Fasten your seatbelts, boys and girls, we are about to embark on the most divisive, assaultive and malicious political campaign in American history. It will also be the most expensive.
Whatever your political affiliation, whatever one of hundreds of passionate causes you embrace, this election season will be both virtual and geographic ground zero for making one’s voice heard. The objective as always will be to make the message attract as much media and Internet attention as possible.
When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, a segment of the American public called then President George W. Bush a liar. His administration countered that most intelligence agencies of our principal allies believed, too, that Saddam Hussein had such weapons.
I do not believe that President Bush was lying. But I do believe that some cunning character in the intelligence chain had contrived the falsehood in such a way that it gained credence throughout the world, aided and abetted by Saddam who must have been enjoying the charade until it blew up in his face.
Read more: We Have All Been Googleized
I’m confused.
I listen carefully to what our leaders feed the media. I watch them on television. I read their words on numerous Internet sites. Because I was once in the public relations business I do understand parsing, spin, slant, timing, and story placement.
In fact, I orchestrated it on more than one occasion. It was my job and I understand the mechanics of information manipulation. Indeed, the march of technology has made it even more possible to manipulate masses of people, especially the discouraged young, to rock concert frenzies and protestations. Unfortunately it is a doubled-edged sword.
Read more: A Rant From the Confused
In Ron Chernow’s magnificent book about George Washington, the greatest President of all, he points out, almost as a throwaway line that three of our most important founding fathers, Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin never talked too much. But when they did, they got right to the point and did not dilly-dally with much ornamental and wasteful rhetoric.
Of all the recent Presidents in my memory, President Obama has talked and talked and talked. His well-crafted and seemingly endless string of speeches delivered with much panache, well honed enunciation and expert use of teleprompters is a good example of overkill and repetition.
Read more: Some Advice for the President
Like most information junkies, arm chair philosophers, exhibitionist pundits, public scolds and dispensers of alleged wisdom and amateur behavioral analysts, I can now conjure that I have received an epiphany.
I know why most of us are angry, frustrated and disheartened by what is going on in our increasingly dysfunctional political landscape. Indeed, it is not only a domestic crisis but a global one.
Read more: Who Believes What?
Once you filter out the hyperbolic and toxic comments of what passes for political discourse these days, you come up with the only thing that really matters in the recent health care debate…the truth.
Read more: Health Care and the Unhealthy Truth
If I were a PR guy for the jihadists, hell bent on humiliating and eventually destroying the Great Satan, I would be jumping for joy at the events of the past year.
On Christmas Day, the most important of all Christian religious holidays, an alleged jihadist suicide bomber rattled our security cage without even killing a single American. He didn’t have to, and who knows if that was his real intention. He got through our vaunted security apparatus revealing how vulnerable and inefficient we are, illustrating to his vast pool of wannabe jihadists that we can, indeed, be defeated. Is that a great recruitment tool or what?
Read more: Some PR Advice
