I don’t know how to put this delicately so I’ll be blunt; the Romney campaign needs to hire a new propaganda minister. After Paul Ryan’s recent fiasco it’s obvious that the campaign’s propaganda minister isn’t doing his job:
The head of a northeast Ohio charity says that the Romney campaign last week “ramrodded their way” into the group’s Youngstown soup kitchen so that GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan could get his picture taken washing dishes in the dining hall.
[…]
Ryan had stopped by the soup kitchen for about 15 minutes on his way to the airport after his Saturday morning town hall in Youngstown. By the time he arrived, the food had already been served, the patrons had left, and the hall had been cleaned.
Upon entering the soup kitchen, Ryan, his wife and three young children greeted and thanked several volunteers, then donned white aprons and offered to clean some dishes. Photographers snapped photos and TV cameras shot footage of Ryan and his family washing pots and pans that did not appear to be dirty.
A propaganda minister has one very simple job: make the candidate or candidates under his or her care look good in the public eye. That’s it. Apparently the Romney campaign’s minister can’t even accomplish that simple task. When this impromptu photo opportunity was starting to develop the minister should have asked some very basic questions such as whether or not Ryan would be able to actually help the soup kitchen. If Ryan came too late to actually help the photo opportunity would be meaningless because it would become public information that the man didn’t actually do anything. In that case the campaign should have just kept rolling and not have bothered going to the kitchen. If Ryan came early enough to help then the minister would have to inform Ryan that he would actually have to help otherwise it would become public information that he did nothing.
This fiasco was a very elementary mistake for a propaganda minister to make. Even an amateur should have caught this and forbidden Ryan from entering that soup kitchen after the patrons had left and everything had been cleaned up. Romney’s campaign really needs to take some lessons from Obama’s campaign. Obama has hired some of the slickest propagandists out there that do some absolutely amazing work. They do such an excellent job that they still have many people who supported Obama during the last election because of his anti-war platform supporting him again even though he’s proven himself to be a complete war monger.
If Romney wants to win the election he needs to get somebody who can propagandize effectively. There are only three weeks left before the election but a really great propagandist could still help pull off a victory by raising Romney and Ryan’s status in the public eye.