Selling The Point

Many years ago the Hamm’s Beer commercials on television featured a cartoon bear that kept getting in trouble. I loved those commercials, as did everyone who saw them. The bear’s misadventures were a frequent topic of conversation around the office water cooler, and we couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen to him next. Hamm’s was extremely popular for sponsoring that bear.

The only problem was that everyone was buying and drinking Schlitz and Budweiser, not Hamm’s. Advertisers were finding out that the commercials that sold products were not the ones that entertained, but the ones that were repeated so many times that they became annoying. Those were the ones that made the brand name stick in peoples’ minds when they were standing at the point of sale.

John McCain knows that. He is getting killed right now by current events. He has nothing on which to sell himself other than his personal valor in combat and in the face of torture, and the fact that he supported the surge. And so he repeats these truisms to the point of annoyance. When asked about removing troops from Iraq he responds by saying that he was right on the surge and Obama was wrong. When asked about Afghanistan he responds by saying that he was right about the surge in Iraq.

It is annoying, it is unresponsive, and it works. It makes people remember his name. People only need one fact to remember a person, and they remember that fact and define that person by that fact.

A friend of mine once told me, when I asked him if his razor broke, that he was growing a beard and that he was going to let it grow out to be a large full beard. I asked him why and he replied that it was so that people would then refer to him as “the guy with the beard” instead of “the big fat guy.”

Do not think that John McCain fails to respond to a question because he didn’t understand the question. John McCain is not stupid. He knows how to campaign. You craft a message, a simplistic talking point that defines you, and you repeat that message until your audience cannot see a picture even remotely relating to that message without your name entering their mind.

Yesterday McCain gave the same answer, “I was right on the surge and Obama was wrong,” to three questions in succession. The answer was responsive to the first question, at least moderately so, but it was totally unresponsive to the next two. McCain knows that to get a point to stick in the listener’s mind he has to annoy them with it. A few people will remember it if he says it once, but virtually everyone will remember it if he says it three times. One news station might play a clip of him saying it if he says it once, but by saying it three times he can be all but certain of getting the statement on television.

John McCain is not interested in answering questions. He is interested in getting his talking points on television and, more importantly, implanted in the memories of the voting public.

Is Obama any different? Well, I think the answer is both yes and no. Obama is a politician, and certainly he knows how to do the “talking point” thing.

But Barack Obama is "tainted" by idealism. There are all of these ideas bouncing around inside his head of things he might actually do if elected. They distract him from the cynicism of merely repeating the talking points and these ideas keep getting into his speeches and into the answers he gives to questions. He knows he is supposed to merely provide talking point number four, but he actually has an answer to the question and he just can’t quite prevent himself from giving it.

It makes it hard for the electorate to get a handle on him, though. They want that talking point. That want that one simple fact that defines him and, so far, he isn’t really providing it the way that McCain is. One thing is for sure, though, if Barack Obama is elected,

Either he is going to change Washington, or it's going to change him.