THE ‘KARL ROVE RULE’ FOR MUSICAL ACTS — Mark McKinnon became a Republican in the late 1990s to work for George W. Bush. Now he co-hosts Showtime’s The Circus , a real-time documentary about American politics. He’s crisscrossing the country to cover the Covid campaign for Showtime along with co-hosts John Heilemann, Alex Wagner and Jennifer Palmieri. Your Nightly host talked to McKinnon today about why he prefers virtual conventions, what Republicans need to do this week and how it’s hard for Republicans to book good musical acts. This conversation has been edited. What do you think of the Covid conventions? I had some responsibility for the programming of the 2000 and 2004 conventions. Even back then we were talking about how anachronistic the conventions were. There's a physics to the tradition that just made it really hard to change until Covid. It’s so much better when people aren’t giving a speech to a crowd of, I don’t know, 20,000 partisans that clap at every single thing you say. These speakers are much more intimate and much more authentic. What do Republicans need to do this week? They’ve got a couple of things they need to do. One is to communicate that they take it seriously, that they do recognize the impact of the health crisis on the country, that they are empathetic to those who have suffered and that they have control of it and they have a plan. They have to get beyond, “It’s just gonna disappear.” They have great potential with an economic message. Trump is better prepared to handle the economy even with Covid and that he’ll bring it back faster and stronger than Joe Biden. They’re going to just make the case: “We've got a handle on this. You know what we can do on the economy. We're gonna do it again.” Even though people feel strongly about Trump's economic record, a huge majority of people think the country’s headed the wrong direction right now. That’s a tough wind in the face for reelection. The buck stops with the president. The greatest challenge is that the Trump campaign has to convince people it’s headed in the right direction. By the way it doesn’t need to be solved. People don't base their votes on the way things are today. They're gonna vote based on how they think it’s going to be. Any lessons for the Trump campaign from Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign? Bush was also steering the country through a crisis and managed to convince voters to stick with him. The parallels are that we were an incumbent in facing reelection, and he was not particularly popular nor were his policies. We had to make it a choice between us and someone else and not just a referendum on George Bush. We came up with a strategy early on that we realized may not be perfect, but we all decided that we’re gonna plant the flag of that strategy and never change it. An imperfect strategy, consistently executed, was better than a strategy that changes every week in search of perfection. My advice to the Trump campaign is that whatever you're laying down this week, lay it down and stick with it. Agree or disagree with Donald Trump in 2016, you knew exactly what his message was. It was as clear as any presidential message I've ever heard. What’s your favorite convention memory? It was driving with George W. Bush to the convention hall to deliver his speech in 2000. I was quiet, thinking he was trying to concentrate and focus on the biggest speech of his life. Then I heard someone whistling the song “Go Tell It On The Mountain.” I thought it was the radio, but turns out it was Bush. I said: “Are you kidding me? There could not be more pressure on you, and you're whistling an old gospel song?” And he said: “I've never felt more calm in my life. Because I know that every word of this speech reflects who I am and what I believe. And if people accept me, great. But if they don't, I know they will have done so not based on some false sense of what I stand for.” It’s always tough for Republicans to match the Democrats when it comes to entertainment. I had that thankless job in 2004, and after months of begging every A-list entertainer we could find, we ended up basically with the holy trinity of past GOP conventions: Lee Greenwood, the Oak Ridge Boys, and Wayne Newton. Initially we had the “Karl Rove Rule.” If he’d heard of them, they were off our list. In the end, Karl knew ’em all. Hopefully, Team Trump will do better. Hard to do worse. NO BUMP FOR BIDEN — Biden hasn’t gotten much of a polling bounce between his Democratic convention speech last Thursday and the start of the Republican convention today. A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll showed virtually no change in Biden’s image ratings, which remain split evenly between voters who view him positively and negatively. Other horse-race polling shows Biden with a large lead over Trump — but still roughly where his advantage stood going into the conventions. THE TRUMP RNC SEQUEL — Trump officially became the Republican presidential nominee in an unusual party convention in 2016 marked by divisiveness, threats and demands of loyalty. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, senior staff writer Michael Kruse talks about how the event teed up the last four years — and what it can tell us about this week's convention.
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