I guess it had to happen: prefabricated, easily personalized digital ads. And it’s happened for political as well as commercial ads. Check out this video from SlateV.
June 17, 2008
Why an Obama Landslide?
Why a landslide for Obama? That can be a long conversation, and I write short posts. So I point, first, to Frank Rich’s column in last Sunday’s NY Times. He provides a good and readable analysis for the forthcoming tsunami (switching to an oceanic metaphor). Rich also notes the mainstream media will not cover this interpretation of the election: It’s bad for business. A close race sells more advertising than a blowout. Click here for Rich’s article.
For my second illustration, I offer the video below which as of this writing has 2,353,851 views on youTube. If John Kerry was a “flip flopper” in the last election, worlds fail me in an attempt to characterize John McCain based on the evidence below. youTube + demographics = electoral nightmare for Arizona’s senior senator. Even if the major media continue their infatuation with the “maverick,” the web will show the world a different McCain.
June 9, 2008
The Counting is Over and the Shouting Has Quieted
Obama has achieved the nomination, “presumptively” of course. And Clinton, after her evening of “deranged narcissism,”* saw the handwriting all over the wall of the Media and Internet saying that her historic run had ended. What a bummer to go from candidate assured of being anointed to also ran…and also ran to such an upstart.
So it can be in life and in history. I remember a college professor of mine saying that the future can never be known because we cannot account in advance for “the genius, the prophet, the random event.”**
So while I do not claim to know the future (how could I if I can still remember that quote?), I will predict an Obama victory in November. Obama and David Axelrod, his head strategist, have laid out the emotionally compelling narratives for the campaign. Obama is telling some of them them now, as I write, in North Carolina, putting it into play for a Democrat for the first time in (almost) living memory.
Not only will Obama win, but he will win in an electoral landslide. The shouting-headed punditry will be as one shouting, “not since Ronald Reagan in 1980…”
These are changing times.
Fundamental text for understanding why people vote (and one reason why I am willing to predict a landslide): The Political Brain by Drew Weston. Click here to check it out at Amazon.
* Jeffrey Toobin. See the video below. Worth it for the triple take that David Gergen makes when the phrase is uttered. Click here for Toobin’s Wikipedia entry.
** Robert Nisbet. Click here for his Wikipedia entry.
May 23, 2008
“The Fall of American Conservatism”
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer as quoted n the article that gave this post its title. The article is long, informative, and most readable. Written by George Packer, it can be found in the New Yorker at the link below.
The fate Republican Party of 2008 looks to be the fate of the Democratic Party of 1968. Click here for the article, “The Fall of American Conservatism.”
January 21, 2008
Watching the Political Discourse Change
More than 20 years ago Ronald Reagan shifted the dominant political discourse in America. Today it looks like it may be Obama’s time. His campaign for president continues on a visionary path. Odd it is to see a communitarian vision poised against the backdrop of the every capitalist for himself theater of the past 20 plus years.
The latest signpost on the what may turn out to be the history road is Obama’s oration At Martin Luther King, Jr.’s old church yesterday marking the anniversary of King’s assassination. The video is below.
As for my political predictions: Wrong on New Hampshire, silent on Nevada, foreseeing an Obama victory in South Carolina. Also predicting that Bill Clinton won’t be able to keep himself (not that I know that he wants to) from another smear (lie) a day or so before the South Carolina vote. It’s the only politics he’s known.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/Kf0x_TpDris" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
It’s Still All Over but the Shouting, er, I Mean, Counting
The shouting in and about the Obama and Clinton campaigns continues, but the basic context remains and the quest for the Democratic presidential nomination unfolds within it. All the tactical decisions, the evaluations of those decisions, all the campaign ads, all the surrogates’s advocacy, etc., are subordinate to the larger question of whether a cultural and political shift is occurring – one that as some commentators have noted is at least as profound as the one that gave Ronald Reagan his greatest role.
I continue to espouse that this is the case. The shift, as I noted in an earlier post, is from the everyman and everywoman for his/herself ethos of the greed is good halcyon days of the 80′s to Obama’s gyral return to the cultural ground of “I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.”
Why do I think this remains the case? Because Hillary’s campaign has indeed thrown the kitchen sink at her opponent, hit him with the garbage disposal, and it has made no difference. Take the Pennsylvania primary, for example. With the flap about Rev. Wright taking stage center in the attack of the sink, the polls (on average and courtesy of RealClearPolitics.com) showed Obama moving from 6 points down to 7. By the time of the election, he was back at 6 points down. He lost by 10 (after having been 20 points down a month before). In the elections thus far where he has started far behind, e.g., Ohio, he has closed the gap and then lost by an additional 4 percent as the late deciders voted for Hillary.
So the net effect of hurling the sink was zero. The rest of the campaign will, I do believe, play out as it has been with Obama getting the nomination on the basis of more superdelegates breaking for what they see as the future rather than the past. The times they are, again, a-changin’.
(As I write this, Rev. Wright is again making news as he defends his career. I predict that the inevitable attacks on Obama will have no lasting impact on his campaign. Time, of course, gets the last word.)
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