Communication

My guest on the latest episode of Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good has fascinating, important insights about Vladimir Putin’s “memory war:” a campaign to rewrite history with Russia at the center of the world stage. That campaign is being enacted with horrific violence in Ukraine, but is pursued in different ways around the world, including in the United States.

Dr. Jade McGlynn is a senior researcher with the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies at MIIS, a former lecturer in Russian at Oxford University, and a contributor to Foreign Policy, The Telegraph, The Spectator, and others. She’s the author of The Kremlin’s Memory Makers, coming soon from Bloomsbury, and is currently writing a second book, Putin’s Unreality.

You can listen on any podcast app or at the Dastardly Cleverness website.

A textbook example this morning of why Democrats lose elections they should win. MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” played a clip of Barack Obama being asked what Democrats should do in the midterms. He can answer in one simple—and true—sentence: “We’ve got a story to tell, just gotta tell it.”

Host Joe Scarborough then asked DNC chair Jaime Harrison—and this is not to single him out, because he is far from alone—what that story is. Harrison’s answer was not a story. As usual for Democrats these days, it was a long list of bullet points.

First there was a wonky wind-up, indicating that there would be no answer to the simple question, “What is the story?”

“Well, you know, Joe, the contrast is an important one. Because Joe, you know, elections are about contrasts.”

Then came the bullet points.