1. I love that Joe Biden's dog keeps biting people and no one cares. And it actually touches on a big difference between Biden and Obama. cnn.com/2021/03/30/pol…
2. In the 2000s, I used to work in the field of online organizing. Online organizing is just marketing but we used to think it was super special if we said online organizing and progressive movement together. Obama used our marketing tools better than we did.
3. The reason, as it turns out, is because extremely polished brands do great online. Obama had a marvelous brand. But eventually it saddled his administration with a harmful cult of personality he had to maintain.
4. For instance, Obama asked every incoming staffer for crazy amounts of details, like all emails they'd ever written. The WH fired Van Jones out of fear of tarnishing the Obama brand because he once signed a petition he didn't fully read. politico.com/story/2009/09/…
5. Anyway, at a certain point, during the early Obama administration, one of the online organizers I knew, now with a job in the White House, told me there would be an amazing announcement the next day. I would love it.
6. By this time, I had given up on online organizing as useful. I was working on foreclosures and finance. I half-thought, maybe they are going to do something helpful to stop 10M people from losing their homes.
7. It turns out, Obama's family got a new extremely beautiful dog, named Bo or Sunny, I don't remember. That was the announcement. Lots of pictures, activists loved it, I mean who doesn't love an adorable dog? But they made a huge deal out of it.
8. That's what the Obama advisors were thinking about, brand maintenance. A lot of the pseudo-scandals of the Obama years, like the tan suit, were ridiculous, but they were a response to the brand obsession of the President.
9. Biden by contrast doesn't seem to care. He doesn't use Twitter. Biden has an old dog in a new place, it's scared and it bit people. Maybe Biden is bad at branding his dog. Either way, there's no scandal, because Brand Biden isn't important, policy is. cnn.com/2021/03/30/pol…
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