Yes we did

Well, the election is over, and this means good things for our country. The election season saw its ups and downs; there were tears and laughter, boring bits, and all of it is documented online. Youtube allowed everyone to see the candidates’ blunders (over and over and over, and send it to all their friends). Blogging allowed even the little guy to have his opinion heard and considered. Wikipedia and others made the candidates’ platforms more accessible, and let more people get educated. Websites have made fundraising easier. All of these factors have made candidates and all politicians be accountable for everything they say. While this is sometimes a good thing, videos can also be edited or skewed, taking words out of context to make the candidate look like a fraud.

Let’s take a look at some great youtube moments. Here is an example of how modern media ensures candidates don’t change their minds or words without everyone knowing. This is an example showing that anyone can post anything, regardless of its ridiculousness. The internet has definitely changed the playing field for presidential election. Even televisions in every home was a big deal for the elections. People being able to see the candidates made charisma and looks much more important. The internet has taken that to a whole new level. Everything can be watched and analyzed in its real format, or in one created by either a proponent or opponent of the candidate. Now everyone can participate in politics.

Voter education has become especially important with growing technology. While the internet has done wonders for elections, it’s scary to think that someone could post complete lies about a candidate or skew the truth and a million people have access to it. But the nice things about non-partisan internet is that there are a million sides to every story and the truth is out there if you look for it. And more truth than a lot of people might want to know. If you’re curious, you can find out anything about someone! Not in a creepy stalker way, but if you really want to research a candidate, internet has made it so easy to find how they’ve voted on issues in the past, everything about their personal life/criminal records, etc. Everything matters now, and the tiniest screw up a politician makes will surely be a video online with thousands of views within days. I haven’t seen any research, but perhaps there’s a correlation between Bush having the lowest ever approval rating and his being the first presidency where internet is accessible to everyone?

The internet helped us find out about the candidates and form opinions about them, but now that the decision making is over, will the internet keep people involved in politics? Obama’s platform got people organized from the grassroots level and promised to represent the people. I think that the internet will keep Obama accountable in office to uphold his campaign promises. Every decision he makes is going to be seen by the nation, and it’s so easy for people to show how they feel online. If he’s not making people happy, those people will have an easy time telling and influencing their friends’ opinions. Another nice thing about the internet is that people all across the country can get organized for issues they care about. Thanks to new technology, politicians have to care about what people think and act on that if they want to keep popular support.

how interested are you?

It’s almost here! Before we know it, election season will be over and we’ll have a new president! I for one, am ready for it to end. According to fivethirtyeight.com ‘Google Traffic Suggests McCain Not Grabbing Voters’ Attention’. The research suggests that the number of people searching Obama on google has increased drastically since mid October, whereas McCain has stayed level and consistently lower than Obama since the beginning of October. But can the results of Google search engine be any kind of predicter in who will win this election?

I find this interesting, especially in accordance with Drew Westen’s The Political Brain analysis of emotions deciding the outcome of the election. His theory is that while voters vote mostly in accordance with party lines, the personality and charisma of the candidate is increasingly important since World War II. The article on fivethirtyeight shows that the public is no longer interested in John McCain, or does not find him interesting enough to research. Especially since the emergence of television in politics, people tend to vote for the more charismatic candidate, the better looking and more passionate candidate. Judging from McCain and Obama’s appearances on tv, it’s easy to see who has the obvious advantage. Obama, a young captivating delivers messages of hope and inspiration. McCain, on the other hand, with his tongue flick, is not as appealing, especially for young voters.

I am led to wonder if people are more likely to vote for a party or a candidate. It seems clear to me that many people do not care about someone’s politics so much as his personality. When Clinton was the democratic candidate, he won, and obviously, he is full of charisma. In the next election, democrats chose Gore, then Kerry, both of whom are older, not as good looking, and generally thought of not to have as much personality and charisma. Did that many democrats change their minds for those elections and abandon their democratic beliefs? Not likely. Much more probably, the large pool of ‘undecided’ voters, decided on a more accessible candidate. If Obama wins this year’s election, I think that’s further proof that voters choose the candidate they find more charismatic and appealing.

