Isn’t it insane that our elections are essentially exercises in Madison Avenue marketing? I think watching the latest ads by the McCain camp have really hit home for me how much our political process has descended to the level of snake oil salesman since the rise of the TV age. The ads aren’t even necessarily targeted at undecided voters as much as they are aimed at our political media which now cover politics with the same rabid disregard for substance and truthfulness as gossip columnists, the National Enquirer, and Drudge employ to cover entertainment and sports celebrities. The general ignorance of so many Americans about the true state of the world means that the visual appeal of ads and the images they present operate to influence elections far more than in the past. What used to be a process dominated by verbal and printed appeals is now one far more oriented visceral and irrational appeals to prejudice and raw emotion. It’s why we get campaigns that focus on “staying on message” (Obama’s “hope and change” stump speech is a perfect example) and why the term “photo op” has become not only part of our political lexicon, but an overused, if still relevant, cliche, of which everyone anywhere in ‘Merika knows the definition.
Not to say that the electoral process that occurred prior to the invention of our mass visual media infrastructure was ideal, but can you see a third party like the early 20th century Socialists having a candidate of the quality of Eugene Debs in this day and age? Debs polled 6% of the vote in 1912, and prominent socialists actually won Congressional seats and local elective offices. As did the Progressive Party in which Phillip La Follette won the governorship of Wisconsin and other party members served in Congress during the 1930’s-1940’s. Bernie Sanders is the only remaining example of this now ancient movement currently serving in Congress. In a Parliamentary system, progressive and liberal Democrats like Kucinich, Wexler, McKinney, etc. would have their own separate party and a much greater ability to influence policy in leftist coalition governments than they do now as part of the “big tent,” “mass marketed” and “one size fits all” Democratic Party which since the 1980’s has essentially been a captive of Big Business, despite its protestations to the contrary.
The sad truth is that we really don’t know what kind of President a President Obama would be if he wins. Hillary would have been an extension of the DLC faction upon whose agenda her husband rode to power, and their core of K Street lobbyists, more concerned with gaining and holding political power than effecting truly progressive policies to help people. McCain is also simply one more classic GOP stooge for Big Business, a man who will support the programs and policies that his CEO and lobbyist buddies and advisers like Phil Graham have advocated over the last 40 plus years, the same policies of free trade and deregulation which have destroyed the wealth and influece of the middle class.
Obama? We honestly don’t know. He’s running as a centrist/populist/technocrat/outsider, but will he be more like Bill Clinton (a pseudo Republican), JFK (who governed as a far more conservative and conventional figure than many realize) or FDR (a true political innovator)? I can’t tell you. All we can be certain of is that his campaign staff is media savvy, internet savvy, and doing their best to make him appear non-offensive and likable to white voters, and, lets be honest, a celebrity. As to what programs he would actually pursue in terms of domestic and foreign policies, we can only speculate about. We know what he’s said in certain speeches, and we know what his campaign ads have emphasized, but do we really know what is in his heart? I fear we are being seduced by his glamor and charisma, without really knowing what he will do once he attains the power and position of our current Dunce-in- Chief. As our country and world teeters toward economic collapse and and an ever more dangerous international situation dominated by the issues of climate change, genocide, plagues, famines, droughts, energy dependence on fossil fuels and violent military action rather than diplomacy as the primary method of solving foreign policy dilemmas by nation states, one can only hope that the change he preaches about on the stump has something more behind it than mere rhetoric.
Not really. Those who pay attention to politics or vote regularly have either picked a side or lean to one side or the other pretty regularly. The “undecideds” are, for the most part, the clueless who are easily swayed by Madison Avenue marketing. Think about it this way – could any amount of marketing sway you against your significant other? Of course not, you know them and what they’re about, and you’re emotionally vested in them. What about Gary Condit or Kwame Kilpatrick? You probably don’t know them other than what the media has portrayed them to be, so you’re more likely to receive and accede to the media narrative about them than if the media ran a similar narrative about your significant other.
For the people who view politics in the same light that many, if not most people around here view religion, they vote once every 4 years because they have to, and their decisions about who they vote for are largely based upon the voices that they are accustomed to heeding – Madison Avenue. If you want them to vote for your candidate then you have to speak to them in the language that moves them to action. It was Winston Churchill who said that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter…
Solution?
Turn the shit off.
All of it.
NEWSTRIKE!!!
MEDIASTRIKE!!!
CULTURESTRIKE!!!
Hit ’em where they live.
In the pocketbook.
If enough people could be convinced of the efficacy of this…and “convincing” really means showing them their addiction and then showing them how to kick…the system would change.
But…NOOOOOOO…
Instead we get endless complaints as the complainants continue to obsessively examine the entrails of the media’s slaughtered robotic turkeys for hints about how to proceed.
