So, Your Humble Blogger has been trying to clarify some of the things I have been feeling about Barack Obama and his campaign. And I think this might help.
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One of the tricks of advertising is that, instead of selling your product, you can get people to want to be the type of person who buys your product. Coke, you see, adds life; the ad company associates Coke drinking with a variety of behaviors, conditions and attitudes, and hopes that people who want to be associated with those attitudes will buy Coke. The problem with this is that it doesn’t particularly work. If you don’t like the taste of Coke, you aren’t going to buy it and drink it just because the ads show beautiful people enjoying it.
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This doesn’t just come from advertisements, and it doesn’t just work positively. I’ve mentioned before that Toyota has trouble convincing people that buying the Prius doesn’t make them into Prius-people, which would entail carrying bulk lentils in a hemp bag. On the other side, buying an SUV doesn’t automatically make you vote Republican, or does it? The kind of person who buys books at an independent bookstore—you know that type of person, right? Is that you? Are you the kind of person that watches The Wire<\/I> or the kind of person that doesn’t know what everybody is talking about? Are you the kind of person that buys recycled paper? Clothes, nightclubs, careers. Residential neighborhoods. Are you the kind of person who lives where you live, who eats what you eat, who lives your lifestyle? Do you want to be?
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In politics, I’ve experienced the negative side of this more often. You know the kind of person who voted for John Kerry. Volvo, latte, blah, blah, blah. Nobody wanted to be like that. Particularly the people who voted for Senator Kerry, of course, but there it is, people who drink Coca-Cola aren’t happy and beautiful athletes. And my idea of a person who voted for Our Only President doesn’t have much to do with any actual voters I know.
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Now, what I think the Barack Obama campaign has done, and done very well, is to create in my mind and I think in a lot of people’s minds a positive idea of the Barack Obama voter. The Barack Obama voter, part of the Barack Obama movement, is young, smart, good-hearted, hopeful, not overly partisan, and (importantly) not racist. Or sexist, either.
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My idea of a John Edwards voter is that he or she is a Democratic leftist, pro-union, angry, maybe a trifle bitter, well-informed, with fairly specific policy desires. Or maybe that’s just me. And my idea of a Hillary Clinton voter is someone older, closer to the Establishment, more cynical, and somewhat inclined to settle.
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Please understand: I am not saying that these ideas are accurate. They are not. They are stories I have absorbed about the election. What I am saying is that those stories about the election do have an effect on how people vote. And they have an effect on more than just how we vote. I think they have an effect on how we live.
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One thing that a great president can do with the bully pulpit (and wouldn’t it be great if some more recent president had come up with some description of the persuasive power of the office, now that bully<\/I> is no longer used in any positive sense at all? In fact, from now on, I’m no longer using bully pulpit<\/I>. From now on, the persuasive power of the presidency will be referred to as the bitchin’ pulpit<\/I>. Oh, wait, er, no, it won’t.) is to call us to our better selves, to give us an idea of the Americans we want to be, and ask us to be those Americans. I think it’s possible that Barack Obama could do that. I think that he could, possibly, if he is elected, change our ideas of what we are, and what politics is, in a way that would have real effects on how we carry out our daily lives.
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Because if he makes us want to be smart, young (at heart), good-hearted, and all that, and we actually make ourselves like that, then, well, that’s an improvement, isn’t it?
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger delves deeper into whatever the hell he's talking about.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10855"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19678,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10855\/revisions\/19678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}