Barack’s “Secret Strategy”

I’ve been watching the Obama campaign since the beginning, and I think I finally understand his strategy that is giving him win after win after win, despite all the things he obviously has going against him.

His secret strategy may also be the simplest strategy imaginable. Just tell the truth. I mean, telling the truth is not something you need a Mark Penn to tell you how to do. You don’t need focus groups to poll to tell you what they want to hear. In fact, you don’t need anything except the intelligence and perception to see what is plain not only to you, but to anyone else who is paying attention.

While telling the truth may not “sound” revolutionary, looking back as far as the Gulf of Tonken resolution, it’s a strategy that hasn’t even been tried.

Instead, Madison avenue “experts” have been used to find out the unconscious emotional fears and desires of the electorate and then pander to them.

That’s what the anti-gay marriage issue was about, it’s what the Wright controversy was about and it’s what the flag pin nonsense is about.

Clinton actually honed the technique when running for his second term, and the Bush victories were both examples of the technique being perfected.

The way it basically works is to divert the public from political issues that make a difference in their lives, to emotional issues that have nothing to do with their lives but tug deeply at hidden fears that each of us carry around inside us.

BBC ran a four part series about how Freud’s nephew came to the US and changed the way Madison Avenue sold their products to the public. Instead of trying to fill real needs of the consumers, needs were created by making everyone feel insecure unless they bought the product. Obviously all personal hygiene products where sold that way, but the technique was extended to just about any product imaginable.

Seen a Calvin Klein add recently? Enough said. The use of Sex to sell products having absolutely nothing to do with sex is now as common as sex itself.

The final episode in the series showed how these Madison avenue psychological techniques were ported over into politics where Bill Clinton established them as the “way to get elected”.

That’s why Hillary can’t get any traction, this election. The fact of the matter is that the real issues facing the country actually OUTWEIGH the psychological fears, needs, and neuroses that the Madison Avenue approach relies on. Barack is the only one out there perceived as telling the truth as he sees it. Hillary’s old triangulation methods simply can’t work in the face of Obama’s truth telling.

Of course, this is not always the case, as the horrendous results of our electoral system have proved over the last 30 years. But it is true this year. Obama seems to understand this while his opponents continue spinning their wheels on issues that are falling worse than flat on a truly frightened electorate.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we might save our democracy from the delegitimization it has suffered from these Madison avenue techniques. This will be the subject of a later blog post.

The reason that this is so important is that even if Barack can break through the barricades of emotional bullshit being erected against him this time, it won’t necessarily insure that we won’t revert to our “bad old ways” as soon as he’s gone. But we MUST find a way to put an end to them somehow, or we can kiss everything we cherish about our system of government goodbye.

Ask yourself if there’s ANYTHING coming out of the Federal Government that you trust as being true because of it’s source?

The scariest thing to me is that that actually is beginning to sound like a rhetorical question.