Hard to say what the effect is on Sam’s personal brand; lots to still cash out I expect. It could enhance his charisma, or he might have spent something which is hard to get back.
When you try to get something unusual done, you “stake” some amount of your political capital on this. If you win, you “expand” the horizon of the socially acceptable actions available to you. You start being viewed as someone who can get away with doing things like that, you get an in with more powerful people, people are more tolerant of you engaging in more disruptive action.
But if you try to immediately go for the next, even bigger move, you’ll probably fail. You need buy-in from other powerful actors, some of which have probably only now became willing to listen to you and entertain your more extreme ideas. You engage in politicking with them, arguing with them, feeding them ideas, establishing your increased influence and stacking the deck in your favor. You consolidate your power.
I’d model what happened as Sam successfully expanding his power. He’s staked some amount of his political capital on the counter-revolution, and he (currently appears to have) won, which means the political-capital investment was successful and will be repaid to him with interest. He’ll need to spend some time consolidating it, but what happened will only benefit him in the long run.
Yep, this is a nicely explained and more detailed version of ‘it could enhance his charisma’ and is my model there too. But there’s also a lot of latent (to us) stuff that might have been traded away, and furthermore a bunch of public ‘potentially reputation-tarnishing’ fallout which might swing it the other way.
I think my model of cycles of power expansion and consolidation is applicable here:
I’d model what happened as Sam successfully expanding his power. He’s staked some amount of his political capital on the counter-revolution, and he (currently appears to have) won, which means the political-capital investment was successful and will be repaid to him with interest. He’ll need to spend some time consolidating it, but what happened will only benefit him in the long run.
Yep, this is a nicely explained and more detailed version of ‘it could enhance his charisma’ and is my model there too. But there’s also a lot of latent (to us) stuff that might have been traded away, and furthermore a bunch of public ‘potentially reputation-tarnishing’ fallout which might swing it the other way.