Hillary Plays the Race Card

A relative of ours is in the advertising business. That doesn’t give me much insight, as he doesn’t talk out of school much. But he has made a couple of revealing comments.

For one, he says that advertising people are in the business of changing our behavior. That may not sound like startling news – perhaps I could put it another way. “We’re subverting you.”

For another, he has spoken of the process by which an ad campaign is put together. First it goes to an inner circle – I assume that this is where they house their polling data and psychological consultants. Behavioral psychology is the mother’s milk of the ad game. People in the inner circle are the big-picture guys, the drivers. They identify critical factors in the ad campaign from which all else follows: The sublime message, and the target audience.

My favorite example is Bud Light Commercials. The ads usually contain some juvenile joke, like a refrigerator that opens on two walls. The message is more sublime than one would think, as the target audience is early teens – 13 and 14-year olds. It’s not that Anheuser Bush wants them to drink – they are doing something called “branding”. When these kids hit drinking age, they want them to be preselected for Bud Light.

Tens of thousands of people do advertising, and some are better at it than others. But successful advertising is not that which is funny or sexy – that helps. But the object is to change our behavior. Any means will do. It’s is an interesting profession – it has to deal with us on our two levels – our public selves, and our real selves. To change our behaviors, it has to talk to the real self.

American politics is nothing more than the ad business applied to a different product.

I added a little snippet to a previous post regarding Geraldine Ferraro’s nasty comments about Barack Obama, where she says that he is merely fortunate to be where he is because he is black. She’s mean and nasty, and after a respectable period of time, she quit the campaign, but is still swinging hard.

The question is, is she just a loose cannon, or is this calculated? The email I received asserted that Ferraro’s behavior was calculated, and that it contained a sublime message: blacks have it easy. The target audience is blue collar voters in Pennsylvania. Hillary is appealing to their base instincts, their real selves.

We’re all less than we present in public – we’re all a little racist, maybe a lot. Advertisers know this about us. Political campaigns are 75% sublime message, and only 25% concrete. Geraldine was on a sublime mission.

Race is a factor in the Democratic campaign. Someone is going to play the race card. But it can’t be done openly – that would backfire. It has to be done on a sublime level. The candidate that does it will be the most base and ruthless and ambitious one.

Hillary hasn’t wasted any time. She’s playing the race card. Why am I not surprised?