Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
.WORK TITLE: The Marketing Revolution in Politics
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1953
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://business.depaul.edu/faculty/faculty-a-z/Pages/bruce-newman.aspx * https://www.amazon.com/Bruce-I.-Newman/e/B001H6QEBA * http://www.marketingclassicspress.com/authors/newman_bi/ *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1953.
EDUCATION:University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, B.S, 1975, M.B.A., 1978, Ph.D., 1981.
ADDRESS
CAREER
DePaul University, Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, Chicago, IL, professor of marketing, Wicklander Fellow in business ethics. Newman & Associates LLC (consulting firm), principal; advisor to White House, William Jefferson Clinton administration, 1995-96.
AWARDS:Ehrenring, Austrian Advertising Research Association, Vienna, Austria, 1993.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, and CNN.com. Founding editor-in-chief, Journal of Political Marketing.
SIDELIGHTS
DePaul University professor of marketing Bruce I. Newman is one of the foremost “experts in the world on the subject of political marketing,” wrote the contributor of a short biographical sketch to the Marketing Classics Press Web site. “He combines an expertise in marketing and politics with his knowledge of consumer psychology and statistical applications.” On that subject alone he has written The Marketing of the President: Political Marketing as Campaign Strategy, The Mass Marketing of Politics: Democracy in an Age of Manufactured Images, and The Marketing Revolution in Politics: What Recent U.S. Presidential Campaigns Can Teach Us about Effective Marketing, cowritten A Theory of Political Choice Behavior, A Cross-cultural Theory of Voter Behavior, Political Marketing: Theoretical and Strategic Foundations, and Political Marketing: Strategic Campaign Culture, edited the Handbook of Political Marketing, and coedited Political Marketing: Readings and Annotated Bibliography, Communication of Politics: Cross-cultural Theory Building in the Practice of Public Relations and Political Marketing, Winning Elections with Political Marketing, and Political Marketing in Retrospective and Prospective.
In his works Newman sees correlations between the ways candidates are presented to the public and the ways products are presented to customers. “Newman,” declared David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “thinks a lot about how political salesmanship has evolved. `I like to go back to the 1960 book by Theodore White, called The Making of the President, the 1968 book by Joe McGinniss, called The Selling of the President, and the book that I wrote in 1994, called The Marketing of the President,’ he says. ‘This is a very typical, standard evolution that we find on the commercial side, where a company goes from a production orientation … to a selling orientation … to a marketing orientation, where we are today. You can follow that same evolution in politics.'” The evidence also works the other way: The Marketing Revolution in Politics, for instance, suggests that modern corporations can learn about appealing to a broader base of potential customers by looking at the ways candidates in recent elections did the same thing.
Newman’s work also points other scholars of elections and politics toward possible understandings of the ways voters choose—consciously or unconsciously—to support one candidate over another. Key among these is an understanding of what is meant by “the issues”—candidates are judged according to their stance on certain key questions. Preparing a candidate through political marketing can accomplish things like making Barack Obama the Democratic candidate for president over rival Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008. “Commodity branding,” wrote Michael Lempert in an article appearing in Anthropological Quarterly, “has increasingly informed electoral politics, especially through the extension of marketing principles and methods into political campaigning … forming what has come to be called `political marketing’…. Akin to taboo objects, The Issues present certain hazards for those who stand before them–though only specific categories of social actor (candidates), as with in-law avoidance, and only under particular conditions. And, again as with in-law avoidance, the hazards candidates face are very much about addressivity, about who might hear and how these actual or potential (over)hearers will (dis)align with candidates by virtue of [their] … behavior.” Evidence suggests, say some of Newman’s other books, that these lessons can also be applied to elections in other countries with other political cultures. The editors of Winning Elections with Political Marketing, said David M. Rankin, reviewing the volume for Presidential Studies Quarterly, “assemble an impressive transatlantic group of experts who concur that what voters, citizens, or, in the language of marketing, consumers of politics think and desire shape campaigns and governance in the United States and United Kingdom. According to the editors, a `transatlantic transfer of expertise and theory” brought the permanent campaign across the Atlantic.” “Eighteen papers,” declared a Reference & Research Book News reviewer, writing about Political Marketing: Strategic Campaign Culture, “… place the concept of culture at the heart of their analyses of political marketing.” “Winning Elections with Political Marketing,” Rankin concluded, “is valuable for adding to our understanding of the extensive reach of political marketing, where consultants and advisors crisscross the Atlantic and, increasingly, the globe. The authors effectively demonstrate how campaigns and politicians continue to develop new ways to court voters, not ignore them. As the volume reveals, we are, from a marketing perspective, all consumers.”
Critics saw much of value in Newman’s analyses. “The old ways of campaigning are gone,” said the contributor of a review of The Marketing Revolution in Politics to the CDMG Inc. Web site. “The new methods are changing and growing every day.” “The author,” explained S.E. Frantzich in Choice, “argues throughout his book that potential voters and customers can be managed in the same way.” “His interesting examples and insights,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer, writing about The Marketing Revolution in Politics, “will increase readers’ understanding of future political campaigns.” “Simply stated,” wrote Micah Andrew in MBR Bookwatch, “`The Marketing Revolution in Politics’ should be considered a mustread for political campaign managers, students of marketing and political marketing, and … general readers.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Anthropological Quarterly, winter, 2011, Michael Lempert, “Avoiding `the Issues’ as Addressivity in US Electoral Politics,” p. 187.
Choice, June, 2016, S.E. Frantzich, review of The Marketing Revolution in Politics: What Recent U.S. Presidential Campaigns Can Teach Us about Effective Marketing, p. 1510.
Chronicle of Higher Education, January 24, 2003, David Glenn, “Political Marketing Is Focus of New Journal; Authors Say Party Identification Is Key to Voting.”
MBR Bookwatch, March, 2016, Micah Andrew, review of The Marketing Revolution in Politics.
Presidential Studies Quarterly, December, 2007, David M. Rankin, review of Winning Elections with Political Marketing, p. 775.
Publishers Weekly, May 16, 2016, review of The Marketing Revolution in Politics.
Reference & Research Book News, October, 2013, review of Political Marketing; Strategic Campaign Culture.
ONLINE
CDMG Inc., https://cdmginc.com/ (March 8, 2016), review of The Marketing Revolution in Politics.
DePaul University Web site, https://business.depaul.edu/ (May 12, 2017), author profile.
Marketing Classics Press, http://www.marketingclassicspress.com/ (May 12, 2017), author profile.*
Dr. Bruce I. Newman is Professor of Marketing at the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University. He is also Journal of Political Marketing Editor and Williams Evans Visiting Fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Professor Newman was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Government at the University of California Berkeley (2001-2002) and in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University (2002-2003).
Dr. Newman is the founding Editor in Chief of the Journal of Political Marketing, published by The Haworth Press in New York (www.haworthpressinc.com). He is one of the leading experts in the world on the subject of political marketing. He combines an expertise in marketing and politics with his knowledge of consumer psychology and statistical applications. He has published 9 books and numerous articles on the subjects of marketing, political marketing and consumer psychology, including The Marketing of the President (1994) and The Handbook of Political Marketing (1999).
Dr. Newman’s books have been published and translated into Hungarian, Italian and Korean. His articles have appeared in both scholarly journals and popular press. Dr. Newman has given 30 keynote lectures in 12 different countries over the past 18 years. He is represented by the Authors Unlimited Lecture Bureau, located in New York City, and by World Class Speakers & Entertainers, located in Agoura Hills, California (www.speak.com). In 1993, Dr. Newman received the Ehrenring (Ring of Honor) from the Austrian Advertising Research Association in Vienna for his research in political marketing. He is the first American recipient of this award in the 30 years it has been awarded. Dr. Newman served as an advisor to the Clinton White House from 1995 to 1996.
Bruce I. Newman (Ph.D.) is Professor of Marketing and Wicklander Fellow in Business Ethics in the Department of Marketing, Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University, USA. He received his B.S, M.B.A. and Ph.D. all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in marketing, and specializes in political marketing, consumer behavior, and customer and voter choice behavior. Dr. Newman is considered the leading scholar in the world on the subject of Political Marketing and Political Branding. He has held visiting scholar positions at several universities, including Stanford University, the University of California-Berkeley, and more recently at Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. His publications have appeared in top academic journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business Research, Psychology & Marketing, among others, as well as in chapters in several handbooks on the subjects of political marketing, political communication and persuasion and social marketing. Bruce has published 14 books, some of which have appeared in Chinese, Korean, Hungarian and Italian. He is the author of The Marketing of the President (Sage, 1994); The Mass Marketing of Politics (Sage, 1999); editor of the Handbook of Political Marketing (Sage, 1999); co-author with Wojciech Cwalina and Andzrej Falkowski of A Cross-Cultural Theory of Voter Behavior (Haworth Press, 2008) and Political Marketing: Theoretical and Strategic Foundations (M.E. Sharpe, 2011); and, most recently, the author of The Marketing Revolution in Politics: What Recent U.S. Presidential Campaigns Can Teach Us About Effective Marketing (Rotman-UTP Press, 2016). He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Political Marketing, now in its fifteenth year. Dr. Newman is a recipient of the Ehrenring (Ring of Honor) from the Austrian Advertising Research Association, and advised senior aides in the Clinton White House in 1995-1996 on communication strategy. Dr. Newman is a frequent contributor to the media, appearing on both national and international talks shows including NPR and BBC, among others. His Op-Ed articles have appeared in a broad range of publications, including the Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor and on CNN.com. Dr. Newman has been invited to give Keynote Addresses in over 30 countries (go to www.orate.me for more information on topics he can speak on). Bruce is Principal of Newman & Associates LLC, a consulting firm specializing in consumer research, image management and marketing strategy.