Drew Westen and fivethirtyeight.com both fail to mention how big of a roll vice presidential candidates play in this equation. Although meant as a joke, I saw at least ten Sarah Palins this Halloween. I saw zero Obamas, zero McCains, and zero Bidens. It seems that Palin’s charisma tops Obamas, and she has become a celebrity of sorts since her nomination. This is a strange rivalry to me, because Palin’s charisma beats Obama’s, but his role beats hers. While the vice presidential candidate is important for the election of the president, I don’t think that the vp’s charisma is as important as the president’s during the debates and to the public. While the republicans got a lot of attention immediately after the nomination of Sarah Palin, the decline of interest shows that getting fast really good results is not as smart of an idea as getting steady good results.

Hopefully, the fivethirtyeight data about people’s interest in the candidate’s plays out in the election. There’s two days left, and not a lot the candidates can do to change people’s minds at this point (especially with early voting), so I’ll take it as a good sign that people are more interested in Obama than McCain, so let’s hope they all get out there and vote!

Ethicality

Ethics are generally seen as synonymous with morality, but I find morality to be more black and white than ethics. While people can have a set of morals that are static (ie stealing is wrong), ethics deals more situationally (ie is it right to steal from the rich to give to the needy), but both terms tend to be very subjective. People base their morality and ethicality on religion, their upbringing, zeitgeists, influential figures, and a variety of other sources. It also seems that politicians have a special code of ethics set aside solely for themselves. Many things we see in politics, the general population concedes to and at times are proponents of politicians doing things that if their neighbors did, they would see at the very least as nasty behavior if not downright unethical.

Every so often when I turn on the tv, I see a commercial produced by one candidate that simply say mean things about the other candidates, or skewing something to make the other candidate look insincere/like a liar/ etc etc. If anyone besides politicians gossiped on such a huge scale, everyone would hate them. However, just because of the people at stake, no one sees it as trivially as gossip. It doesn’t end there. Many politicians take it further to lie about the other candidates or intentionally trick people into thinking the candidate is something they’re not. Push-polling is one example of this. “Would you be more or less likely to support Obama if he was involved with Hamas?” was a question recently asked to a largely Jewish population by GOP pollsters. IF he was involved with Hamas, the answer would probably be ‘Less’ for a population larger than the Jewish. This statement is legal only because the IF is thrown in there. Anything can be said in these polls, even the most blatantly fallacious statements as long as the IF is there.

Even though this is legal to an extent, is it really right? I can find no way to justify the ethicality of strategies like push-polling. It leads me in fact to think that the candidate sending out these messages is the untruthful devious one, if not incredibly insecure. But as Allen Raymond says of persuading voters to think two candidates are involved in a scheme when he’s working for a third unnamed candidate, “There really is no right and wrong in politics. There’s legal and illegal…if you want to tell me it’s illegal, well, that’s up to you. But as far as my ethics? My ethics are fully intact.” Is he here then equating ethics, right and wrong, with legal and illegal? Politics is a tough game, but I feel like, out of anyone in the country, politicians are the ones I would want to be more concerned with right and wrong than with legal and illegal. Maybe if politicians actually cared more about ethics and morality, it would be easier for the lower and middle class to get a break on taxes. Yes, you may be able to justify it as ‘legal’ to give your millionaire friends higher tax breaks than the people who need it, but is that really right?

The fact that politicians have the ability to make laws does not help either. It means those with power keep the power and keep themselves safe under that power. The fact is, politicians are not completely devoid of morality. They too have grown up with ideals and the majority claim a religious affiliation (which is a whole other facet I won’t get into), but these people know what’s right and wrong, and manage in many cases to suppress that feeling for personal gain. Politicians truly are a special breed.

Slander in Politics

I have had an exciting political week, what with the VP debate and Seth McFarlane (the creator of Family Guy) came to Miami to promote Obama. I found the debates interesting and thought both candidate held his/her own. Personally, I think that through Palin’s beauty pageant training and debate boot camp, she pulled out a decent debate. But I can’t help but wonder how genuine her knowledge is. How many times did she avoid questions or change them around to something she could answer. We knew Biden would have to be careful and avoid the possibility of looking demeaning toward Palin, which would have given the Republicans a field day. He did this by attacking many of McCain’s policies, but only directly challenged Palin once when he asked her to clarify her war policy. One thing I noticed and don’t quite understand is that Palin says Obama points too many fingers. Seriously? If we look back at past elections, the Republicans constantly slur the Democratic candidates, and the Democrats just take it. Why aren’t the Dems fighting back? One of my current reads, The Political Brain by Drew Westen looks at this phenomena in more detail.

