There's no question that both McCain and Obama are both heavily trained on how to manufacture their image to the public. It's no surprise that we see people from the acting profession naturally gravitating towards politics - both are professional fucking liars.

Seriously. That's what actors do, and the better they are at lying, the more advanced is their career.

Politics is no longer about policies and now purely about image - not their real image, but their best ability to approximate the image that most people find agreeable.

John McCain looks like some psychotic little midget compared to Obama who seems less intense, more friendly, compassionate and controlled. Who cares what the policies are when they are being spouted by some intense, spastic midget? Not Americans, that's for sure. They'll even vote a nigger in for the first time, instead of such blasphemy.

The modern world of mass communication has made images in general, and personal "images" in particular more compelling and more important than any policies they pretend to have.

HItler too saw the power of using images to control public opinion, and exploited it to the fullest. So is it a failing of humanity, that we rely on images more than underlying policies or practices?

It's both a blessing and a curse, at the worst. There is an old saying "I have to see it to believe it" in which all of us can find some measure of familiarity. The converse of this would be that if we didn't actually see it, we may not believe it. And policies are abstract and it's not always clear, even to experts, which policies are best economically, socially or even militarily. What people find they can trust though more than policies, are images. If we can trust the man behind the policies, then it's natural that any policy they promote will come under that same sphere of trust.

We use images of people every single day to decide how much to trust them. If you see someone with shifty expressions or eyes, it's hard to predict their behaviour, and predicting behaviour is the foundation of trust. That's what it means to "trust" someone - it means "I can predict how you will act." And so politicians study the traits that most people respond to as trustworthy, and the "best" politicians portray them. It's in their best interest to do so, even if they are honest politicians promoting policies they believe in.

When will policies become more important to people than images? The jury is still out on that, but it's my opinion that policies will supersede the importance of image only if and when life changes drastically. What constitutes a "drastic" change? Well, not even 9/11 qualifies, nor the current banking fiasco.

When the majority of people have their freedom's tangibly, markedly affected, then policy will once again gain prominence over the image portrayed by a policy holder. Barring such deprivations, image will remain at the forefront because it relies on a basic human inherent ability to determine the trustworthiness of another.

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I think the main reason hitler came to power was because of such drastic changes you reject. At the time the world was in a huge slump, unemployment was high, as was hunger and poverty. You had people demonstrating on the streets and workers striking because of wage cuts. The ruling class were afraid and backed hitler all the way. germany even had two left wing parties much bigger than hitlers at the time but they refused to join forces to protest his rise which left the working class perplexed and hitler smashed them which paved the way for his one party state.

I’m not saying image doesn’t play a big part in politics but policies represent the most important part in elections and they are even more important given that the business environment is in meltdown.

Here in the UK gordon brown has been doing really bad in the polls but they have begun to rise and I think the current financial crisis might actually prove to be his saviour. He has taken the lead on the issue throughout the EU by getting all the other countries to follow britains model for tackling the crisis by throwing billions at bank bail-outs, being prepared to take controlling stakes in the biggest banks up to like 60% and put government representatives on their boards to halt the crisis. Now just yesterday every major EU country has followed his lead with france and germany being the noticeable ones. I’d say Brown has taken a huge risk but people will remember the person who got them out of this mess rather than who got them in the situation in the first place. Besides, the problem was a mixture of the bank industry, speculators, government, regulators and the central bankers themselves which might make his policy for sorting this mess be much sweeter in the future.

It’s similar in the US. I don’t think it’s hard for people to understand that john mccain hasn’t got the intelligence or the modern perspective to lead a country and it’s the current crisis america is in, which is exposing him as such. I mean, the guy suspended his campaign to vote for that bail out which collapsed. Members of his own party voted against him, that means he cant even lead his own party nevermind a country. Actually, the guy is completely out of touch with what’s going down, he’s been supporting pretty much all the bush administrations economic policies then all year claimed the American economy is strong. Sure he walks like a penguin, has weird little hands, skin like a burnt victim, consistently tries to portray his experience and how America is winning the war on terror but at the end of the day, his economic record is really bad and that’s what the election is being fought over.

Obama has a new way of looking at the economy, he doesn’t think like the past. This isn’t an image he has created, it’s genuinely been his matrix from day one. Every half decent economist supports his policies from stiglitz to mcfadden, those guys are nobel winners. So, i reckon if there is ever a time for when policies will supersede the importance of image, that time is now.

Great post. Nice to see some well thought out posts on this site. The quality of the members here is encouraging.



Hitler came to power for a combination of reasons. While I used Hitler's adept exploitation of images (film had only recently become available as a medium), I certainly don't mean to associate his rise to power purely based on this new phenomena of image exploitation - though we can agree that it played a role. Hitler's oratorial mastery (also part of an image) was another huge factor in his success. Also, Hitler perspicaciously played on the bruised national German pride, heavily damaged by the loss of World War I and the severe, possibly unfair reparations guidelines set out in the Treaty of Versailles (1919).

The world was deep into the Great Depression and Germans were ready for change in policy, even drastic change, perhaps moreso than many other powerful nations that were also suffering economically from the Depression. These and other lesser criteria all conspired to propel Hitler AND his policies to the forefront. But let's keep in mind that Hitler kept his most drastic policies (anti-semitic annhilation) secret for much longer than he did his other policies. So it is in times of drastic stress, when loss of freedom's are noticeable to everyone, that policy again becomes imporant and never current policy, but drastic new policy... anyone's policy, so long as it promises change to the same drastic magnitude as the public perception of the crisis is. (Check out an excellent comparative biography written by Alan Bullock called Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives available here and for a short review, look here.