Bruce I. Newman
bnewman@depaul.edu
Professor
Department of Marketing
Phone: (312) 362-5186
1 E. Jackson Blvd.
DePaul Center 7522
Chicago, IL 60604
Academic Degrees
PhD University of Illinois, Marketing, 1981
MBA University of Illinois, Marketing, 1978
BS University of Illinois, Business Administration, 1975
The Marketing Revolution in Politics
Micah Andrew
MBR Bookwatch.
(Mar. 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
The Marketing Revolution in Politics
Bruce I. Newman
Rotman / UTP Publishing
c/o University of Toronto Press
10 St. Mary Street, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4Y 2W8
www.utppublishing.com
9781442647992, $32.95, HC, 224pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: In 2008, Barack Obama's presidential campaign used an innovative combination of social media, big data,
and microtargeting to win the White House. In 2012, the campaign did it again, further honing those marketing tools
and demonstrating that political marketing is on the cutting edge when it comes to effective branding, advertising, and
relationshipbuilding. The challenges facing a presidential campaign may be unique to the political arena, but the
creative solutions are not. "The Marketing Revolution in Politics: What Recent U.S. Presidential Campaigns Can Teach
Us About Effective Marketing" by Bruce I. Newman (Professor of Marketing and a Wicklander Fellow in Business
Ethics in the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University, and founding editorinchief of the Journal of
Political Marketing) shows how recent US presidential campaigns have adopted the latest marketing techniques and
how organizations in the forprofit and nonprofit sectors can benefit from their example. Distilling the marketing
practices of successful political campaigns down into seven key lessons, Professor Newman shows how organizations
of any size can apply the same innovative, creative, and costeffective marketing tactics as today's presidential hopefuls.
Critique: An impressive study of exceptional and original scholarship, "The Marketing Revolution in Politics" is an
informative and compelling study of marketing that is remarkably relevant to the 2016 presidential campaigns. Simply
stated, "The Marketing Revolution in Politics" should be considered a mustread for political campaign managers,
students of marketing and political marketing, and nonspecialist general readers with an interest in how presidential
campaigns operate in the postCitizens United world of American politics.
Micah Andrew
Reviewer
Andrew, Micah
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Andrew, Micah. "The Marketing Revolution in Politics." MBR Bookwatch, Mar. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
4/10/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491862111825 2/6
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449662560&it=r&asid=a28500144b0129b4bc0e1a1d16b6bc62.
Accessed 10 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449662560
4/10/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491862111825 3/6
Newman, Bruce I.: The marketing revolution in
politics: what recent U.S. presidential campaigns
can teach us about effective marketing
S.E. Frantzich
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.10 (June 2016): p1510.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Newman, Bruce I. The marketing revolution in politics: what recent U.S. presidential campaigns can teach us about
effective marketing. Toronto, 2016. 205p index afp ISBN 9781442647992 cloth, $32.95; ISBN 9781442669741 ebook,
$32.95
534434
JK2281
Can. CIP
This pantheon of the use of modern marketing strategies and tactics in the two Obama presidential campaigns provides
a detailed discussion of the use of databased analytics and microtargeting. Newman (marketing, DePaul Univ.) argues
that although cuttingedge marketing techniques were developed first in the business world, the Obama campaigns
leapfrogged other venues to provide a model for business and other sectors to follow in the future as they seek to retain,
gain, and maintain customers or supporters. The author argues throughout his book that potential voters and customers
can be managed in the same way. The goal is using a political example to better inform businesses and nonprofits of
new potentialities while describing the Obama successes and crediting those responsible. Topics include the strategic
use of new technology in marketing, integrating quantitative and qualitative research methods, developing a unique
brand, and building a relationship with one's customers. Although the book includes many insightful descriptions, the
repetition of themes and examples may lead to some frustration for readers. Some terms (such as big data) are thrown
around without definition, but the book is generally well sourced and includes a number of keen insights. Summing Up:
** Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, practitioners.S. E. Frantzich, United States Naval Academy
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Frantzich, S.E. "Newman, Bruce I.: The marketing revolution in politics: what recent U.S. presidential campaigns can
teach us about effective marketing." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1510.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942845&it=r&asid=89f46522c684e5ff29256041876a20f7.
Accessed 10 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942845
4/10/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491862111825 4/6
Political marketing; strategic campaign culture
Reference & Research Book News.
28.5 (Oct. 2013):
COPYRIGHT 2013 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780415844567
Political marketing; strategic campaign culture.
Ed. by Kostas Gouliamos, Antonis Theocharous, and Bruce Newman.
Routledge
2013
325 pages
$140.00
Hardcover
Routledge research in political communication 10
JF2112
Eighteen papers presented by Gouliamos (vice rector at the European U. Cyprus) place the concept of culture at the
heart of their analyses of political marketing, with Gouliamos suggesting that by "understanding and adapting a broader
campaign culture, political marketing models may be seen as sets of pathways of key resources resulting in viability in
human assets, forms of influence, class stratification, alternative flows of information or networking and intercultural
knowledgesharing activity." Opening papers address theoretical issues related to political cynicism; the intermingling
of politics, mass society, and everyday life; the relationship between political marketing and political credibility; the
evolution and competition of memes in debates over constitutional change in the Philippines; and the decline of
political knowledge and participation among youth in South Africa. Another set of contributions examines electoral
issues, including the relationship between declining voter participation and social marginalization in the New Zealand
electorate, the electoral marketing consequences when campaign slogan doesn't match party image in Polish election
campaigns, the projection of political images through a candidate's physical appearance and personality and its impact
on (mock) elections in a Belgian city, and the role and influence of the mass media on voters' decisions in Lebanon. A
pair of papers then explores aspects of nationalism and national identity, focusing in turn on an extreme right party in
Belgium, the selfpresentations of Russia's Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin in relation to the mythological reading of
Russian current events. Finally case studies of the impact of webcasting local council meetings in a Norwegian city
and the use of the Internet by Greek local governments are presented.
([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Political marketing; strategic campaign culture." Reference & Research Book News, Oct. 2013. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA344582585&it=r&asid=5c2030caa8eaeafd41af1a15ac70876c.
Accessed 10 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A344582585
4/10/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491862111825 5/6
Winning Elections with Political Marketing
David M. Rankin
Presidential Studies Quarterly.
37.4 (Dec. 2007): p775.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Center for the Study of the Presidency
http://www.theprisidency.org/psq/index.htm
Full Text:
Winning Elections with Political Marketing. Edited by Philip John Davies and Bruce I. Newman. New York: Haworth,
2006. 239 pp.
Philip John Davies and Bruce Newman assemble an impressive transatlantic group of experts who concur that what
voters, citizens, or, in the language of marketing, consumers of politics think and desire shape campaigns and
governance in the United States and United Kingdom. According to the editors, a "transatlantic transfer of expertise and
theory" brought the permanent campaign across the Atlantic. Along with it came political consultants, advisors, and
approaches, not only joining New Democrats and New Labor but also refining tactics for future elections, introducing
emerging technologies, and marketing new political products to the citizenconsumer.
In the first chapter, Robert Worcester and Paul Baines explain how "policy and message development ... are somewhat
akin to market positioning in the commercial sector" (p. 11). Clinton advisor Dick Morris used polling to "triangulate"
between Republican and Democratic positions. The Worcester method, honed at Britain's public opinion organization
MORI, targeted and adjusted to the relative importance likely voters attached to party and leader image and salient
issues in policy development. Darren Lilleker and Ralph Negrine examine how a political market orientation that
focuses on "cycles of consumption" changed politics in the United Kingdom, "part of a constant process of feeding
material to the electorate principally via the media, whilst rebutting criticisms from opposition parties and political
commentators" (p. 38). Such descriptions summon the terms "spin control" and "rapid response," key features of recent
U.S. presidential campaigns and administrations.
Robert Busby considers how more candidatecentered elections also were exported to the United Kingdom, such as the
marketing of candidates Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair, who "played down privileged backgrounds
and portrayed themselves as ordinary" (p. 61), strategies that also made "regular guys" out of candidates such as George
W. Bush and wealthy Democratic challengers. However, Busby does not explain which imagemaking tactic has been
more successful or why, as a similar child of privilege, Bush seemed to connect with many "average" voters in a way
that eluded Al Gore or John Kerry. For Peter Ubertaccio, President Bush's party leadership experience built in Texas
translated into a "broadbased, majority party" with the strategic help of advisor Karl Rove. Ubertaccio notes that "the
Bush team ... chose to build up their party organizations by linking them to grassroots activists and tying it all together
with the popularity of the president" (p. 100). Although Bush's popularity has tumbled and Republican control of
Congress vanished, grassroots mobilization may be the real enduring element of the BushRove partnership.
The institutional framework of American elections makes grassroots activity more viable than in the United Kingdom.
Conor McGrath concedes that British grassroots lobbying is limited, but notes that it also has become increasingly
sophisticated and effective, particularly for marginal MP seats. And Gary Wasserman's examination of why the poor
face obstacles in lobbying provides critical reflections on how "to cement a tradition of public service into the norms of
political consulting" (p. 144).
