Obviously I'm not doing justice to anything concerning the election. Still way too busy over here.
But a quick thought, following up on this... in the past few weeks, we've gotten a good look at exactly what's wrong with the whole reptilian thing. As in - the McCain campaign tries to appeal to fear by painting Obama as an exotic. Then something really scary comes along - say, for example, the collapse (or near collapse) of the financial system. Under those circumstances, Obama looks safe (Presidential) and McCain takes the honors as scary, out of control guy. So what does he do? Try to gin up the fear again by leaning on the whole Ayers/terrorist dynamic...
Which proves what, exactly? Well, to me, the lessons are...
- Fear is genuine, not something you can manufacture. Calculated attempts to gin up fear (exotic, Ayers) look tinny next to the real thing (meltdown).
- Fear is dynamic, not something you can control. Things change and your well-planned fear campaign winds up behind the curve. The audience gets a vote - it's not just what you tell them, it's what they tell you.
- Deliberate attempts to appeal to fear bring out everybody's worst - the campaigner and the audience, too.
- THERE ARE NO MAGIC BEANS!
I can't make that last point often enough. There's no single thing that you can do in a communications campaign that automatically spells victory. "The reptilian always wins." No. The reptilian always plays a part. "What we really need is a new message." "What we really need is a brand solution." No. No. Those are nice things to have but the reason people - especially businesspeople - like them is they're shortcuts. "If we had the reptilian/the message/the brand then we wouldn't have to do the work." But you've got to do the work. You've got to go out and meet people and get to know them and work with them in a complex dynamic environment and build relationships and build trust.
In other words, reality always wins.
Nice try, reptile guy.
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