![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The uphill struggle
Sep. 4th, 2008 10:18 amWatching American politics is a frustrating experience because it's like a continuous uphill battle against stupidity. This is the first election campaign I've been in America for, and in Britain I got the feeling that they didn't really matter much because most of the candidates for the next Prime Minister amounted to the same thing anyway, but here you get more of a feeling that the decision will actually affect the world. Ideally, calling for a change in attitude and being nice to people should be a fairly easy decision over continuing to destroy parts of the Middle East and digging up most of Alaska looking for oil, but this side continually seems to be the underdog against a populace who've grown quite happy with not really caring over the last few years.
Part of it is their sheer gullibility. If you live in a land-locked state with near total ignorance of the outside world, I think that you have more of a tendency to believe whatever you're told about the frightening and radical liberals - there was an email going round a while ago that contained a list of unfortunate quotations from Obama from the past, most of which were put into clever context to make him sound slightly like a genocidal maniac. Of course, just doing a slight amount of research into what he actually said dispels these impressions immediately, but it's the target audience not thinking this way (or at all, really) that might make things like this effective. And I like to think that it wouldn't work in the same way the other way round, because the people on the left are more inclined to... pick these things apart. At least, I should hope so.
Similarly, the recently released video for "Why are you a Republican in 2008?" (which is a pretty good question, honestly) focuses on rather painfully generic things that you would expect from either party and hopes that you just won't notice, but the way that it has the gall to describe itself as the "party of change" is particularly unbelievable. The criticism of the Democrats seems to concentrate on their raised taxes, and I've said before that the amount of tax that comes off what I'm paid is fairly appalling, but I can see this as rather a necessary step given the giant deficit they're now in thanks to their last stupid president. Where's their solution to that?
My memory of the last election was that the republicans very nearly didn't get in again, and it all came down to one last crucial state that hung on for ages. If that's true, then, well, it's still somewhat worrying given their past performance up until 2004, but it also means that I'm hoping that having slightly better charisma and visibility could push the balance over the edge and people will want somebody who seems to have good ideas about running the world properly this time. If not, Britain will clearly have to invade and stop all this nonsense.
Impressively, the news channel that Whitney was watching yesterday managed to make Bush look even less aware than usual, because it replayed his speech to the republican convention but managed to leave out the sound channel the applause was coming from, so it appeared that he was just making frequent massive pauses that made it look like he'd forgotten what he was saying. But most of the reason I just can't watch him without laughing any more is because of Jon Culshaw's frequent impressions of him - I keep on wanting him to use words that he doesn't really say like "thankerificate" and "obliterize". (Note that if you're from America, his Bush voice may sound about as much like the man himself as I sound like, say, Dangermouse if you're Australian).
Part of it is their sheer gullibility. If you live in a land-locked state with near total ignorance of the outside world, I think that you have more of a tendency to believe whatever you're told about the frightening and radical liberals - there was an email going round a while ago that contained a list of unfortunate quotations from Obama from the past, most of which were put into clever context to make him sound slightly like a genocidal maniac. Of course, just doing a slight amount of research into what he actually said dispels these impressions immediately, but it's the target audience not thinking this way (or at all, really) that might make things like this effective. And I like to think that it wouldn't work in the same way the other way round, because the people on the left are more inclined to... pick these things apart. At least, I should hope so.
Similarly, the recently released video for "Why are you a Republican in 2008?" (which is a pretty good question, honestly) focuses on rather painfully generic things that you would expect from either party and hopes that you just won't notice, but the way that it has the gall to describe itself as the "party of change" is particularly unbelievable. The criticism of the Democrats seems to concentrate on their raised taxes, and I've said before that the amount of tax that comes off what I'm paid is fairly appalling, but I can see this as rather a necessary step given the giant deficit they're now in thanks to their last stupid president. Where's their solution to that?
My memory of the last election was that the republicans very nearly didn't get in again, and it all came down to one last crucial state that hung on for ages. If that's true, then, well, it's still somewhat worrying given their past performance up until 2004, but it also means that I'm hoping that having slightly better charisma and visibility could push the balance over the edge and people will want somebody who seems to have good ideas about running the world properly this time. If not, Britain will clearly have to invade and stop all this nonsense.
Impressively, the news channel that Whitney was watching yesterday managed to make Bush look even less aware than usual, because it replayed his speech to the republican convention but managed to leave out the sound channel the applause was coming from, so it appeared that he was just making frequent massive pauses that made it look like he'd forgotten what he was saying. But most of the reason I just can't watch him without laughing any more is because of Jon Culshaw's frequent impressions of him - I keep on wanting him to use words that he doesn't really say like "thankerificate" and "obliterize". (Note that if you're from America, his Bush voice may sound about as much like the man himself as I sound like, say, Dangermouse if you're Australian).