With the emergence of the Internet as a political force, Nigel Jackson explores how enewsletters provide costeffective
relationship marketing for British parties. He explains that "enewsletters build continuous relationships political parties
need to both promote their own views and discover the interests of the recipient" (p. 156). Dennis Johnson discusses the
impact of the Internet on the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries and how candidate Howard Dean successfully
tapped into this community of online citizens and fundraising. Yet Dean was undone by electoral dynamics building
since 1976, compressing each successive primary schedule. Johnson concludes that, although "the Internet campaign
became a fascinating new development in 2003 ... this campaign was also about money, enormous amounts of money"
(p. 202). In the final chapter, Carl Stenberg asserts that, in building public support for public financing of elections,
mainly through the state initiative and referendum process, "the power of language in marketing proposals cannot be
underestimated" (p. 219).
4/10/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491862111825 6/6
The insight these final essays provide into the intersection and understanding of political marketing in the United States
and the United Kingdom would have been strengthened by a concluding chapter that examined how each essay
informed and contributed to the volume. For example, Winning Elections with Political Marketing focuses on how
American political strategies increasingly influence marketing tactics in the United Kingdom, but how might the British
experience contribute to the debate over media and money in U.S. elections? Chapters on George W. Bush's party
leadership and lobbying also drift away from more tightly connected initial chapters on political marketing approaches
and lessons in the United States and United Kingdom.
Nevertheless, all of the contributors offer solid analyses that raise thoughtprovoking questions on political marketing
from the past and for the future. As Lilleker and Negrine contend, "Policy development, campaigning and delivery all
became part of a marketoriented strategy" (p. 43). They acknowledge, however, that a key challenge for scholars is to
confirm this connection, as elected officials are loathe to admit that they shape policies based on polling for fear of
appearing unprincipled and wavering, which ironically may itself be part of a marketbased appeal. And scholars, much
like marketing strategists, may have to adjust to changing political realities. The selfdescribed "thumpin'" of President
Bush's party in the 2006 congressional elections, for instance, leads one to ponder Ubertaccio's suggestion that this
"new model of presidentialparty interaction and the marketing of such may become the basis of resurgent party
organizations" (p. 101). Moreover, how do we comprehend the rise and fall of Tony Blair, when Worcester and Baines
suggest that "polling provides early warnings when politicians are adrift from the mood of their nation" (p. 29)? Unlike
his popular early leadership, Blair faced a barrage of domestic criticism and low approval for his steadfast commitment
to the war in Iraq, a transatlantic mood that also would weaken the political standing of President Bush.
Still, as we head into 2008, familiar marketing strategies are at work to elect Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton president,
resurrecting talk of triangulation and positioning. Winning Elections with Political Marketing is valuable for adding to
our understanding of the extensive reach of political marketing, where consultants and advisors crisscross the Atlantic
and, increasingly, the globe. The authors effectively demonstrate how campaigns and politicians continue to develop
new ways to court voters, not ignore them. As the volume reveals, we are, from a marketing perspective, all consumers.
David M. Rankin
State University of New York at Fredonia
Rankin, David M.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Rankin, David M. "Winning Elections with Political Marketing." Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 2007, p.
775+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA171401154&it=r&asid=68a4c97ea6a6d673b394a86d33e00857.
Accessed 10 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A171401154
The Marketing Revolution in Politics: What Recent U.S. Presidential Campaigns Can Teach Us About Effective Marketing
Bruce I. Newman. University of Toronto (UTP, dist.) $32.95 (205p) ISBN 978-1-4426-4799-2
Newman, a marketing professor and founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Political Marketing, offers an in-depth study of how marketing techniques have been used in American political campaigns over the last 50 years. He focuses on President Barack Obama's "integrative use of technological advances for the first time in a marketplace setting," and discusses his campaigns' combination of social media, big data, and micro-targeting. With a wealth of examples from other presidential campaigns, Newman takes readers through the various hits and misses, pointing out what worked and didn't and why. He goes back to Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy" ad, in which the image of a little girl taking petals from a flower leads into a missile launch countdown and nuclear explosion. It implied that Republican Barry Goldwater's hawkishness was a threat to the country helped Johnson to a huge victory. He compares President George W. Bush's disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to Obama's skillful handling of Superstorm Sandy. Structured around seven marketing lessons that Newman suggests can be adopted by any organization, the book sometime reads like a marketing textbook, but his interesting examples and insights will increase readers' understanding of future political campaigns. (Jan.)
Book Review: The Marketing Revolution in Politics
by DMU Team | posted in: Advertising & Marketing, Direct Response TV and Radio, Facebook/Social Media, Integrated Marketing, Latest Direct Mail | 0
0Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
PrintFriendly and PDFPrint Friendly
Election 2012: The Year of the Marketing Revolution
Barack Obama surprised the Republican Party and the country as he swept the electorate with an unprecedented, targeted direct marketing campaign. Despite a flagging economy and a growing frustration with the Obama Administration, the President effectively undermine his opponent Mitt Romney.
The old ways of campaigning are gone. The new methods are changing and growing every day.
How did I first learn about this tsunami-change in advertising?
Bruce Newman’s new book The Marketing Revolution in Politics: What Recent U.S. Presidential Campaigns Can Teach Us About Effective Marketing
Technology is playing a huge—Yuge—role, following big data, consumer analytics, micro-targeting, and social media. With the micro-targeting in particular, the Obama Administration—and major companies in following—have created and marketed to clear and dedicated subsets of prospects, finding out their needs and wants, then offering clear advertisements in connection with that information.
I recommend to any growing or successful marketer to read and adapt to the principles laid out in this book. The new insights will fascinate and shock you!
Also, if you didn’t read my article on marketing trends for political campaigns, you can see it here!
Do you have any other questions about direct marketing? Call me at (310) 212-5727 or email me craig@cdmginc.com
Avoiding "the issues" as addressivity in US electoral politics
Michael Lempert
Anthropological Quarterly. 84.1 (Winter 2011): p187.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Institute for Ethnographic Research
http://www.aq.gwu.edu/
Abstract:
In televised debates in US electoral politics, behavior before The Issues is scrupulously monitored, so much so that even a candidate's dysfluencies can be perilous, often registering to commentators as 'avoidance' and spurring them to speculate about addressivity, about which category of implied voter the candidate's avoidance was "to" and "for." Focusing on the 2007-2008 primary debates and post-debate coverage, I examine how infelicities around The Issues are read as addressivity and used to cast candidates as social types (e.g., "flip-flopper"). I situate these critical readings in relation to the political marketing industry and compare this kind of ascribed performativity with the rigid performativity of verbal taboo. [Keywords: Language, taboo, addressivity, politics, stance, authenticity, branding]
Full Text:
That "The Issues" are a hallowed discursive institution in US electoral politics is suggested by the rote outrage expressed when people fail to address them. The day after the Democratic party's 21st and final primary debate of 2007-2008, held in Philadelphia for finalists Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Obama aired this complaint before supporters in North Carolina: "Last night, I think we set a new record because it took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters to the American people." Irate columnists echoed Obama, like Philadelphia Inquirer's Trudy Rubin, who railed against the moderators' "'gotcha' questions with no relevance to the problems we face," or Nico Pitney of The Huffington Post who, in a bid to convince readers of the new lows to which political debates have sunk, tried his hand at quantification: He sorted "policy" from "non-policy" from "scandal" questions in the debates between Obama and Clinton, arguing that the more recent were scandal-heavy and policy-light. (1) The moderators, concluded Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will Bunch, "disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself." (2) Unfazed by this reflexive "debate over the debate," as the kerfuffle came to be called, Annenberg's stalwart FactCheck.org-ers, unswerving verificationists all, continued to subject the candidate responses to the acid test of truth or falsity: Did Obama really say that he wouldn't wear a flag pin? (Yes.) Did "people" die from the Weather Underground's bombing in the 1970s, as Clinton suggested when she tied Obama to former Underground-member William Ayers? (Yes, but the three who died were group members.) (3)
From laments over The Issues' declining status and complaints that politicians and debate-moderators disrespect them, and from the compensatory proliferation of Issue-Watching and Fact-Checking sites and services, (4) it would seem The Issues still do matter. They matter not the least for candidates, since it is their behavior toward The Issues that is taken to reveal their "message," their political brand (Silverstein 2003, 2005; Hill 2000). And what matters is not just the reportable things candidates say about Issues, like whether offshore drilling can "help America meet its energy needs" or whether a "path to legalization" should be offered to undocumented migrants, but how they face them: It is their manner or style of addressing Issues that helps make candidate brand.
Which is not to say that candidates may address Issues as they please, for there is a certain morally inflected relational etiquette brought to bear upon their behavior, an etiquette in which the sublime of authenticity looms large, as I suggest. To appreciate this relational etiquette and the taboo-like performativity it affords, I begin by noting a few ways in which The Issues manifest and matter. The Issues appear as commoditized design-elements on candidate websites, where The Issues are resolved into lists of abstract problem-areas for deliberation and policy making, like "Health Care" or "Education," each with attached position statement meant to distinguish candidates. In the forensically framed "debates," The Issues manifest as discourse-topics that make up an institutionalized field of stance- and position-taking in which (a) candidates (again) ought to distinguish themselves, to which (b) the news media and commentators ought to attend scrupulously, and in response to such reporting (c) consumer- voters ought to base their electoral choices.
The Issues are persuasive fictions on several fronts, but on each they stand as objects of cultural deference, like national flags or icons of the Virgin or, perhaps better, like mothers-in-law before sons-in-law (as in cases of in-law avoidance familiar in the ethnographic record). Focusing on their status as fraught objects of address, I suggest an analogy with so- called "taboo" objects, objects that present hazards (and affordances) for certain categories of interactant by virtue of their indexical entailments.
