minicivan

At its core, politics is about branding and marketing. Each politician is building a brand (themselves) and marketing it. Every act is to build and market that brand. Every word spoken is to build and market that brand.

Politicians also do a great job at positioning the competition. "those greedy republicans" "those tax and spend democrats" etc. That keeps the focus off of the brand they are building and any missteps of their own marketing/brand or that of the master brand (the party).

A two party system is a battle between Coke and Pepsi. Taste is irrelevant. People have decided what they like and are extremely resistant to change no matter what the actual facts are. What matters is the perception of the product, not the actual realities.

A president is a brand. People didn't elect Obama because he was the perfect leader for the job. He had no leadership experience. He had no record of leadership. People elected Obama because he was a new, likable brand that at all incumbents do, properly positioned himself as the opposite and appealing alternative to an existing brand, which was very weak at the moment (Bush/Republicans).

He didn't need a convincing message to communicated his ability to lead. He didn't need it. He simply needed an appealing message that demonized the current leading brand and that both took advantage of its weak position and also worked to weaken it further. In a master stroke of brilliance, they distilled his message down to two simple words "hope" and "change". No one really knew what it meant. At the end of the day, no one wanted to know. The voting public only knew they wanted to buy into a concept that was the opposite of Bush.

I am conservative in my thinking. But I don't believe either side is better or worse than the other. Both sides are necessary to debate and discussion. I do believe that what Obama has done to get elected was incredibly brilliant - whether by deliberate design or accident. He got the whole world to buy into a vague and ambiguous message about nothing and no matter what he said wrong along the way (i..e closing Guantanamo immediately without addressing the obvious complexity of the issue, meeting any and all world leaders without condition, when thats a diplomatic impossibility and reflected an tremendous amount of naivety with respect to world politics), he was quickly forgiven because people are driven by emotion, not reason and his simple message trumped any argument to the contrary.

After all, who does't want hope and change when they are watching 2 wars and the economy collapse. What that means is about as relevant as "what is heaven specifically/what is hell specifically" to a dying man. Its easy to get him on board with the "heaven" concept and the specifics are irrelevant.

As attention spans decrease and as we live in an ever increasingly over communicated world, being bombarded with endless advertising messages each day in addition to the constant distraction of justin beiber, text messaging, cell phones, facebooks or whatever, this will only get worse. There is not going to be a point where we become less distracted. I suspect that in the future, the political messages will get more and more vague as peoples ability to properly absorb, intellectualize and process that information and all its complexities will diminish and we will all suffer for it as accountability will also diminish.