Entries Tagged 'messages' ↓

It’s fun to be a detached observer of the Incredible Campaign of 2008, which has galvanized a nation. Our “mass of niches” culture seems to have coalesced in these past two weeks into a genuine mass audience. It’s probably temporary and of course there’s no guarantee that getting our attention will lead to our doing something (or even voting), but we are riveted to the political soap opera unfolding before our eyes.

The viewership for various segments of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions was huge.

As a television draw, John McCain was every bit the equal of Barack Obama.

The GOP presidential candidate attracted roughly the same number of viewers to his convention acceptance speech Thursday as Obama did before the Democrats last week, according to Nielsen Media Research.

It marked the end of an astonishing run where more than 40 million people watched political speeches on three nights by Obama, McCain and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The Republican convention was the most-watched convention on television ever, beating a standard set by the Democrats a week earlier.

Three times in two weeks, political speeches were watched by more people than the “American Idol” finale, the Academy Awards and the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics this year.

“It clearly suggests that a great number of Americans think that who will be the next president is important and worthy of their time,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter and director of the Project for Excellence in journalism.

One day, this will be seen as a watershed—the moment that the world of politics, borrowing from the world of showbiz, inspired the Couch Potatoes of Amercia to take a good, hard (though, possibly, brief) look at their country, their neighbors, and, most of all, themselves and to see if maybe we all couldn’t do a little bit more to get along, goddamnit, and while we’re at it, to do more for ourselves—individually and collectively.

But I must be dreaming, because that would be true progress.

However, I do have some hope that something better will result from the election of 2008, regardless of whether the Republicans or the Democrats win the White House this time around, because all of the candidates are dedicated—and inspiring—public servants (even if they are politicians and thus by nature suspect. Every one of the current crop has sacrificed something and done good things for others. Along the way, we unruly American, with our crude democratic system, shoved aside some folks who had already had their turn and we got rid of at least one rotten apple and we rejected alarmism as a way of daily life).

Well, goddamn!

Ain’t that America somethin’ to see, baby!

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, agree with ‘em or disagree with ‘em, we’ve finally got some great role models (new heroes and villains, as JFK memorably referred to them in 1959,***) that people are paying attention to.

And so we sail into uncharted waters.

————–

*** Admirably, JFK warned the people not to believe in the false idols launched by the new TV era. Then he proceeded to become one of them. He succeeded beyond his wildest imagination, because politicians are still emulating his style, and Democratic politicians all covet the imprimatur of the Kennedys and … but that’s a story for another day. Let’s just say for now that the imprimatur will long outlive the Kennedys.

Politicians cannot possibly accomplish everything they promise the people. They are ambitious above all else. John McCain knows this and is torn up about it, as the NYT reported the other day; nevertheless, he’s running for president for a second time. And he is using war strategies (such as surprise) in his political campaign. He means to win—with honor and within the rules of the arena.

Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopaganda^TMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***

Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.

Howard Kurtz tried to burst this bubble on Reliable Sources this morning [e.a.]:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …

KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.

Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.

And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.

KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.

HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?

The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).

The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.

Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopaganda^TM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.

The campaign ‘08 Battle of Iconography goes on.

————-

*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.

They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.

Let me say goodbye and good riddance to the dreadful year of 2007 by wishing you good cheer via these counterintuitive findings:flag-waving reduces jingoism

a few extra pounds won’t kill you

Happy New Year, dear readers.

Courtesy of our friends at the New York Post,

Islamist fanaticism is having a Bad PR Day.

And that’s a good thing.

So. I’m back and I’m mellow—probably because I have studiously avoided catching up on the blogospheric eruptions that I missed while I was away (though I did follow the news, at a vast remove, in the International Herald Tribune, which, shockingly, costs € 2,20 [approx $3.10]; more later on following the news at a vast remove).

Among others, I had P. G. Wodehouse for company on my European idyll, and these words, from Psmith in the City, written in 1910, also helped to lighten my mood [e.a.]:

All political meetings are very much alike. Somebody gets up and introduces the speaker of the evening, and then the speaker of the evening says at great length what he thinks of the scandalous manner in which the Government is behaving or the iniquitous goings-on of the Opposition. From time to time confederates in the audience rise and ask carefully rehearsed questions, and are answered fully and satisfactorily by the orator. When a genuine heckler interrupts, the orator either ignores him, or says haughtily that he can find him arguments but cannot find him brains. Or, occasionally, when the question is an easy one, he answers it. …

The electors of Kenningford who really had any definite opinions on politics were fairly equally divided. There were about as many earnest Liberals as there were earnest Unionists. But besides these there was a strong contingent who did not care which side won. These looked on elections as Heaven-sent opportunities for making a great deal of noise. They attended meetings in order to extract amusement from them; and they voted, if they voted at all, quite irresponsibly. A funny story at the expense of one candidate told on the morning of the polling, was quite likely to send these brave fellows off in dozens filling in their papers for the victim’s opponent.

[Penguin; pp. 56-57]

In 1910, there was no Feiler Faster Thesis to explain (courtesy of Mickey Kaus) that candidates (and their campaign strategists) needn’t fret about not having enough time to connect with voters.