All this drama, where candidates behave and misbehave before The Issues--'addressing' them, 'avoiding' them--is narrated into existence by a chattering class of professional commentators: the commentariat, as some meta-commentators dub them. The commentariat's civic virtue consists in helping you, the consumer-voter, choose. Through close, critical readings of candidate behavior toward The Issues, they can infer the "implied voter" (cf. "implied reader" Iser 1974), the constituencies that candidates must have really been addressing when they spoke or mispoke or skirted an Issue. They are the color commentators of the oft-bemoaned "horse race" that is electoral politics, the pace of their reportage quickening before each state-based primary election and the debates leading up to it. They review polls, chart ups and downs, scrutinize slips, gaffes, peccadillos. To the commentariat is perhaps even owed the debt of emplotment, for they mark off time, serializing the campaign cycle by reviewing and previewing episodes--and all in a manner and register that, in its most histrionic flourishes, seem parasitic off of televised sports commentary shows like Pardon the Interruption and wildly popular America-gets-to-vote talent contests like American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance? If all of this seems terribly irreverant toward The Issues, it is not. For by exposing the strategems of politicians and magnifying their successes and failures in facing The Issues, the commentariat pays deference to a discursive institution that nobody can seem to respect.
Got Issues?
Campaign websites certainly try to respect The Issues. (5) Set high on John McCain's presidential campaign website (accessed October 22, 2008), third from the left on the top menu bar, is an [ISSUES] button that reveals a dropdown menu of 19 links. Subtract the first ("On the Issues") and the last ("Decision Center") and what remains is a list of McCain's Issue captions: "American Energy," "Economic Plan," "Iraq," "Health Care," "Education," "Climate Change," "National Service," "Homeland Security," "Border Security," "Human Dignity & Life," "Fighting Crime," "Second Amendment," "Veterans," "Judicial Philosophy," "Technology," "Government Reform," "National Security." Barack Obama's [ISSUES] button (accessed on the same date) is comparably positioned--second from the left on the top menu bar. His drop-down menu reveals two columns of Issues, in alphabetical order. (6) The Issues are ennumerable and list-like, but form what is felt to be a cohesive set intersubjectively shared by publics and politicians alike. Like the formidable wholeness and gravity of the literary Canon, The Issues look monolithic, but as with the storied canon debates that erupted in the 1980s, there is a whole politics surrounding the question of which Issues are included and excluded. McCain's "Second Amendment" Issue has no analogue in Obama's Issue list, for instance, while Obama's "Katrina" Issue has no place in McCain's. More often tensions turn on how an Issue is named. Quite a few names for Issues can be calibrated across candidate websites ("Government Reform" [McCain]: "Cleansing Washington" [Obama]), but differences in Issue nomenclature reveal their shibbolethic nature (e.g., "American Energy" and "Climate Change" [McCain] : "Energy Independence & Global Warming" [Obama]). Differences in Issue-rubrics can thus be subjected to a kind of membership analysis that discloses Message and permits one to infer the implied voters being courted (McCain's "Human Dignity & Life" = Pro-Life = "The Catholic Vote," among others). Issue captions are Message shibboleths.
And because they are shibboleths designed for an implied voter, presupposed or potential, it is no surprise that these rubrics and their rank order should be responsive to the mercurial dynamics of campaign messaging. Their order may be shuffled and names revised as a campaign unfolds, though Issue-captions tend to be added or renamed, not dropped. Hillary Clinton's site added "Reforming our Immigration System" on January 8, 2008, "Improving Our Schools" on January 21, "Creating Opportunity in Rural America" on February 7. Faced with mounting gas prices in the summer of 2007 (this was a vital topic in the June 3rd primary debate), Obama's site changed in June from "Energy Independence & Global Warming" to "Meeting Energy Needs," but then late in September 2007 this was changed to "Energy & Environment," just in time to anticipate AI Gore's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize.
In the forensically oriented "debates," where candidates participate in what is at least supposed to be a zero-sum contest, candidates' positions on Issues compete. In news media coverage of the debates, Issues and the positions adopted on them are obligatory topics of pre- and post-debate commentary where they are teased out, compared, and summarized so that consumer-voters can make informed choices. Dedicated "Issue Trackers," like CNN.com's, compare candidate positions on issues from "Abortion" to "Israel" to "Taxes." Sober, putatively disinterested policy reports, like those of The Brookings Institute, compare, say, the tax policies of McCain and Obama. For the past two presidential campaigns, C-SPAN has supplied topic- captions in its televised coverage of presidential (and many primary) debates, captions that remain on the bottom of the screen as the candidates respond; sometimes these are captions of the Issue being addressed, or else a direct report or paraphrase of the moderator's question.
Addressivity and The Implied Voter
The Issues circulate through media scapes as shibbolethic design elements of campaign websites, as discourse-topics in televised debates, as objects of coverage by news media and political talk shows, but what I consider below is the way commentators typify candidate behavior in the face of The Issues, this being an important way of constructing candidate-brand. (Commodity branding has increasingly informed electoral politics, especially through the extension of marketing principles and methods into political campaigning [Hill 2000, Moore 2003, Silverstein 2005, Needham 2006, Lempert 2009], forming what has come to be called "political marketing" [Newman and Sheth 1985, Newman 1994, Kavanagh 1995, Mauser 1983].) Akin to taboo objects, The Issues present certain hazards for those who stand before them--though only specific categories of social actor (candidates), as with in-law avoidance, and only under particular conditions. And, again as with in-law avoidance, the hazards candidates face are very much about addressivity, about who might hear and how these actual or potential (over)hearers will (dis)align with candidates by virtue of the farter's behavior.
Addressivity, an utterance's "quality of being directed to someone," as Bakhtin (1986:95) sweepingly put it, is central to what it means to take a position on an Issue. Addressivity is polyadic and involves, at minimum, a two-place relationship: some utterance in the proximal, here-and-now speech event is construed as 'oriented' toward some alter, who may be in the same event or in a spatio-temporally removed event, as in cases of interdiscursive addressivity (Lempert 2009). While I concern myself here with the way the commentariat attributes addressivity to candidate behavior in post- debate coverage, the semiotic means and stratagems by which interactants motivate such readings are, expectedly, many and varied. Most transparently, addressivity can be motivated by such familiar resources as participant deictics and address terms (think of the diagrammatic chain of role designators, proper names, and titles from the outset of a State of the Union Address, like Bush's from 2002: "Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished guests, fellow citizens ..."). More often addressivity is motivated through denotationally implicit means. In the poetics of stance, for instance, cross-turn lexicosyntactic parallelism (e.g., I don't like those : I don't either (Du Bois 2007, Agha 2007:96-103, Lempert 2008) can invite readings that the second stance is oriented to the first because it is felt to resemble it. Second pair parts in adjacency pairs are by default oriented toward their first pair parts by virtue of norms of sequentiality. Gaze direction and bodily orientation are equally familiar denotationally implicit means for selecting addressees and vectors of address (Kendon 1990:51-89, 209-237; Holmes 1984; Lempert, In press), as are forms of cospeech "deictic" gestures (McNeill 1992, Kita 2003).
When it comes to expert readings of candidate behavior, addressivity is less about orientations toward proximal, here-and-now, copresent people (cf. the interactionist and conversation-analytic notions of "recipient" and "audience design"), and more about distal "superaddressees," Bakhtin's (1986:95-126) term for a virtual participant who is only assumed to be present, like an abstract, overhearing public, or, indeed, a constituency. Akin to the "implied reader" (Iser 1974) of response theory in literary criticism, we may speak of an "implied voter"--a superaddresee whom Message mavens recover through critical readings of candidate text.
In our electoral politics, these preoccupations with addressivity are part of a politics of recognition (Taylor 1994, Silverstein 2003:83-85), where identities, like demographic categories of identity, deserve and hence vie for equal recognition in the self-consciously multicultural nation-state. Political communication requires "recognizing" and thereby establishing co-membership with some segment of this diversity at the exclusion of others. At a second-order of construal, regularities of address serve as a sanctioned criterion for distinguishing politicians in the relational field of candidates. Normatively at least, a candidate's recognition of (and hence alignment to) constituencies is diagrammed by his or her position on The Issues, so that Issue-watching offers clues as to who the candidate is really "for."
If, like the commentariat, one is attuned to the relational field of candidates, and if one presumes this kind of differential address to constituencies, the mere presence of an Issue makes candidate behavior around it highly indexically entailing. (7) Under such conditions, a heightened absorptive aura (see below) of indexical entailment forms around this category of discourse topic. Especially in the forensic contexts of the debates, the presence of an Issue can entail a participation framework in which the candidate inhabits--must inhabit, is made to inhabit--a position. What matters (increasingly?) is not only "where one stands" (with respect to an Issue) and by implication "for whom one stands" (with respect to an implied voter linked to that Issue), but how one orients to both. This how, a candidate's manners and bearing before The Issues, in speech and bodily hexis, is constructed by commentators through the aid of quick audiovisual replays and splicings that juxtapose things the candidate said and did, inciting evaluation and, of course, commentary.