Duh.
The media Catch 22.
Examine its contents in order to free yourself from its domination.
Ain’t working, Steven.
Not even a little bit.
In fact, as you so rightly observe it is getting worse.
AG
Last night I watched Frank Capra’s film “State of the Union” (1948). Maybe things were different in the late 19th century amd early 20th century, but by 1948 the voters were already nearly irrelevant to the system. I suspect that was true long before that.
Political Parties have undergone major realignments in response to massive social shifts and movements. It’s fashionable on the left to bemoan the lack of a Parliamentary system, and I think I even agree-in principle. We can bemoan it all we want and the reality is we are not going to get one. And even in those countries where there is a Parliamentary system, the major left parties have been coopted into the system to the extent that they are no longer “left” in any meaningful sense of the term, other than not being “right”. They have become centrist parties.
I would also argue that in the Democratic (and Republican) parties implicit coalitions are formed through the primary process. A stronger Kucinich showing, for example, would have moved the dialogue to the left. One of the underappreciated outcomes of the Clinton-McCarthyist campaign was to force the dialogue to the right, thus making it virtually impossible for Obama to even broach any thing meaningful by way of discussion about the values and assumptions of U.S. foreing policy.
Similarly, I think that conflating the Socialist-Labor movement of Debs and Thomas with the Progressive movement is not necessarily useful. They had and shared some similar goals, but in overarching philosophy were pretty different. A lot of Progressive ideas were integrated into the system and continue to function (albeit weakly). One can even argue that the social democratic tendencies in the labor movement were also in various ways integrated into the Democratic Party. The last hurrah (that I can recall) of a labor based Democratic Left was William Winpisinger at the 1980 Democratic Convention saying he would walk out if Kenneddy did not get the nomination. After that, organized labor became politically impotent due primarily to deindustrialization.
Finally, I disagree that we don’t know what we will get from Obama. I think it is pretty clear. We will get a centrist Democratic President who will make efforts to expand the welfare state in some areas (such as healthcare), will preserve the Social Security System, move the tax code in a more progressive direction and adopt a realist, pragmatic view of foreign policy and U.S. military power. In these efforts he will be aided by a solid Democratic majority and hemmed in by a deteriorating fiscal situation and a Republican minority out to bring him down-perhaps with some help from Clinton, the PUMA crowd and the Blue dogs.
One Presidential campaign is not going to bring about a radical change in the nature of U.S. economic and political life, and people who look for this radically and woefully misunderstand the nature of the Presidency and what Presidential campaigns are about. What an Obama Presidency might do is shift the political dialogue back towards the center, thus opening up moderate space for more extensive discourse.
I’ve heard that TV waves leak out into the universe and just keeping floating around. I worry that a powerful alien civilization is going to pick up our televised political ads and obliterate us before we infect the entire cosmos.
As of the July convention Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente are the Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees of the Green Party of the United States.
Must be something in the air: I was just obsessing about the marketing of “our leaders” last night. Thing about marketing and advertising is that their most essential function is to lie. Not in a overt, actionable way most of the time, but to lie by association, omission, misdirection. As an infamous ad pioneer bragged nearly half a century ago, we sell the sizzle, not the steak. We sell the motherhood, not the infant formula.
Today most advertising is pretty much the same whether it’s about Celebrex or Red Bull or birth control pills or a credit card or a slop-food burger or vastly overpriced sneakers. Buy this and you, too, can be energetic, attractive, successful. And people fall for it over and over again no matter how often they find out it ain’t true.
Advertising/marketing is about manipulating the consumer through misdirection. Exactly the opposite process from one that has any chance of installing a great or admirable president or legislator. America’s founders believed in democracy and freedom because it would enable the winnowing and sifting of information by which the truth can be found. Campaigns are designed precisely to avoid that process and are succeeding quite well. As long as the current political marketing continues only a miracle will get us a president/legislators who can pull America off its path to real, third-world-level disaster.
It would be relatively easy to short circuit the deadly cycle of political marketing by making full transparency mandatory and taking the money out of politics. But right now it looks like the small elite that benefits from they system is beating the vast apathetic, misdirected majority by a landslide.
As an idealistic (and poor) designer, I refuse to do any branding other than “here’s this good thing – let me communicate its goodness clearly and convincingly”. I can’t defend marketing & advertising industries at ALL, however I just wanted to point out that it’s not inherently immoral or even amoral. It just happens to be those things about 99% of the time.
In response to Steven’s original post: I feel like a sucker. Those “got hope?” t-shirts on Obama’s site make me want a “Cynics for Obama ’08” shirt. I bought the hype. Now I am let down, but still very desperate for him to win. Such a bummer….