Watching Donald Trump vs. the NFL, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen this all before. Then it struck me – oh, yeah! He did the same thing to the sixteen other  Republicans seeking the GOP nomination for President of the United States in 2016. Specifically, Trump spoke directly to their audiences, which…

I don’t have a law degree, and I make a living doing consulting — some of it political. These are among the many objections senators and critics would rightly raise were I to be nominated to the Supreme Court.

Good mentoring relationships can be richly rewarding, not only for the person being mentored, but for the mentor too. Mentors can, among other things, provide exceptional learning experiences for their mentees and, in doing so, expand their mentees’ awareness, insight and perspective. Being a mentor is a commitment and takes a willingness to share skill…

External crisis communications are important, but don’t overlook the importance of internal communications during times of crisis. Employees are your number one stakeholder—your brand ambassadors—and effective employee communication is indispensible to minimizing crisis-related damage.  Some things to consider, inspired by our friends at Melcrum: Plan First and foremost, have a crisis communication strategy and matching…

So it appears that Wendy’s is now the Donald Trump of fast food chains, at least as it regards Twitter. The AP reports: It started Monday when a Twitter user accused the fast food chain of lying about using “fresh, never frozen” beef for its hamburgers. After Wendy’s reiterated its fresh beef policy, the user…

I caught this interesting tidbit while browsing through the latest WSJ / NBC poll [pdf]. Q19 of that poll asks all voters how comfortable they are in voting for potential unnamed presidential candidates who bear a variety of characteristics. Given the choices enthusiastic, comfortable, have some reservations, very uncomfortable and not sure,  61% said they…

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Hynes Communications, the nation’s leading public affairs and advocacy firm is pleased to announce, agency Vice President, Amelia Chassé has been named a recipient of Campaigns & Elections Magazine’s prestigious Rising Star award. Chassé is one of just twenty-five young operatives in the 2013 class of Rising Stars. “David Axelrod, James Carville,…

October 9, 2012–With the campaign getting a bit surreal, I thought I might highlight some people you should know. Today I got inspired when Marc Lamont Hill published a piece at the Huffington Post entitled “The 15 Most Overrated White People.” So, then local radio show host Michael Berry on NewsTalk 750am , decided to…

We were told that debates can’t alter a presidential contest. But what voters are telling pollsters completely contradicts that. In the hours that followed the surreal role reversal in last week’s presidential debate, liberal political scientists and statisticians rushed to the public square to insist that television scraps of the like rarely reorganize contests. Breathless…

In case you haven’t heard, fellow women, we are at war. Barack Obama’s new ad tells us that “it’s a scary time to be a woman.” According to President Obama, we should vote to give him a second term on the sole ground that under a President Mitt Romney, we may not get free birth…

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. – Hynes Communications today congratulated the firm’s own Emily Zanotti, whose blog, “Naked DC,” was awarded Best New Blog of 2011 by CPAC and TheTeaParty.net.

There’s nothing more annoying than hecklers or protestors disrupting a campaign event except, maybe, when those hecklers are high-profile surrogates for your opponent. It was a strategy Mitt Romney recently deployed in Florida, dispatching big-name backers – including Reps. Connie Mack (Fla.), Mary Bono Mack (Ca.) and Jason Chaffetz (Utah) – to attend rival Newt…

Newt Gingrich is trying to leverage Twitter in his fight to overtake Mitt Romney. Twitter was a novelty in 2008 but it has grown into a force that drives the national debate and shapes the way reporters and campaign media operatives do their jobs. The micro-blogging site now has 100 million active users, according to…

PORTSMOUTH, N.H., January 12, 2012– Hynes Communications, the nation’s leading new media public affairs agency headquartered in New Hampshire, announced it has hired two new team members and promoted a third. Leonardo Alcivar has accepted the role of Senior Vice President of Public Affairs; Andrew Clark joins the team as a Strategic Partner and Account…

Human resource managers and employment professionals agree there are several common mistakes made by young professionals that may be keeping them from climbing up the career ladder as quickly as they’d like. According to Business NH Magazine, these are the top five common mistakes made by young professionals: 1. Poor Communication Skills Some young professionals…

Your public relations or communications internship may be the first time you’ve worked in a professional setting. The rules are different among firms, so you must figure out the appropriate code of conduct—from dress, to culture, to formal company policies and reporting. Public relations, advertising, and marketing, is all about perception. What you wear determines…

