Obama's excellent marketing campaign

Far too many people are confusing Obama's excellent marketing campaign with a social movement. It is no more a social movement than is the iPhone.

the PC

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He is a politician after all. But I don't think 75,000 show up to watch a demo of an iPhone.

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:rofl:

clean up on aisle 3

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Because we know better.

...is there any difference?

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For all of Hillary's experience, it was a piss poor decision not to market herself as the change candidate. It's a change year, and the pubs are just beginning to realize that they can't pass with this "maverick" illusion of McCain anymore. The Republicans wanted to run against Hillary because they knew they could market McCain as an outsider more, but they know they're fucked with that now.

You might start by defining a social movement, and distinguishing it from marketing. I suspect that argument should occupy a good deal of your time.

Don't just tease us. Cash out your definitional argument!

Obama's great skill in appealing to progressives is that he is not quite the vulgar demagogue, especially on foreign affairs, that McCain and Senator Clinton are. He supports Israeli state terror, an increased US military budget, hostility towards Iran, a more competent imperial course for Iran, opposing Hugo Chavez, etc. but he plays all that down and talks vaguely about how he's willing to negotiate with America's enemies, implies that there is something to grievance against neoliberalism in Latin America, etc. The Council on Hemispheric Affairs has recently published a few articles straining mightily to see a few rays of hope for Obama's Latin American policy, though when you get past obviously vague and opportunistic rhetoric and look at actual concrete proposals, he seems to be proposing a very small scale version of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress.

penalizing corporations for sending jobs overseas and skipping out on taxes sound. And thats just for starters.

But that has little to do with whether it is a social movement.

Define your terms, please.

take an unbeatable brand with a sterling reputation among its loyalists and fuck it all up

and yeah, it's about marketing but it's about a whole hell of a lot more than that. It's about strategy for one thing. One can see clearly that he had a strategy to win against an overwhelming favorite. Clinton's strategy seemed to be about taking it for granted she'd me the nominee.

Is the Obama campaign a social movement? Of course not. Could it presage one? Absolutely.

I'm rather contemptuous of these pretentious little one liner posts that the authors actually think are saying something meaningful.

The Obama Bubble: Why Wall Street Needs a Presidential Brand



by Pam Martens

Despite Barack Obama's claim that his campaign represents a mass "movement" of "average folks," the initial core of his support was largely comprised of rich denizens of Wall Street. Why would the super wealthy want a percieved "black populist" to become the nation's chief executive officer? The "Obama bubble" was nurtured by Wall Street in order to have a friend in the White House when the captains of capital are made to face the legal consequences for deliberately creating current and past economic "bubbles." Wall Street desperately needs a president who will "sweep all the corruption and losses, would-be indictments, perp walks and prosecutions under the rug and get on with an unprecedented taxpayer bailout of Wall Street." Who better to sell this "agenda to the millions of duped mortgage holders and foreclosed homeowners in minority communities across America than our first, beloved, black president of hope and change?"

The Obama Bubble: Why Wall Street Needs a Presidential Brand




The Obama phenomenon has been likened to that of cults, celebrity groupies and Messiah worshipers. But what we're actually witnessing is Obama mania (as in tulip mania), the third and final bubble orchestrated and financed by the wonderful Wall Street folks who brought us the first two: the Nasdaq/tech bubble and a subprime-mortgage-in-every-pot bubble.

To understand why Wall Street desperately needs this final bubble, we need to first review how the first two bubbles were orchestrated and why.





http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=548&Itemid=34">LINK

:)

It's a political movement. There is a distinction. :eyes:

Politics deals with economics and power, not so much positions on issues, as related to various isolated liberal causes, most of them in reaction to the right wing's "cultural war" - all a distraction, and only peripherally related to politics.

The Republicans well know that the battle is about and they relentlessly pursue their goals. They represent the wealthy and powerful few, and destroy everything of public benefit that is in the way. That is politics, that is the battle. Until and unless we fight back, take up the other side - in the real battle, not all these phony ones they draw us into - we are locked in a cultural struggle and are very weak politically.

The Obama campaign is clearly a political movement rather than a social one. One is the domain of the sociologists, the other of political science. As someone who is willing to draw a bright line between politics and the culture war, I am sure you understand why a political scientist such as myself would want to make this distinction (and it also grates a bit, when folks use my beloved academic jargon in a way that not only reveals that they don't understand a particular concept of which they pretend knowledge, but that they don't even know enough to realize how little they know).

I am not using the terms correctly. Sorry.

I am talking about the dramatic turn that the party and liberalism took in the late sixties. The contrast between the Democratic party over the last four decades (approx. 68-08) and the party over the previous four decades (approx. 30-70) is pretty stark. What I see is that there was a shift from focusing on economic issues to focusing on personal beliefs, values, and alternative lifestyles and choices, a shift from a comprehensive program to a grab bag of isolated causes, a shift from collective decisions to an emphasis on personal expression and personal choices.

I was writing about the OP, not anything you said. I see what you're on about, but it's not hopeless--the same wedge issues used against us might be used with some effect to slice off some more libertarian Republicans at some point.

The electorate is on the move. Both parties are deeply riven and there is much unhappiness in the ranks. I think it is a good thing. We are overdue for a re-organization of the parties.

We'll have to see. I think it may, but I've been wrong before.

Get ready to either get on board or keep those comments to yourself, because soon enough we won't have to see this kind of attack on our nominee any more here.

I do think that it is a brilliant sales and marketing plan, modeled after corporate sales and marketing plans, and it has been brilliantly executed. However, I do think that it also represents and embodies a cultural movement, as well. It is not causing any social movement, that is true. It is more of a fan club or a cult of personality. But it does represent a cultural movement. That is why it is throwing politics into disarray, because the cultural movement is at odds with the political movement that the Democratic party once represented.

You're tugging on Superman's cape, pulling the mask off the Lone Ranger, and all the rest of that.

Let the chips fall where they may. If you can remain objective, you will never cease to be amused by the skillful wiles of the Axelrod advertising agency (which he is in the advertising business) and its promotion of the illusion of change.

As for the iPhone, I'm guessing if the price were as cheap as a vote, there would be more iPhones in the hands of Americans than votes for Obama.

:spray:

Unfortunately, you won't find many people here ready to look at the misconceptions produced by our reified minds.

It sucked and got banned from the marketplace.

Their cognitive abilities appear to be equally lacking.

movement. Just because you choose to not be a part of it doesn't make it any less real.