NEW YORK - Make no mistake: "Change" is in the air, the undisputed buzzword of the turbulent 2008 campaign. Lodged squarely at the intersection of politics and marketing, the word has had an almost spellbinding power over voters in election after election.
"We're obsessed with it. We can't let it go, can we?" says Marian Salzman, chief marketing officer for advertising titan J. Walter Thompson. "It's the word of the day, minute and hour, and I don't even know what it means."
Mitt Romney insisted to voters in Iowa that he was the candidate to bring "change to Washington." Banners behind Barack Obama promised "Change We Can Believe In." John Edwards offered "the change we need" to combat corporate greed.
Unfortunately we've heard all this before. During the 2006 mid-term elections many Democratic hopefulas ran "Change" based campaigns and won, though have yet to get much done. I do realize that its tough to get anything done with George Bush at the helm, but I still am skeptical of any candidates who run a purely "change" based campaign just because of how hard it is to get any serious reform passed. Would you vote for the candidate who promised more change, or the candidate with the more realistic agenda? Based on the democrats' past failure to get anything done, would you expect that a candidate promising serious change would actually be able to get anything done if he or she was elected?
3 comments:
Personally, I would vote for the candidate with an the realistic and acceptable agenda. "Change" is too hard to do nowadays because the public opinion of certain issues is constantly changing due to new developments and information. During the elections, the public might be against something, and after elections, it might have a different look on the issue.
However, that doesn't mean that serious change cannot be accomplished by a candidate. It's just that in this time period, change can be supported one day, but then opposed the next due to the rapid speed of news being brought to the public through the radio, television, and the Internet.
I wouldn't vote for the candidate who promises the most change because, as we have seen in the past, many candidates don't follow through with their promises, and 'change' itself is a very vague promise. It depends on what exactly the candidate is promising to change--are they changing the policy on war? the healthcare system? social security? It can be pretty hard now to tell exactly what change a candidate will make if elected into office because 1)some candidates try to keep their platforms broad or vague to appeal to more voters and 2)once elected into office Congress or the Court may impede changes the president tries to make
Simply having "Change" as a platform doesn't really make sense. It all depends on what the candidates are trying to get changed, and how they plan to do it. Hypothetically, what should happen is, if the presidential candidate ran with "Change" as their platform, and other congressmen ran with a similar platform, then they would be working together to bring change to the country and would be able to get things done. It would be a lot harder for any single candidate to get anything done, as opposed to a group of candidates working toward some common goal.
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