Basically, one conclusion that we can draw is that those who participate in polls don’t want to see slur campaigns. But the Republicans keep doing it, and they keep winning! One definite conclusion I’ve come to regarding activism, is that it’s much easier to rally people around an injustice, ie against a war, rather than something positive, like say, raising money for an orphanage. I think the same goes for political campaigning. When one party slams the other, everyone gets riled up and cares about the flaws of those who are being attacked. When a party says something good about policy, the result is generally more lukewarm because it’s not marketable.

When I think of the type of person I would like to see as president, it’s someone who has good ideas and a well laid out plan; not someone who can only point out the flaws of others to make him/herself look good. I think this must be the general consensus of humanity, based on the polls saying just that, but this doesn’t work out in reality. Emotion decides SO much in politics. People see the attacker as strong, and when Dems don’t defend themselves or counterattack, they’re seen as weak. Maybe people don’t want to think that that’s how their brains work, but the facts are undeniable. Westen points out many campaigns in which the Dems have a policy of not attacking Republicans and decides this needs to stop. There are so many issues on which Democratic candidates can call out Republicans for their hypocrisies, like how Republicans often tout Dems for being unpatriotic when the actual person they’re speaking to has served in the armed forces while he avoided military service. Let’s take a look at this in action.

This website shows us slander and personal attacks in action. Please note, that while it’s “not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee”, it is paid for by the Republican National Committee. I’ve been looking, and simply can’t find any examples of this published by the Democratic National Committee. If you find one, I would love to see it. The comebacks aren’t working. Nothing positive is going to come out of protesting comments; at the very most, comebacks only make the attacked NOT look bad. Although I don’t like to see it, and I wish it didn’t come down to this, there’s a good possibility that the Democrats are going to have to learn to make the first strike if they want to win over the public.

Messaging

The republicans have one great ability; to keep their support base on track and without any other options. They have one simple message that is easy to get out and easy to understand. While of course republican politicians have different stances on issues or at least differing degrees of opinions on an issue. However, during the primaries, only one republican voted against the war, and that was Ron Paul. Only 2 candidates supported a pro-choice stance, Ron Paul and Rudy Giulliani. So, on the whole, I think we can agree that the republicans’ stance is easy to understand and static.

It would make sense, then, for the democrats to be the same way on the opposite end of the spectrum. However, the democrats tend to be more divided on issues or just have too many people with a stance on just one different issue, and the two therefore cannot come together on anything. Not to mention, there is generally at least one candidate on the ballot from a third party who has generally liberal views. While this candidate wants his or her outlooks heard, they don’t take into account that the democratic candidate has the same general outlooks, albeit to a different degree or wants to promote them in a different way, but by putting two candidates on the ballot with the same issues splits the vote.

When polled, the majority of Americans’ political views coincide with those of the democrats, but many continue to vote in solidarity with the republicans. Why does this happen? Is it simply because the republicans have managed to come up with a more concise message? George Lakoff seems to think so. His ‘essential guide for progressives’, Don’t Think of an Elephant proclaims that were the democrats to put together a slogan for their campaigns that was simple and catchy, people would be better able to understand the message and the values and stance of the democrats.

Another problem the democrats have is that the republicans originally developed the frame for arguments, and the democrats just have to play into it. For instance, the republicans are pro-life, democrats had to go pro-choice. On paper, pro-choice looks like it is the antithesis of pro-life, which many can skew as pro-death. Were the frame to change to pro-choice versus no-choice, the democratic stance would look stronger. George Lakoff makes a strong bid for a ten word philosophy that would define the democratic ticket, which goes as follows: strong America, broad prosperity, better future, effective government, and mutual responsibility to combat the republican’s strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government, and family values.

In my opinion, the views of the democrats are the views of the majority of American people. They just need to learn how to articulate their views to the people better. Speaking solely from values, the democrats do have many; they are just hard to see immediately when the democrats have no one word responses. Values get lost in long explanations. The republican views tend to be simpler in consistency, and it is unfortunate that that garners them more support. If all the democrats have to do is make a catchy slogan to attract as much support as the republicans and then some, they will have no problems in the upcoming elections.