chose to give life to a special needs baby, has a career and a home and a hot husband and everything the women on the Left want but have never been able to balance. Plus, people show up by the thousands on the mere rumor of her turning up at an event somewhere. Last time I checked, Obama’s having trouble getting 1,200 people to fill a room to hear him speak in Democrat strongholds like Cleveland. So, call her all the names you want, Leftists. She doesn’t care. If anyone in your presence uses foul language like this at Christmas dinner, then you should know best how to handle the inappropriateness of that…if someone defaults to name-calling an pejoratives merely asking that person why he can’t express himself without curse words and misogyny is usually enough to win that debate.
(4) Governor Palin hates gay people and is out to get them:
A: Really? What has she done to gay people? Can you name one thing? This is actually a good approach no matter what the Governor is being accused of. Asked people what the source is for that information. Press them for specifics and don’t let them get away with casting blanket aspirations on the Governor. Ask these people if they know the Governor’s best friend is a lesbian. Ask them if they know Governor Palin has legions of gay supporters…and you may quote HillBuzz.org as a group of gay Hillary guys who are 100% behind the Governor in all that she does. Ask the Leftist to cite even one thing the Governor has done against gays. Do not cede ground to people speaking in generalities.
(5) Governor Palin is polarizing:
A: Tell the Leftist, “Yup, she sure is. She’s North Pole-arising…and her polls keep rising against Obama”. Take that “polarizing” word the Left keeps using against female politicians and start conjuring Alaskan, Arctic imagery with it. It’s Christmas, and if you are in a winter climate, point at the snow outside and start talking about the TV show Sarah Palin’s Alaska, and how Governor Palin was trained to be tough and survive in hostile conditions…no matter what is thrown at her, the woman just keeps moving forward. It’s amazing. America has never seen anything like it. Talk about Momma Grizzlies and the wildlife of Alaska and all that natural beauty you saw on the TLC travelogue the Palins filmed. “You want to talk about polarizing…did you see her with that fishing pole she had there and all that trout she caught with her dad”. Then go into how great Alaska is and how much you love that show, which has gotten the highest ratings for any show in TLC history.
If you have some great examples of other things Leftists routinely say to you, or other things you can think of that are great shut-downs when these people launch attacks on the Governor, add them to this thread.
It should make a great resource for anyone out there who knows she or he is headed to dinner with a friend or relative who enjoys tearing into the Governor, but who wilts completely at the merest criticism of Obama, since they just can’t think of a single thing to defend the man.
PROACTIVE ACTION ITEM: What can you say to Leftist family members at Christmas when they start attacking Governor Palin tomorrow?
I’d love people to chime in if they spent Thanksgiving with any Lefty relatives who regurgitate the media’s talking points against Governor Palin…so we can hear how you countered this garbage and refudiated the attacks on Governor Palin.
What can you tell your relatives and friends at Christmas dinner tomorrow about Governor Palin, should politics come up?
What can you tell them about Sarah Palin’s Alaska?
What can you tell them about the Governor’s excellent new book, America By Heart?
What can you tell them about her last book, Going Rogue?
What can you tell them about the Palins’ combined family contributions to the state of Alaska?
What can you tell them about what you expect for a Palin presidency?
If you have at least three great things to say about Governor Palin that anticipate the attacks the Leftists will make on her, you will be sitting pretty at Christmas dinner when these attacks inevitably come.
Leftists are rather predictable.
They only say about 3-5 things about Governor Palin, which they all learn from Chis Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric, or Tina Fey, 60.
If you can hold your own against this garbage tomorrow in a familial setting, you will get an early start on the 2011 campaigning…when you’ll have to do this exact same thing on the ground for the Governor wherever you live…or across the nation should you spend next Christmas in Iowa somewhere, where I expect many of us will be, prepping for the Iowa primary.
Never too early to plan ahead.