Irrespective of a candidate's manner of engaging an Issue or even The Issues tout court, there are certain infelicities that all should avoid. On January 11, 2008, for instance, Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason reports that "Republican presidential rivals John McCain and Romney dueled over economics on Friday." Neither, it would seem, was forthcoming about his plans: "They offered few specifics and focused their attention on the economic situation in Michigan and South Carolina, which hold the next state contests to nominate party candidates for the November election." Weak information flow ("offered few specifics") reveals, for Mason, the candidate's dates' distal, prospective addressivity. Obscurity before this Issue bespeaks a strategic orientation toward (or "recognition" of) segments of the electorate being courted. Candidate's stance- and position-taking behavior is read as addressivity. While Mason does not proceed to typify McCain and Romney as social types by virtue of their addressivity, many forms of commentary do just this. To addressers they attach such incendiary metapragmatic descriptors as "flip-flopping," "pandering," "poll-watching," Issue" dodging," opposed to which is a parallel set that includes "conviction" and "straight talk." Together, these morally weighted names for good and bad modes of stance- and position-taking--that is good and bad ways of behaving before The Issues and before the publics who care about them--seem to presuppose a normative figure of the candidate qua stance-taking subject, a cardinal, moral dimension of which is speaker-authenticity.
Driver's Licenses for Undocumented Migrants?
October 30, 2007. In a Democratic primary debate in Philadelphia, (8) co-moderator Tim Russert cites something front-runner Hillary Clinton recently said to New Hampshire's Nashua Telegraph:
Senator Clinton, Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer has proposed
giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. You told the
Nashua, New Hampshire, Editorial Board it makes a lot of sense. Why
does it make a lot of sense to give an illegal immigrant a driver's
license?
(Clinton's response to Telegraph columnist Eduardo de Oliveria's question of whether she'd support Governor Spitzer's approach wasn't so simple. She was charitable toward Spitzer ["I-I know exactly what Governor Spitzer is trying to do. And it makes a lot of sense, because he's trying to get people out of the shadows ..."], but warned that "this can't work state by state," that immigration "has to be looked at comprehensively," and that undocumented immigrants would have "an earned path to legalization" (9) (emphasis mine). For Clinton, Spitzer's proposal makes sense in the absence of a sorely needed federal plan and hence would be imperfect and provisional. She does not simply endorse it. This subtlety was lost on or elided by Russert.)
Just as she did in New Hampshire, Clinton says she understands Spitzer's predicament. Senator Chris Dodd takes up her sympathy as a tacit endorsement. Chipping in, Clinton rights the record: "I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it." This just roils the waters more, especially given her juxtaposition of epistemic adverb plus verb of cognition (... I certainly recognize ...) with a strictly negative claim about what she had said (... "I did not say that it should be done" ...), both posing as qualifications (as stipulated by the matrix clause, "I just want to add ..."). Given the blend of delicacy and certainty, surely she must know what she did say.
"Wait a minute," snaps Dodd. "No, no, no. You said yes, you thought it made sense to do it." John Edwards and Senator Barack Obama join the fray and charge that she is being unclear and dodgy and even self-contradictory--evidence of what they had started to construct as the slick, conviction-less Washington-Insider, a negative inflection of precisely the branded attribute she had been claiming for herself, Experience.
So what did she say?
RUSSERT: Senator Clinton, I just want to make sure what I heard. Do you, the New York Senator Hillary Clinton, support the New York governor's plan to give illegal immigrants a driver's license? You told the Nashua, New Hampshire, paper it made a lot of sense.
Reasserting himself under the guise of a mediator merely asking for clarification, Russert administers a performative on Clinton, swearing her in, as it were: "Do you (hereby) support p," with hyperbolically precise person reference, complete with determiner the, state name, and role designator (New York Senator), narrowing the indexical focus upon her to the point that no escape is possible. With several debaters arrayed against her and abetted by Russert, Clinton looks like someone who isn't eager or able to stake out a position on this issue at all.
Which is just how Joe Trippi, Senior Strategist for the Edwards Campaign, frames the matter in post-debate coverage on the political talk-show Hardball (msnbc.com 2007).
MATTHEWS: The case you made at the very end, on the issue of driver's licenses in New York State for illegal immigrants, for people in the country illegally, giving drivers licenses, Hillary Clinton seemed to be saying that's an OK idea with her. And then your candidate John Edwards said in the space of a minute she gave two different positions. What are those two positions. Explain the double-talk.
TRIPPI: Well, I'm still confused, too. I mean--and Obama was confused. I mean, this wasn't just Senator Edwards that could not tell where she really was. And by the way, it's clear to me that she'll change her position again on this one within the next week. Probably by tomorrow when her consultants ...
MATTHEWS: ... supporting a driver's license for illegal immigrants by tomorrow? Do you think she's going to dump that position?
TRIPPI: It depends whether she's in primary mode or general election mode, and I don't think ...
MATTHEWS: If she's in a general election mode, where will she go?
TRIPPI: I think it's going to change.
Trippi says that Clinton's positions depend on whether she is in "primary mode or general election mode"--a matter of who is being addressed, and he predicts that her position on this issue will change yet again once her consultants get hold of her. Trippi is not fastidious about separating out types of infelicity ('obscurity,' 'inconsistency'), but fashions them into an amalgam that begins to resemble the figure of the flip-flopper.
Flip-flopper, that derisive epithet for a politician who is "pandering, poll watching or abandoning long-held views for short-term political gain" (Schulman 2007), is never mentioned by Trippi, but it is this label--and a host of related ones--that is soon pinned to Clinton by campaign antagonists and members of the commentariat, and which subsequently enjoyed tremendous play in the whole 2007-2008 season. Two days after the debate, for instance, Boston Herald editorialist Michael Graham (2007) does this in a cutting editorial.
Hillary Rodham Clinton may have achieved the politically
impossible: She has managed to out-Kerry John Kerry himself. Sen.
Flip-Flop, you recall, famously claimed that, on the issue of
funding U.S. troops, he voted 'for the $87 billion before I voted
against it.' Clinton, on the other hand, managed to declare herself
both for and against driver's licenses for illegal aliens at the
same time. When it comes to illegal immigration, Hillary is
FORGAINST!
Again, Clinton's manner of facing an issue is read as addressivity, and this addressivity betrays attributes of speaker: lack of conviction.
January 31, 2008. Less than a week before Super Tuesday, when a mass of primary elections had the potential to settle the question of who the Democratic candidate would be, a CNN-sponsored debate was held in Hollywood, California. The field of candidates had been narrowed to two, Clinton and Obama. (10) Obama fields a question on the topic of immigration, then co-moderator Doyle McManus turns to Clinton: "Senator Clinton, Senator Obama has said that he favors allowing illegal immigrants to obtain drivers' licenses, and you oppose that idea. Why?" Only at the close of her substantial three-and-a-quarter minute response does Clinton mention the topic of driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants, and even then, she offers no baldly stated position. Co-moderator Wolf Blitzer circles back to settle the matter: "Very quickly, Senator, why not, then, if you're that passionate about it, let them get driver's licenses?"
Well, we disagree on this. I do not think that it is either
appropriate to give a driver's license to someone who is here
undocumented, putting them, frankly, at risk, because that is clear
evidence that they are not here legally, and I believe it is a
diversion from what should be the focus at creating a political
coalition with the courage to stand up and change the immigration
system.
In some post-debate coverage, the distance Clinton put between herself and this Issue was taken up as "avoidance." And the fact that she eventually staked out a clear position against issuing driver's license to undocumented immigrants in response to Blitzer registered to many as a flip-flop. Both are read in terms of addressivity and linked to characterological attributes of speaker. In post-debate coverage on MSNBC's Live with Dan Abrams: (11)
CRAWFORD: This is where you saw Obama really playing to the California primary here because he's taking a risk. I mean one reason I think he's feeling less confident than Hillary about Super Tuesday. He took more risks tonight and this is a big one. He signed up for this driver's license program for illegals. He even talked about putting Ted--with Ted Kennedy on immigration reform. Both are efforts to appeal to Latin American voters in California--Latinos, because Hillary has had a lead there. If you take that lead of hers among those Hispanics out of the equation in California, it's a dead heat in California. That's what the whole game is in California. Interestingly, she didn't take the bait. She backed off of that driver's license program, and took, if anything, a more conservative stand and told me she's feeling confident about that vote.
ABRAMS: She tried to avoid answering the question first about driver's- CRAWFORD: Which is the best thing for Democrats to do, by the way.
ABRAMS: And you know what's interesting, Peter, is they both seemed to recognize--and I was surprised that Obama didn't go in for the kill. I mean Hillary Clinton has clearly changed her position on this. And Obama mentioned it, but he almost seemed like he wanted to put his hand on hers to say, "We don't want to go there. We don't want to go down this road."
Avoidance is read as addressivity, just as Obama's Issue-engagement was the focal constituency with Obama being Latino voters in California, alleges Crawford.
A Question of Principal
I cite these moments from the 2007-2008 primary election cycle to illustrate how perceived infelicities before an Issue--whether judged strategic (Clinton's January 31, 2008 performance) or chalked up to a bad performance (October 30, 2007)--are read in terms of addressivity and taken to index morally weighted attributes of speaker. All kinds of dysfluencies and infelicities can be cited as breaches of etiquette, like false starts and markedly long pauses, odd or brusque topic shifts, dense or overly delicate qualification of propositional content, and of course interpropositional 'inconsistency' on Issues--a canonical symptom of the flip-flop. Which isn't to say that one can list off eric criteria for each offense, as if there were some neat, mechanical rule-of-law for debate behavior. Most offenses are never registered or brushed aside, suggesting that additional factors make dysfluencies and infelicities actionable in post-debate commentary. (12) I expose here simply the existence of a relational etiquette imposed on candidates in the presence of The Issues. This relational etiquette, invoked by the commentariat and campaign antagonists, has moral dimensionalities that involve a sublime of authenticity.