Even a century ago it was understood that only at the last minute do voters give political campaigns their

allotted minute and a half of concentrated thought.

Except: even a century ago Wodehouse knew that the great unwashed among voters don’t give candidates their thought.

They vote with their gut.

And they are likely to be swayed not by facts but by—dare I say it?—infotainment [that is: gossip, rumor, fabrication, PRopaganda^TM or anything else that makes for a more entertaining story than what reality, and a factual rendering of it, can deliver].

Upshot: time isn’t the crucial problem for candidates. As always, perception is the problem. Image is the problem. (Then, of course, there’s the little issue of connecting with the public’s mood.)

It’s not fair.

It’s not right.

It could lead us where we definitely don’t want to go.

It’s likely to offer dismal results for those of us “earnest Liberals” who want to vote for Obama—or, rather, to live in a world where Obama’s views hold sway.

But that’s the way it is.

The latest poll from Gallup indicates that the disgraceful former president of the United States has got a hard row to hoe as he “seeks to erode the ‘impenetrable wall’ that blocks the American public from seeing the plight of Palestinians.” 

(link to this great photo provided by Aussie Dave at Israellycool)

That’s because Americans just keep sympathizing with the Israelis, no matter what:

Carter continues his jihad, although he has had to change his tune. Here’s what he said last Thursday at George Washington University:

“The driving force for the terrible oppression and persecution in Palestine comes from a minority of Israelis and their desire to confiscate and colonize Palestinian lands,” Carter said Thursday. A trade of land for peace would be acceptable to most Israelis, he said, “but not to a minority of the more conservative leaders who have intruded into Palestine and who are unfortunately supported by AIPAC and most of the vocal American Jewish communities.”

See? Whereas in Carter’s narrative there was once a massive conspiracy on the part of Israel to impose racist apartheid on the long-suffering Palestinians, now it’s only a tiny handful of Israeli Jews [a "minority"] who are to blame for the Palestinians’ “terrible oppression and persecution.” (And, of course, the evil AIPAC.)

Here’s another trend for Carter to consider: as Americans move out of the “undecided” column, they move over to sympathize with the Israelis, not the Palestinians.

No amount of Jew-baiting, Israel-baiting, and AIPAC-baiting is going to change this. It’s not a conspiracy, and it’s not that complicated.

When the Palestinians become more sympathetic—i.e., when they are seen to behave in a manner that befits sympathy rather than disgust, indignation, or outrage—they will garner more sympathy from Americans.

Going where Jack Shafer refused (for some inexplicable reason) to go before (see this post), Isaac Chotiner names “evil genius” pollster  and “message guru” Frank Luntz “the architect of the [1994] GOP takeover.”

In TNR, Chotiner also reports that a “disappointed” Luntz (actually, he sounds enraged, not disappointed, by the idiots in Congress) is “fleeing” D.C. for “the beach.”

In Luntz’s telling, what was once a visionary movement of bold ideas has been consumed by the nasty and anti-intellectual culture that dominates Washington. “I read these blogs,” he says, his voice downbeat. “They are so bitter. So bitter and so angry. … It’s not my style.” And later: “I think Washington, D.C., is intellectually tired.”

It’s hard to argue with Luntz’s take on the state of intellectual debate in Washington. But Luntz’s career has been about nothing so much as cheapening language and obscuring honest discussion. During the debate over tort reform in 2005, a memo written by Luntz, which eventually leaked to the press, classily counseled Republicans with the following: “It is tempting to counter-attack using facts and figures. Resist the temptation. … The President’s language works because it speaks to a series of individual proposals that common sense suggests will lead to job creation.” When House Republicans wanted to gut Medicare in 1995, Luntz advised them to be, well, blatantly dishonest about what they were doing: If the cuts would be perceived as long-term savings, he said, then the public would go along with benefit cuts. “We want a solution that preserves and protects Medicare,” Gingrich said at the time, echoing Luntz’s advice. Luntz’s most notorious memo may be the one he sent out in 2003 about the threat of global warming: “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue”–even though no such “lack of scientific certainty” exists. [emphasis mine]

Luntz is getting a bad rap: because he perfected spin for the Republicans. Even Kos has called him “formerly evil but now just a mercenary.” [In the world of the coldhearted coldblooded, a "mercenary" is a values-neutral term. I think Kos got a bad rap way back when, too.]

Anyway, it’s more than a little disingenuous to blame Luntz for the fact that our entire political culture sounds as empy and hollow as it does. For one thing, he used to work for people who were passionate about the ideas he helped them shape. For another, it’s hardly Luntz’s fault that his techniques have been mimicked by Democrats—and everyone else trying to sell ideas.

No wonder Luntz is “circumspect” in response to some of Chotiner’s questions:

And, yet, if you ask Luntz about his role in Washington over the last decade, he has no regrets. “I wouldn’t change anything,” he says. Pushed on whether his snappy and often misleading slogans hurt political debate, he is circumspect, saying only that sloganeering has been going on for 150 years.

So if Luntz is fed up with Washington, perhaps he should work for an outsider. Someone who’s got mojo but no clear message?