Wednesday, March 9, 2016

The path to victory

They say the squeakiest wheel gets the oil.

There's an outstanding amount of harsh claims made at this point in the presidential race, and it can grind the gears of anybody who has access to media, be it social or mainstream. The truth of the matter is that without the attention, one of the most important parts of democracy would fall flat to reality TV.

Okay, it does, but I digress.

We want to be hopeful for a better tomorrow. Or do we? Candidates tend to focus on the negative, and rub it in our faces like we just peed the floor.

So what's the deal? Just my opinion, but...

There is no such thing as bad publicity -- but you need publicity

Donald Trump represents Newton's Third Law of Political Candidacy: for every condemning comment said about him, there is an equal amount of votes in his ballot. It doesn't matter if what's said is factual, it doesn't seem to slow him down.

As it's been noted, time and time again by many political pundits, what Trump has been saying this entire time is full of holes. As easy as it would be to let, say, Megyn Kelly or Rachel Maddow explain Trump's lack of a proper stance on anything, it's a lot easier to let comedian John Oliver provide the best researched cracks in Trump's candidacy:

#makedonalddrumpf again aside, it's impressive how much
Oliver and his staff dig up.

As Oliver clearly states at the beginning, he has made it a point to avoid Trump. Comedic reasoning aside, the understanding here is that Trump knows where he stands, and not even on a political level: it's at the forefront of everybody's mind. He's doing what everybody else isn't doing and in the process providing some sordid sense of relevance, in a Kanye West kinda way.

Where true conservatives would stand with Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, and moderates with both left and right leanings feel John Kasich is the best candidate, there's Trump, getting the crowd riled up in a way that would make The Rock question if he was lacking something in his own rhetoric during his WWE days. If you're in his corner, you're talking about how much you agree with him. If you're against him, you loathe him and you've got to let everybody around you know more than that Crossfit WOD you did this morning. If you're getting into arguments, you're only cementing his position.
Pictured: 1/100th of the last three months.
Semi-related: Could somebody teach me
how to place pictures around text
properly? I miss WordPress.

Here's where it gets tricky for other candidates -- one already dominates the attention span of America, so what else can be done? Kasich refuses to be a mudslinger, and up until recently failed to make any waves with Republicans. This hurt him a lot, especially when he said during a town meeting held at Kennesaw State University that he didn't know if it was his destiny to take the office of POTUS.

Then again, his performance at the debates was widely lauded. While Trump, Cruz, and Rubio flung dirt like bored monkeys in a jungle clearing, Kasich opted to remain calm, speak with more confidence, and stick to the issues, and it paid off -- in many viewers' minds, he won, and even jumped over Rubio in a recent poll.
Doing differently with backbone gets you somewhere, huh? Let's face it, when you've had little media previously, you're gonna need all the media you can get at this point, and good on you if you can stick to principle in the process. But it's only gonna happen if you....

Know your audience

 Politicians seek to make connections, by saying whatever their constituents are thinking. The Republicans talk about gun rights, pro-life concerns, and illegal immigration.
Democrats, on the other hand, speak about pro-choice concerns, minority rights, women's rights, and gun control.
Yes, these things make sense to the intended audience, given that one of Trump's major themes is a giant wall stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and that one of Sanders's themes is uplifting minorities, particularly African Americans.

People need to relate to you on some level in order to vote for you. Of course, this means that there are indeed people out there who relate to insane rhetoric. The candidates listed here are wildly popular for being anti-establishment; that is to say, they spout their ideologies without bowing to the lobbyists and special interest groups that have a large hand in politics. It's been shown that many people are beginning to grow tired of the same old song and dance produced in Washington, so that alone is enough to get so many to listen to whatever their message is.

The truth won't necessarily set you free; in fact, it might be the lie that does

 For those of you that glossed over the John Oliver video above, or somehow forgot any of the details in a 20 minute video, here it is once again:

Or maybe you just wanted to spend another 20 minutes
watching an in-depth report that no news network produced.
Not judging.

Yes. Holes. Lots of them. In fact, Trump leads Politifact over all candidates, and by a long stretch, in the categories of mostly false, false, and pants on fire statements, with a whopping 1% of statements actually true. Related to the above statement:

Yuge.
Not just Trump, but most past and present 2016 Republican candidates have championed the efforts of both Bushes and Reagan in deporting illegal immigrants, with the implication being that Republicans bring the hammer down harder than Democrats. The major malfunction here is that the record holder is the current one, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama. But the issue is still important to Republican, so that'll be glossed over quickly.

Then there's the issue of white people not knowing what poverty is. To which Politifact (and others) say this:
Missing from this: "... you don't know what it's like to be living in a ghetto. ..."
But this doesn't matter. It's not like the comments on black journalist Janell Ross's commentary on such statements were met with open ears by Sanders's supporters.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if you lie. There will always be the supporters who will follow you through thick and thin, and stand up for you in the face of wholly incriminating evidence. The trick is to stay the course, because people follow leaders.
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