This sublime surely has something to do with the increased cultural salience of the political marketing industry and its commoditization of authenticity (Lempert 2009). It is hard to overstate just how strident and widespread talk of conviction and flip-flopping has become in electoral politics of late. In the weeks following Clinton's fateful Philadelphia debate in late October 2007, for instance, the traffic in the charge of flip-flopping increased, so much so that New York Times commentator Rutenberg could dub this the "season of the 'flip-flop'" on November 4, and even back in June Reuter's Holland (2007) augured, "It's the year of the flip-flop in U.S. politics." The charge of flip-flopping was fired among Republican candidates with equal brio, with front-runners Mitt Romney and John McCain repeatedly tagging each other with this indictment. As testimony to flip-flop's currency, in August of 2008 the well-trafficked PolitiFact.com introduced a "Flip-O-Meter" (akin to its earlier Truth-O-Meter) which ranks candidate behavior on issues as "No Flip," "Half Flip," "Full Flop." (13) (Apparently, degrees of flip-flopping now exist, permitting consumer-voters to make finer distinctions.)
As evidenced in Graham's (2007) editorial on Clinton's alleged flip-flop-ping, much of this talk of conviction and flip-flopping retains an interdiscursive tie to Democratic candidate John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race against incumbent George W. Bush. In that contest, flip-flopping was the centerpiece of Bush's characterological argument against Kerry. "How can John Kerry protect us ... when he doesn't even know where he stands?" So went a Republican campaign attack ad that ran just before the first presidential debate. (14)
In terms of the zero-point or origo from which addresser speaks, flip-flopping typifies allocentric rather than egocentric address, but to which alter is addressivity transposed? Who speaks to Issues and to constituents, if not the candidate? Professional consultants, perhaps, as Joe Trippi suggested, when he said Hillary would change her position again? Indeed, though flip-flopper, as a term of derision for politicians, may be traced to the late 19th century, as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, and though it is undoubtedly part of a longer history in which speaker-sincerity and authenticity have been cardinal norms for speakerly behavior, this term often speaks to the presence of and suspicion toward political marketing, which has both expanded dramatically as an industry in recent decades and has increased in cultural visibility. (15) Flip-flopping does not merely describe a change of position, but a change often attributed to "pandering" and "poll-watching" and, more generally, to subordinance to professional strategists.
In this respect, flip-flop is part of a family of characterological terms for candidate (in)authenticity. On the (usually) valorized end of the slide are terms like "uncandidate" and "uncampaign," both of which appear to draw on 7-Up's influential uncola campaign that was first launched in the late 1960s. (As for the lexicosemantic artistry of this trope, the negative prefix un- attaches unexpectedly to a concrete, count-noun stem, a stem that denotes a generic class member, cola. Cola is a hypernym of branded varieties like Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, Eanta, and when used with un- as an epithet for the brand-name 7-Up, it motivates the tropic reading of 'not'-class member, i.e., 'unconventional.') A famous piece of anti-brand-branding, the uncola has found some life in talk about campaign politics. ("The Uncandidate," for instance, is attested in the 1980s with Democratic Congressman and Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, with Democratic Senator of Massachusetts Paul Tsongas who competed with Clinton for the presidential bid in 1992, and especially with independent candidates Ross Perot in 1992 and Ralph Nader in 2000.)
Anti-marketing, anti-brand Message has been on the rise, (16) as attested partly by the fact that charges of inauthenticity and claims to authenticity have become both widespread and strident, contributing to a kind of histrionic realism (Lempert 2009). How can we forget the garish legibility of the "Straight Talk Express," blazened across the side of John McCain's deep blue, star-spangled campaign bus? Or McCain's drumming on his "Maverick" sobriquet, reminding Americans that he's bucked his own party (even if the real Mavericks, whose 19th century Texan ancestor refused to brand his cattle and launched the eponym, took offense: "He's [McCain] a Republican ... He's branded." [Schwartz 2008]) Or Sarah Palin, McCain's Vice Presidential pick, whose strenuous efforts to be Mavericky and reinforce McCain's anti-brand brand were mercilessly lampooned by Tina Fey on the late-night television comedy show, Saturday Night Live. Or Barack Obama who, on the heels of the fateful October 30, 2007 debate in which he all but pegged Clinton as a flip-flopper, shows up on Saturday Night Live at a fictive Halloween Party at the Clintons' house. He is dressed as himself, sporting his own Obama mask. "Who is under there?" pries Hillary, played by Amy Poehler. Peeling off his mask, Obama digs into Clinton: "Well, you know Hillary I have nothing to hide. I enjoy being myself. I am not going to change who I am just because it's Halloween."
Irrespective of which constituencies they embrace or eschew, there is a relational etiquette all candidates should respect. This etiquette, which demands deference for The Issues and requires that candidates face them with clarity and conviction, helps explain how commentators can move so fluidly from behavior before the Issues to addressivity to morally weighted images of people, that is, how first-order signs of addressivity can motivate second-order indexical readings of candidate character and brand. As "faced" or "avoided" in venues like televised debates, The Issues become in effect ritual sites for authenticating candidates, for verifying whether they are still Real.
The suspicion that comes from all this scrutiny is that none is real. As commentators narrate the strategies of competing political campaigns, candidates tend to be voiced as animators of polled and tested positions-on-Issues (animators, in the sense of physical bearers of the message, as Goffman [1981, 1974] classically put it); their positions are authored by their consultants and advisers. And the real question is whether they, the candidates, can remain the principal of what they say (principal being Goffman's participant role for the one 'committed' to an utterance). Just as the people, the electorate, are understood by default to care about Issues, so candidates should reciprocally be 'care'-full, committed. Candidates are real, to the extent that they maintain their reciprocal, bilateral 'commitment' to this discursive institution of The Issues.
Discussion
Unlike proscriptive language-ideological regimes that demand null-forms (obscenity bans, blasphemy avoidance), candidates are often eager to invite readings of their behavior as branded addressivity, and this may seem quite apart from canonical cases of verbal taboo. To be sure, candidates have issues, too, which should be avoided. Each has a longer list of candidate-relative unmentionables which the so-called "opposition" strategists they hire (firms that research vulnerabilities in candidates) try to identify so that candidates know what not to say. (It is unwise for Hillary Clinton to bring up NAFTA on the campaign trail in Michigan [the North America Trade Agreement, passed by President Bill Clinton, which many fault for having gutted industry in the state]. And it was downright perilous for her to have brought up the topic of assassination with Obama as the front-runner, as she was accused of doing in late May 2008. [Asked to explain why she remained in the race so late, even though she trailed Obama and had little chance of winning, she noted--among other things--the demise of Robert Kennedy late in the 1968 campaign. Her point presumably was that unexpected things can happen. (17)] Obama's middle name--Hussein--was a notorious unmentionable for him during the campaign, too. And so on.)
But what makes behavior before The Issues of a piece with "taboo" phenomena like in-law avoidance is not just that the commentariat polices such behavior in terms of a morally inflected relational etiquette, but that this feverish scrutiny creates an aura of indexical entailment around this category of discourse topic.
Consider the peculiar qualities of this aura.
A long literature on indexicality has examined mappings of linguistic form to co(n)text of occurrence and has tended until quite recently to focus on relatively discrete linguistic forms (e.g., deictic expressions) and their combinatorics in sentence-sized units. As Agha (2007) (among others) has painstakingly shown, many non-referential, social-indexical effects (e.g., 'deference,' 'politeness') are far more distributed and configurative than is usually appreciated, in the sense that the indexical reading is not the precipitate of isolable form-tokens (e.g., lexical items) but that of cross-modal arrays of semiotic tokens which are further mediated by forms of reflexivity that help invest such arrays with value. In the cases described here, one may be tempted to view the indexical readings of 'addressivity' (the way a candidate's utterance is understood to be 'to' and 'for' certain publics and constituencies) as akin to familiar cases of text-level indexicality in discourse, but this would be misleading. A typical case of 'deference'-indexicality, for instance, may involve some combination of lexicogrammatical resources (in languages like Tibetan, Japanese, and Korean, for instance) with gesture, prosody, sequential order, facts of role inhabitance, and so forth, yielding effects gradiently felt as 'deference.' Yet the indexicality of addressivity around the issues is unlike such cases of text-level indexicality in an important sense: the indexical focus of candidate-addressivity is never settled in situ through sequential orderliness or co-occurring semiotic resources, and the rest. It is necessarily an unfinished text to be completed by the social actors licensed to entextualize it, the commentariat.
In this respect, so-called "absorptive" deictic expressions spring to mind. Unlike indexically "focused" deictic expressions (speaker- or addressee-focal expressions like first and second person pronouns I and you, which categorially index participant-roles 'speaker' and 'addressee' respectively), absorptive expressions are unmarked for focus. In the case of Issue-addressivity, what is entailed is merely that some focus (some determinate addressee[s]) exists, but this addressivity must be worked out--unveiled, really, for it is deep--through hermeneutic labor that the commentariat carries out. There is thus a kind of distributed metapragmatic regimentation of candidate addressivity, where the commentariat stands between politician and public in an effort to help voter-consumers choose.
