what p. diddy did for bush

we can come up with a million reasons why bush won. his win came as a shock to many, esp. as fervent as the opposition was. the democrats really did try every trick in the book, and with good reason: the stakes were high, and they foresaw the impending apocalypse with bush’s reelection. in traveling to several cities, i saw hundreds of kerry and dnc folks on street corners. celebrities told us we’d die if we didn’t vote [for kerry]. documentary filmmakers crafted propaganda films to sway. a record amount was spent on campaigning. although it’s purely anecdotal, i for one didn’t see this push from the conservative side.

how could have all of this money – and not just money, but honest, grassroots effort - fail? reasons abound, including that bush’s expenditures were also significant, and comprable. the polity typically favors the incumbent. it could be as simple (and unbelievable) as: the american people just preferred his policies, esp. his appeal to morality.

i’d say the campaigning method liberals used may have had some small effect as well. earlier i linked to this article:

The weakness of persuasive messages is they tend to give incomplete information…. [W]hen people realize the facts have been tweaked, they may end up distrusting all the information provided.

the general phenomenon may be the same here. celebrity chants and filmmakers spin could have made americans more skeptical of the liberal message, producing the exact opposite affect they desired. although it rallied the core liberal constituency and made some leaning democrat lean more heavily, it also may have turned off many slightly sympathetic to bush or even some who liked neither (such as myself). i doubt if the phenomenon is powerful enough to have to turned the polity off to the democratic message altogether, but instead of convincing the undecided of bush’s evils, it put them on their guard about the liberal messenger.

also, liberal efforts may have convinced them that bush was a bad choice, but they did little to convince us that kerry was a good one. and, when unsure, many people tend to stick with the default, the incumbent.

so, in summary: don’t ask p. diddy to campaign for you, and if you tell us one person is bad, at least give us a viable alternative.

update: speaking of p. diddy, nice shirt! (thanks for the tip, mark!)

Labels: ideology