I just don't see the current "crisis" in the same light.

Most Americans are ignorant. Their school system is among the worst of industrialized nations. Very few of them are nearly as informed or intelligent as you are, Mos, and lack the acuity to digest policy. Sometimes we make the mistake of assuming everyone is like ourselves. I do this too. Sadly, they just aren't.

Most Americans can't even grasp the subtlties of policy, nor do they much care, because their level of freedom has been rather adequate and static for decades - and this remains unchanged. We haven't seen the skyrocketing inflation of the Great Depression, nor the massive unemployment levels - yet. This financial crisis is mainly a crisis of the upper and upper middle classes. For the bulk of people, nothing much has changed. We won't see any real drastic change in policy until we feel a drastic loss/change in freedom.

So I reiterate, policy, especially to Americans, at this time is not important. Americans were almost evenly split between Liberal and Republican voting in the past two elections. There is no clear "policy" winner. What makes the difference in who actually gets elected, nowadays, is image.



Agreed.



But still near half the electorate will vote for him.



Lmfao!! Omg 'skin like a burn victim' hahaha!!



Obama is just more of the same. His aptitude for image exploitation is not paralleled in McCain. His paid television infomercials during primetime and his foray into electronic media with a strong internet presence, attest to his pre-occupation with image. His policies read like a wish list.

Nothing I've heard from his camp isn't something I've heard numerous times from Liberal policy makers for decades. Is he the lesser of two evils, economically? Absolutely. The real root of this current financial crisis though isn't being addressed in the same way it wasn't addressed by government after the stockmarket crash in 1929.

Here is a new post which serves as a reminder of the climate that brings forth economic depression.

But overall, its his image, not his policy that will win him this election. If it were about policy, Ron Paul would be the next president. Lol.

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Lol, well i have a new avatar straight from the mans stuff folder on the heresy forum.

Anyway, when you talk about image winning elections for candidates, I presume you’re referring to factors such as personal appearance, the candidates style, his religion and culture, the amount of media exposure he commands and how the public perceive the candidate. One simple example in the American case might be mccain as an old experienced leader, with military credentials to obamas youth yet experience along with his charisma. I ask this because you also mentioned how candidates exaggerate claims because the public aren’t well informed which is true but to me it's more like a campaign of manipulation rather than coming under the image umbrella, no?

I actually don’t think image was the most important factor in the past two elections either. Bush won his second term with the whole war on terror policy. 9/11 was still fresh in peoples minds, america were – still are- in Iraq. People were still in the mindset of it being the right thing to do and that they were winning. Most importantly he won the battlegrounds and got a bigger turnout in the traditional conservative states by imposing old skool policies on changing views to sexuality and religion. Whereas Kerry and co weren’t as good at managing their traditional seats and kerry pretty much stood for nothing. People felt his proposals on education, health care and jobs had no clarity and he was running too far to the left, which I remember looked bad in the non-peaceful global environment.

I agree, people will vote without even studying the candidates and their policies. There will be some people who will vote for Obama because they wanna see a black president in their lifetime or because everyone in their family has voted democrat or republican for as long as they can remember. Like you say, a lot of people will vote without being all that well informed whether it’s for those reasons above or because politics is too complex for them and/or the reading is viewed more as a cost than a gain.

The thing is though, you’ve got the ISR and the ANES data in america monitoring voter behaviour and they are predicting there will be strong policy orientations among voters this year. Surveys always say voters are motivated by national conditions, and turnouts are consistent with this assumption. If you were to look at turnouts for the bush elections between previous years I bet they are extremely high due to the 9/11 and the Iraq War. I bet they will be just as high this year when the full ramifications of the financial crisis are felt. I also think the lower-middle classes are feeling the heat right now, sure they are a little preoccupied with being angry at the greedy investment bankers, their lifestyle and the massive bail outs, once again their money going to the rich but even now, many people have investments in the stock market regardless of socioeconomic classes. There is higher interest rates and reduced availability on non secure loans which a lot of lower class people rely on to juggle different debts. Mortgages, credit cards and overdrafts have all went up and people with pensions will find their money a lot less than it was 6 months ago.

Anyway, all this is pretty subjective I guess. Maybe there could be other questions spawned from this, like, does america represent the country where voters assign more importance on image than policy when voting in comparison to other nations? Or just simply, how dumb are American voters? ha

However, the "policies" themselves were used as images, too. After 9/11, Bush came out looking like the tough president, one who would fight back, while Kerry seemed like.. well, a pussy. Besides, our country has a knack for using crises to forward free market "reforms" on many countries. From Argentina, Chile, the Asian countries, to Iraq, quite a few actually. It's interesting that you mention crises in today's politics, because they are used and exploited to get people to accept policies that they otherwise would not accept. A look at history shows this, too, with Hitler as well.

Even in Canada, Knot... I believe a few years back some conservative think thanks and corporations in Canada were putting pressure on companies in Wallstreet to basically say that Canada's credit was going to go under. They also reported this in the news, as well, to stir up public fear and blamed the looming credit wall on "overspending." They were able to cut back on some health care and educational programs. After the public found out that this companies were doing this, even though various companies were saying that Canada's credit was A++, it was too late, the changes were already made.

It makes me look at the whole financial crisis in another light. More than likely, the current leaders will try to push even more unpopular policies on the public. I think what will happen to our country will be what our free market ideas have done to others. I've heard people say that what we currently have is a kind of "mutant" capitalism; they long for a return to "normal" capatalism (new deal, anyone?) However, free market laissez faire capitalism is capitalism in it's truest form. It's capitalism stripped bear of it's "socialist" compromises.

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"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." - Isaac Asimov