In forensic spectacles like the primary and presidential debates, an intensely absorptive aura of indexical entailment surrounds this instistutionalized category of discourse-topic. Like iron fillings dragged toward a magnet, nearly any bit of behavior can be adduced as evidence of who the candidate is "really" speaking to and for. But in terms of address, this entailing indexicality is labile, not "rigid." Unlike cases of so-called "rigid" performativity (cf. rigid designators [Kripke 1972]; see Flemming, this issue), where a taboo expression has stable pragmatic entailments that can't be neutralized through strategies of decontextualization (framing luck as 'mere' represented speech ['mention,' not 'use'] won't convince the FCC to drop the fine, if the offending word is uttered between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. on public airwaves). Unlike rigid performativity, Issue-Avoidance has an underdetermined focus. There are no well-institutionalized metapragmatic rules-of-use that map form (luck) to effect ('indecent,' 'obscene'), and what a given mode of address reveals about speaker is often just as plastic. In brief, key variables of actant structure (who-said-what-to-whom) are left blank and filled in by the commentariat in post-event reportage. As guardians of public virtue who ensure that The Issues still matter, it is their self-declared Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995) that fashions authoritative interactional texts from candidate behavior, no matter how fragmentary, trivial, or accidental this behavior may seem to noninitiates.
I linger on these differences from phenomena traditionally classed as "taboo" (proper name avoidance, bad words, in-law avoidance behavior) not to expand a typology per se, but to erode existing ones, especially those that take proscribed lexical registers (e.g., Allan and Burridge 2006) as the prototypical material of verbal taboo. If heightened indexical entailment is one key measure of taboo, then proscription is just a special case, as is the focus on words-and-expressions, as is the relative "rigidity" of indexical entailment.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to two AQ reviewers for very thoughtful comments. Thanks, too, to Luke Fleming and Sean Silver for fielding questions, and to Theodore Hixson of Georgetown University for excellent research assistance.
REFERENCES
Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge and New York; Cambridge University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M., Michael Holquist, and Caryl Emerson. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Du Bois, John W. 2007. "Stancetaking in Discourse; Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction." In Robert Englebretson, ed. The Stance Triangle, 137-182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dulio, David A. 2004. For Better or Worse: How Political Consultants are Changing Elections in the United States. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Fahey, Anna Cornelia. 2007. "French and Feminine: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Emasculation of John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential Race." Critical Studies in Media Communication 24(2):132-150.
Fritz, Sara, and Dwight Morris. 1992. Handbook of Campaign Spending: Money in the 1990 Congressional Races. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.
Goffman, Erring. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper Colophon Books.
--. 1981. "Footing." In Erring Goffman, ed. Forms of Talk, 124-159. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Graham, Michael. 2007. "Anyone behind wheel, Hillary?" Boston Herald, Nov 1. Accessed from Editorial: NewsBank America's Newspapers. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:2073 on Oct 10, 2008.
Hill, Jane H. 2000. "Read My Article: Ideological Complexity and the Overdetermination of Promising in American Presidential Politics." In Paul V. Kroskrity, ed. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, 259-292. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Holmes, Dick. 1984. "Explicit-Implicit Address." Journal of Pragmatics, 8:311-320.
Irvine, Judith T. 2009. "How Mr. Taylor Lost His Footing: Stance in a Colonial Encounter." In Alexandra Jaffe, ed. Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, 53-71. New York: Oxford University Press.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1974. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Johnson, Dennis W. 2007. No Place for Amateurs: How Political Consultants are Reshaping American Democracy. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Kavanagh, Dennis. 1995. Election Campaigning: The New Marketing of Politics. Oxford and Cambridge: B. Blackwell.
Kendon, Adam. 1990. Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kita, Sotaro. 2003. Pointing: Where Language, Culture, and Cognition Meet. Mahwah, N I: L. Erlbaum Associates.
Kripke, Saul. 1972. "Naming and Necessity." In Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, eds. Semantics of Natural Language, 253-355. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Lempert, Michael. 2008. "The Poetics of Stance: Text-Metricality, Epistemicity, Interaction." Language in Society 37(4):569-592.
--. 2009. On "Flip-Flopping: Branded Stance-Taking in U.S. Electoral Politics." Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(2):222-247.
--. In press. "Indirectness." In Scott F. Kiesling, C. B. Paulston, and E. Rangel. Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Matalin, Mary, James Carville, and Peter Knobler. 1994. All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President. New York: Random House: Simon & Schuster.
Mauser, Gary A. 1983. Political Marketing: An Approach to Campaign Strategy, Praeger Series in Public and Nonprofit Sector Marketing. New York: Praeger.
McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moore, Robert E. 2003. "From Genericide to Viral Marketing: On 'Brand.'" Language & Communication 23:331-357.
Needham, Catherine. 2006. "Brands and Political Loyalty." Journal of Brand Management 13(3):178-187.
Newman, Bruce I. 1994. The Marketing of the President: Political Marketing as Campaign Strategy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Newman, Bruce I. and Jagdish N. Sheth. 1985. Political Marketing: Readings and Annotated Bibliography. Chicago: American Marketing Association.
Sabato, Larry. 1981. The Rise of Political Consultants: New Ways of Winning Elections. New York: Basic Books.
Schulman, Bruce. 2007. "Beware the Politician Who Won't Flip-Flop." Los Angeles Times. Accessed from http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/ suncommentary/la-opschulman1apr01,1,407481.story?coll=la- headlines-suncomment on Jan 3, 2008.
Schwartz, John. 2010. "Who You Callin' a Maverick?" The New York Times. Accessed from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/ 05/weekinreview/05schwartz.html on Sept 25, 2010.
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to "W." Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
--. 2005. "The Poetics of Politics: 'Theirs' and 'Ours.'" Journal of Anthropological Research 61 (1):1-24.
Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.
Taylor, Charles. 1994. "The Politics of Recognition." In Amy Gutmann, ed. Multiculturalism, Examining the Politics of Recognition, 25-74. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Michael Lempert
University of Michigan
ENDNOTES
(1) "Debate Analysis: ABC Asked Most Scandal Questions, Obama Was Clear Target." 20 April 2008. Accessed from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ 2008/04/20/debate-analysis-abcasked_n_97599.html on Oct 22, 2008.
(2) Will Bunch. "An open letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos." 17 April 2008. Accessed from http:llwww.philly.com/ philly/blogs/attytood/An_open_letter to Charlie_ Gibson and George_Stephanopoulos.html on Nov 6, 2008.
(3) "Taking Liberties in Philadelphia" 17 April 2008. Accessed from http://www.factcheck.org/ elections-2008/taking_liberties_in_philadelphia.html on Oct 22, 2008.
(4) FactCheck.org is now joined by a number of comparable services, like PolitiFact.com and factchecking services linked to national news media (e.g., WashingtonPost.com's FactChecker). Issue-monitoring sites include OnTheIssues.org, Project Vote Smart, and news media who offer tracking services, like CNN.com's Issue Tracker. Tellingly, some of the dedicated Issue-Watch sites explicitly position themselves as 'compensatory' in the field of public-sphere deliberation about candidates. OnThelssues.Org's site says that its "mission is to provide non-partisan information to voters in the Presidential election, so that votes can be based on issues rather than on personalities and popularity." Accessed from http://www.ontheissues.org/join.htm on Oct 30, 2008.
(5) Nearly all sites list candidate positions on Issues. Exceptions from the 2007-2008 primaries include Hillary Clinton's site, which only added an [ISSUES] link to her front page sometime between April 19 and May 17, 2007. For quite some time, G.W. Bush's website didn't have "issues," it had an "agenda," though this does not appear to be a widely used descriptor on campaign websites. Having Issues on campaign websites extends to senate and congressional pages, with occasional exceptions (e.g., Elizabeth Dole's site, accessed in October 2008).
(6) Unlike McCain's list, Obama's is alphabetized, just like a number of past democratic campaign websites (e.g., John Edwards and John Kerry in 2004, Gore and Lieberman in 2000). Obama's site appears to have alphabetized its Issues only in late December 2007. Besides the fact that this rubricization of Issues admits of a kind of membership analysis, the alphabetization itself suggests that no one issue (and hence constituency) is more important than another. In addition, the Issue-captions in the new web-format differ. Instead of predominantly gerundive captions like "Strengthening America Oversees," "Cleansing Washington," and "Fighting Poverty," the new web-format features Issues that do not signal Obama's agentive positioning and involvement: "Civil Rights, "Defense," "Disabilities," "Economy," etc. (Taken together, these two mutually reinforcing patterns may even be seen to resonate with the campaign's post-partisan 'unity'-message.) Expectedly, care has been taken to re-name Issues during this web-edit to preserve a second-order of messaging, laminated upon the first. In his non-alphabetized 7 September 2007 site, for instance, the number one Issue (out of 14) was "Strengthening America Oversees," but in his newer, alphabetized format, this Issue appears to be renamed "Defense" so that it can remain near the top of the list (second out of 24), just below the new top Issue, "Civil Rights."
(7) No individualized agency of the stance-taking subject is presumed here. It is the felt presence of the topicalized Issue that interpellates the stance-taker. More precisely, it is a kind of schooled spectatorship of politician-before-the-lssue (by members of the news media, commentariat, and campaign antagonists) which ultimately assigns positions to candidates, even when the latter hem and haw, and even when they produce a null-stance, as it were (more on such Issue-infelicities below; on stance ascription, see especially [Irvine 2009]). In interaction-centered literature on stance, the "stance-taker" is sometimes imagined to be hard-wired followers of a liberal-democratic credo, as if naturally endowed with the capacity and hence right to evaluate discourse and (dis)align with others. It would be misleading to speak of Issue-avoidance from such an actor-centric perspective here, because it is less a stratagem of Message-maximizing rational-actors and more an artifact of mediatized ways of interpreting stance-taking for the benefit of a public who needs to be informed.
