Ringside Politics With A Punch

This thread discusses the Content article: TALE WAGS DOG?

Wow! What an insightful dissertation on this whole image thing that many of us are struggling to see beyond. What comes to mind here is the scene from the Wizard of Oz movie in which the wizard is ultimately revealed to be just an ordinary male homo sapien hidden behind a curtain while spewing smoke and thunder to the cowed, gullible masses. The Emperor's New Clothes analogy may also be applicable in this instance.

Dr. Horvitz has obviously been studying and absorbing this 21st century branding phenomenon, made possible through trunk lines and feeder lines of a technology most of us have only just begun to grasp. For every age a sage. We had them during the Age of Enlightenment, we had them in the Industrial Age and we certainly have them in our modern Technological Age, though who they are now may only be seen through the eyes of a later generation. The present rarely, if ever, recognizes its prophets because, obviously, the prophecies have yet to metamorphize into reality.

The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines a paradigm as "a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated." If Dr. Horvitz could somehow codify his musings and keen observations of today's instantaneous electronic gratification into the paradigm of a cohesive body of work, he could possibly become this generation's Professor McLuhan.

Dean M. Shapiro

Lots of information about advertising using Barack Obama in a negative light. Write the same article about McCain and the Rove machine. This is a non-issue.

My job as a citizen is to be aware of the hype - thanks, Jon Stewart - and dig a little deeper. Read the newspaper. Read the blogs. Watch CNN and Cspan, This Week, Washington Report, Meet the Press, Face the Nation. Find the platforms, research the history. Ignore or laugh at the non-issues. And keep asking questions.

Bottom line: Does my candidate espouse my moral beliefs or is he or she just an advertisers dream of sound bites. You have advertisers on all sides. And have had throughout our history. No news here.

Discern! Dissect! Decide!

Vote!

T. Jefferson missed the point of the article.(Given his passing on centuries ago, we can forgive him.)"Tale Wags Dog?" is not claiming that Obama is a candidate being packaged (yawn), but to a large degree a package that is being "candidated." That is something very new. If he loses, the hollowness and hilarity to many of this branding will be one of the chief reasons.

Analyzing Obama's actions through the prism of Branding is a fascinating endeavor, and to a very large extent : I'm Sold. I have two observations which dovetail to your argument, and forgive me if both betray my partisanship.

The first is that while Obama might be a babushka doll [a very small man, cloaked by successive shells projecting larger and larger images, each successive image as depthless as the one before], Obama is the fruit of a tree planted long ago. His trajectory might have been preceded in recent history by Mr. George Lackoff's advice to the DNC, 'Its not what you propose, its how you sell it,' but the Democrats have, for quite a while, existed almost entirely in the realm of perception.

If the Democrat's agenda is a tin of soup, the successes they've enjoyed or failures they've endured are to the extent that Republicans have successfully identified the tin's contents, and slapped a Warning Label across the marketed brand name. Consider this failure of Republicans to identify the content: Social Security is an abject failure. As it was conceived, it was a scam to fleece people while they lived: its benefits to be delivered shortly before a person's expected death. As It is executed today, its a budgetary black hole, perpetuated by its Logo: "Security". Allowing people to voluntarily engage in partial privatization might have pulled Social Security up from the nose-dive it currently enjoys... or at least given those without a death wish the opportunity to bail out... But old people (I suppose) are easily scared, and young people (I suppose) are easily fooled, and Democrats succeeded in waging a marketing campaign, making 'private' synonymous with 'risky', despite economic proofs to the contrary. Republicans should have labeled the existing program for what it was before offering an alternative. "SOCIALISM", once identified to an American, is like oil to vinegar: naturally repulsive. Consider the success of Republicans to identify: HIllary 's Socialized Healthcare Plan.... under the inadequate verbal guise of "Universal."

Which leads into my second point: If being a Leader means guiding and being guided by substance, and is what you want, Obama being truthful would say this, "I am a Socialist, and this is why you should be too." If you're waiting for Obama to Lead on the basis of his substance, not dazzle with the brilliance of his packaging, you'll be waiting a long time. You've certainly identified, in more depth and eloquence than I can muster, the conceptual absence of "truth" and "falsehood".... Rather than debate the ideological divide which separates Left from Right, the Democrats package Left Wing Ideology as something else. On Monday it's "Moderate", on Tuesday its "Progressive", and today its "Change."

Consider that it is an objective fact, that taxing for the sake of "fairness" is a principal rooted in Marxism. I need not quote the maxim, "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs." The conspicuous sums Obama has promised to this group or that have been noted. The manor in which Obama intends to get the money is clear. The demons Obama has denounced are known: they're the companies which make you life and mine independent of government.....

He might say what he does, but not what his doing is.

Obama knows this: The truth is a 600 lb. Gorilla for Democrats. If the focus of his campaign was directed at what his propositions actually are, rather than how flashy he looks selling them, the American people would reject him.

I think Aldous Huxley said it best in the beginning of Brave New World: "Community, Identity, Stability." Sell it however you can.

This is something that I think is just the reality of big politics these days, especially as a part of the author's "Generation Text", but I agree that Obama is way more guilty of it than McCain. Perhaps he's more guilty because he's closer in age to the text generation and realizes that this election could be won or lost based on who has the most bells and whistles (and I'm not talking stance on issues here). Much has already been written on the amount of coverage of the two candidates on the internet, for example, their MySpace pages. Is this maybe just the new reality of the Presidential election?

Very interesting article that puts a new twist on the campaign. Keep writing, Dr. Horvitz. Your opinions give us something different to read about the overly-covered but nothing new campaign.