Turning the unexpected into money and momentum for your campaign. Originally published in Campaigns & Elections magazine on December 12, 2011. It was during an address to a joint session of Congress that a relatively unknown South Carolina congressman became a household name overnight by calling President Obama a liar. After Rep. Joe Wilson pointed…

Originally published in Campaigns & Elections’ Campaign Insider blog on October 17, 2011. Road appearances are tougher than they look. Some tips to help your advance team pull off seamless events. A well-planned advance operation ensures that, even with the chaos that can seem routine on the trail, your campaign will still be able to…

Five clinical case studies to help you recruit, manage and retain your campaign volunteers. Democrats routinely field more effective volunteer armies than Republicans, largely due to the help of their allies in organized labor. But Democrats have also had more success building grassroots organizations because they’re often better at communicating with and organizing their base….

Google launched Google+, its answer to Facebook, last week amidst a good deal of, um, “buzz,” not all of it good. The search giant has been hungry to break into the social networking space for years but has yet to get it quite right. Still, Google has a billion daily web users and a vast…

Published in the Daily Caller on June 29, 2011 Last Saturday, the Nevada Democratic Party’s Central Committee selected State Treasurer Kate Marshall to be the Democratic candidate in the upcoming special election to replace now-Sen. Dean Heller in the House of Representatives. Marshall won the near-universal support of those voting, a testament to the strong…

Published in the Daily Caller on 6/23/2011 Among many political commentators, the meme du jour regarding the 2012 presidential race is that President Obama’s real opponent is the economy; who Republicans nominate is of limited importance. On its face, this characterization makes sense. As Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson note in their book about the…

Yes. And no. A recent POLITICO story titled “Social media not so hot on the Hill” no doubt caused some trade association executives to reconsider their budgets.When a member of Congress tells a major Beltway publication on the record that “there’s a lot of trolls on Twitter . . . I just got to the…

The Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) performed an online survey of 260 House and Senate staffers in Fall 2010.  A plurality of those surveyed occupied senior staff roles in their offices.  The survey respondents as a group were representative of the composition of Congress at the time, and therefore do not represent the current balance of…

After the whistleblower group Wikileaks released Afghan war documents identifying local informants, its founder Julian Assange said in an interview with the Today Show that if American sympathizers were targeted in the divestment’s wake it would constitute his own collateral damage: “If we had, in fact, made that mistake then of course that would be…

At the Huffington Post today, I write about a Washington, DC-area homeless man who is using social media to highlight the plights of his underserved community. Admirable and indeed pioneering, but nonetheless agitating for someone who grew up dirt poor in South Georgia: He rebuffs formal 9-to-5 jobs lest it detract from his capacity to…

Even as the House Republican Conference looks to sell the public on its new-found spending restraint, we learned that earmark requests for the Congressional Tea Party Caucus—whose members hoped to position as a leader on spending—had crested the $1 billion mark. In a op-ed today for Fox News, I warn legislators that voters—in particular the…

My piece, up at CNN: In less than two months, members of the Republican National Committee will convene at National Harbor, just outside Washington, and select a chairman to lead the organization over the next two years.

The 2010 midterm cycle has produced an unprecedented number of female candidates, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since 1992.  Hynes VP Liz Mair spoke with the Atlantic about the trend and what it means for the “old boys club” going forward.

When a deeply polarizing egotist leads an already-unpopular party, the only place to go is down, as endangered Democrats will soon realize. Some, having already learned the lessons of the Pennsylvania and Colorado Senate primary contests, are politely rebuffing—while others still downright rejecting—Barack Obama’s offers to join them on the campaign trail.

Incumbent Democrats are desperate—increasingly aware the public’s taste for their brand of change has waned. Some, in generally conservative districts and states, are reaching for the mantle of the moderate; others, like those in reliably Democratic areas, have not yet begun backsliding on the president on the issues of health care reform and spending.

I have an editorial in today’s POLITICO on the Democrats’ procedural gimmicks and faulty pay-for system that cost the passage of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.

As you know, July 16th marks the end of summer…well just about.  In a panic, the kids are starting to take seriously their summer reading requirements. In that vein, I have created my own summer reading list. Enjoy!

I moved to Washington, DC in January of this year.  Since moving I have had a huge and standout pet peeve with the city that I don’t think anyone from another city could understand. As simple as it sounds, it’s the escalators in the Metro. It’s not just me, everyone I know that lives here…