From "The Selling of the President 1968" by Joe McGinnis
Kevin Phillips, the “ethnic specialist,” was twenty-seven years old, pale and dour…
“Essentially what I do is determine what blocs can be moved in what states by what approach,” he said. “'Group susceptibility' I call it.
"For instance, in Wisconsin you have Germans and you have Scandinavians, and the two groups respond to very different things. First, we determine where the groups are and then we decide how to reach them. What radio station each listens to, and so forth.Sounds like the Obama campaigns except substitute Facebook and Twitter for radio and add special interest, gender, and race to ethnic groups. Yes, I did just compare the Obama campaign to the Nixon campaign.
Interesting. I just read a statement about Obama's election campaign that seems to fit:
ReplyDelete"The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which named Obama ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008,’ easily beating out Apple computers. A good predictor of the elections a few weeks later. The industry’s regular task is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices, thus undermining markets as they are conceptualized in economic theory, but benefiting the masters of the economy. And it recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy in much the same way, creating uninformed voters who make often irrational choices between the factions of the business party that amass sufficient support from concentrated private capital to enter the electoral arena, then to dominate campaign propaganda."
- Noam Chomsky