Accentuate The Positive
By Paul Grimsley
Seems Like A Bare Necessity
Reading all the negative press about everything can provoke much navel gazing and drifting into a morass of depressing directionlessness. Who offers any answers or any hope of digging yourself out? The negativity is used to market and push one doom over another.
If you are a Democrat then all your doom-mongering centers around The Donald. If you are Republican your doom-mongering focuses on Liberals and the erosion of traditional values. Neither approach has much value in providing a way forward that doesn’t alienate half the country, nor is it designed to … the whole game seems to be to get the two camps constantly battling each other, instead of focusing on the real problems.
Marketing and branding are big in politics — even if it wasn’t quite so blatant before, it is a constant feature of the landscape currently. But think about the Shepard Fairey images of Obama, the campaign slogans, courting journalists, and seeking out photo opportunities. The things that politicians do that actually seek to put across a positive image of the candidate — I think these are the things that work better. It is initially always the rallying cry for something, rather than the push back against something disagreed with that gets people moving. As they say, you catch more flies with honey.
Donald Trump got people with Make America Great Again before he started attacking Clinton, and everyone else. He had a stronger message and more of a brand than Clinton, and he could be observed to be in action throughout his campaign. Clinton was fairly low profile, and seemed to be operating on the assumption that no one was going to vote for this crass non-professional politician; totally failing to see that for those who were gravitating towards him as a candidate appreciated these very facts about him. If he had entirely focused on running a positive campaign he could have been different in another sense as well, but alas, that was not to be.
People act like our Social Media President came out of nowhere though, and it isn’t true: he represents the current iteration of an evolution that has been taking place for a long time. He is not as polished as some of his predecessors who were also considered somewhat media savvy, and this lack of polish is something celebrated among his followers. His detractors can point to many areas where he is having problems, but if he could curtail his need to attack everyone he might survey better with them. He isn’t really interested in that though -sees no need to pander to the people who don’t support him … in many ways he doesn’t play the politician, and this is where detractors attack him and supporters love the break with traditional slickness.
JFK was considered by some to be the first of a breed of media ready Presidents and people loved him. In the UK Tony Blair ushered in the age of spin and people were not so keen. The thing is, we should be talking about features and benefits, not wasting our time detracting from the opposition. The current administration often bemoans the negative press they receive, but they created a very antagonistic and combative environment from the start (and this is partly what their base loves about them). Would people feel quite so bad about things if the PR was handled better though?
Promoting things the parties agree on might shift the focus off this unproductive bipartisanship — the system is designed to prevent gross errors of judgement from getting through, but the bipartisan bickering seems designed to entirely gridlock the process. Starting from the fact that they are all public servants, and must at some level want to help people, surely we could start to inch forward into what is, regardless of differing viewpoints, our shared future.
I understand that sometimes not taking a hard line against the opposition can be seen as weakness, and politicians fear this is going to lose them their seat, but if there is no middle ground we are really going to have some problems — more than we have now. It isn’t easy, but it is necessary. there have to be points of reality.
It’s generally not that easy to hate someone, so finding something to like, and finding something positive to say, should, even at a stretch, be easier. Try selling a product where you only smack talk about the competition — people are going to start looking at you funny. When one person consistently acts badly and the other doesn’t, it’s hard for the person to keep fighting against them. Wouldn't it be great if there was less arguing and the future arrived quicker?