(8) De Oliveira (2007). The candidates in this MSNBC-sponsored debate were Joe Biden (Senator, Delaware), Hillary Clinton (Senator, New York), Chris Dodd (Senator, Connecticut), John Edwards (formerly a Senator for North Carolina and Vice Presidential candidate in 2004), Dennis Kucinich (Member of the House of Representatives, Ohio), Barack Obama (Senator, lllinois), and Bill Richardson (Governor, New Mexico).
(9) Audio transcript accessed from http://media.nashuatelegraph.com/projects/edits/primary/clinton/spitzer/ on Aug 3, 2009).
(10) Accessed from http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/31/dem.debate.transcript/ on Aug 5, 2009)
(11) Transcript of MSNBC "Live with Dan Abrams" 31 January 2008. Accessed through LexisNexis on Sept 21, 2009.
(12) Indeed, while official discourses tend to represent flip-flops as strictly matters of interpropositional inconsistency, specifically, cases where a candidate changes his or her position on an Issue, inconsistency alone isn't what motivates the charge.
(13) Bill Adair. Introducing the Flip-O-Meter. PolitiFact.Com from St. Petersburg Times. Published on August 5, 2008. Accessed from http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/aug/05/introducing- flip-o-meter/ on October 24, 2008.
(14) An astute reviewer noted the gender-inflection of the figure of flip-flopper in the 2004 attacks on Kerry. In contrast to Bush's "strong" paternal leadership, Kerry's alleged flipflopping was often cited as evidence of an emasculated actor: "it [the charge of flip-flopping] emblematizes a failed masculinity, a candidate emasculated by subservience to his (or her?) 'handlers,' and to the whims of capricious ('fickle'?) and short-sighted constituencies within the electorate (the term whipped comes to mind)" (cf. Fahey 2007). Flip-flopper (and related terms) is no monolithic figure, naturally. In some inflections, it was Kerry's patrician pretentions that were foregrounded, where his lack of decisiveness was a function of his extensive retinue (a charge bolstered by attention to his wife, Teresa HeinzKerry, heiress of the Heinz ketchup fortune). In other readings, flip-flopping was symptomatic of Kerry's failure to commit to country, a lack of patriotism. This charge was aided by citing Kerry's turn against the Vietnam War, by suspicion of his war medals, and by recalling his vote against an $87-billion-dollar resolution to supply emergency funds for the troops in Iraq and to support reconstruction there and in Afghanistan. (It is surely no accident that Kerry used his first turn of the first presidential debate to say, "...President Bush and I both love our country equally...") Still, common to these indictments is the charge of displaced principalship, where the candidate is said to have ceded commitment to The Issues over to some alter(s). It is this displacement that interests me.
(15) Political consultancy underwent professionalization in the late 1960s in the United States but only in recent decades--especially since the 1990s--has its cultural visibility spiked, as evidenced by a spate o[ books that worry about its influence on democratic governance, as well as by films like The War Room and Wag the Dog, by popular memoirs of former campaign strategists (e.g., Matalin, Carville, and Knobler 1994), and by the emergence of "celebrity consultants" (Johnson 2007) like Karl Rove for George W. Bush. As well-known consulting firms became increasingly viewed as assets for campaign fund-raising (Sabato 1981, Dulio 2004), as a way to reassure donors, this, too, has made visibility valuable, to the point that press conferences are now convened to announce the arrival of a major consultant (Fritz and Morris 1992).
(16) Though not investigated here, it is possible that campaigns have drawn on this figure so frequently in 2007-2008 because of the Senator-heavy nature of the field. Senators are vulnerable to the charge of being "beltway insiders" in ways that governors are not.
(17) Accessed from http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2008/05/24/on-the-road-clintonsvery-bad- day/?scp=1&sq=clinton%27s%20very%20bad%20day&st=Search on Aug 9, 2009.
Lempert, Michael
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lempert, Michael. "Avoiding 'the issues' as addressivity in US electoral politics." Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 84, no. 1, 2011, p. 187+. Expanded Academic ASAP, login.portal.oaklandcc.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=EAIM&sw=w&u=lom_oakcc&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA249135900&it=r&asid=152fc58014a036cf73811a8c7af1519f. Accessed 12 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A249135900
Political Marketing Is Focus of New Journal; Authors Say Party Identification Is Key to Voting
David Glenn
The Chronicle of Higher Education. 49.20 (Jan. 24, 2003):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
http://chronicle.com.portal.oaklandcc.edu/section/About-the-Chronicle/83
Full Text:
Byline: DAVID GLENN
POLLS ABOUT POLLS ABOUT POLS: Bruce I. Newman thinks a lot about how political salesmanship has evolved. "I like to go back to the 1960 book by Theodore White, called The Making of the President, the 1968 book by Joe McGinniss, called The Selling of the President, and the book that I wrote in 1994, called The Marketing of the President," he says. "This is a very typical, standard evolution that we find on the commercial side, where a company goes from a production orientation -- you can go back to the Model T Ford, when it was developed in the early 1900s -- to a selling orientation, when GM entered the market and started to talk about cars that weren't just black, but had different colors, different styles, to a marketing orientation, where we are today. You can follow that same evolution in politics."
Mr. Newman, a professor of marketing at DePaul University, is the editor of the Journal of Political Marketing, which made its debut last month. He hopes that the journal, published by Haworth Press, will bring together a global cast of scholars of advertising, elections, and political consulting. The first issue features contributions from Britain, Greece, and Slovenia as well as the United States.
Greece is behind the United States in Mr. Newman's making-to-marketing progression, but apparently catching up quickly. The news media there were recently deregulated and commercialized, and poll-wielding consultants have swooped in to manage candidates' images, writes Prodromos Yannas, a professor of international relations at the Technological Educational Institution of Western Macedonia. Constantinos Karamanlis, leader of the New Democracy Party, was pictured during the 2000 campaign "together with his young and pretty wife Natasa visiting a night club in Thessaloniki and serving drinks to youngsters, together with his wife walking their newly acquired dog, in the company of farmers in the city of Larisa drinking ouzo, [and] visiting the earthquake victims of an Athens suburb which was badly hit in September 1999. ... "
Candidates for office in the United States wouldn't choose to be seen "serving drinks to youngsters," but what the American political culture lacks in bibulousness it makes up in mathematical precision. A brief article in the new journal explores "surveys of what viewers want from polls." The authors mention that "one poll of viewers of CNN campaign polls found that 45 percent believe that polls provide a better understanding of the news."
"The journal is a nice, formal establishment of a base of knowledge that we can build from," says Mr. Newman. "But I think the most exciting implications still haven't been tapped yet." He would like to see the creation of academic programs in political marketing. "The market for educational programs in this field is going to be explosive," he says.
The professor has also just signed on as general editor of a new book series on political marketing, also published by Haworth. The first titles are expected to appear in late 2004.
Mr. Newman plans special issues of the journal on what he calls "the marriage of public relations and political marketing" and on governments' Web sites. The latter topic, "e-government," is described in the debut issue by Michael Sommer, a visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, with an enthusiasm that recalls the heyday of the tech boom: "Is e-government likewise about to reconfigure American democracy in ways we have not yet dared dream of? Very probably. It is here and ready to go, and like a young yelping pup, barking ever so loudly."
***
BRAND LOYALTY: Are voters today more free-floating than their parents were, and so more susceptible to the messages of political marketers? An influential school of political scientists argues that voters in Europe and North America have been gradually "de-aligning" from political parties since the early 1970s.
But that just isn't so, according to Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters (Yale University Press), a recent book by Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Schickler. They insist that "party identification" is still a powerful predictor of voting behavior -- more so than sex, class, and religion.
Contemporary scholars like to claim that "the politics we have now is really fundamentally new and different," says Mr. Green, a professor of political science at Yale. "But that picture turns out to be misleading, in ways that allow people to ply their ideological trades or perhaps make a quick buck, depending on what they're doing. For example, if you're a campaign consultant, and you're able to convince people that all politics ultimately boils down to candidate-centered politics, you have much more latitude in the kinds of resources that you can abstract."
One problem with the "floating voter" hypothesis, according to the book, is that it's often based on surveys of the entire population, rather than only those people who are likely to vote. And arguments based on the rise of "ticket splitting" -- voting for one party's candidate for president and for the other party's candidates for members of Congress -- are flawed, the book adds, because they don't take into account the increasing numbers of Congressional races that are essentially uncontested.
Mr. Green and his colleagues argue that party identification is in part a product of social psychology. "People make partly ideological, partly social adjustments during young adulthood," he says. "People get a sense of who they are, and who the friends and enemies of people like them are, and that gives them a road map that they can then use to adjudicate which candidate to vote for, which party to root for. ... Party identification isn't irrational in that sense. It has to do with which social groups you ally yourself with." Which means that political marketers still have their work cut out for them.
By DAVID GLENN
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Glenn, David. "Political Marketing Is Focus of New Journal; Authors Say Party Identification Is Key to Voting." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 Jan. 2003. Expanded Academic ASAP, login.portal.oaklandcc.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=EAIM&sw=w&u=lom_oakcc&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA147121274&it=r&asid=20c17569e70c31757dd90dc561c453d4. Accessed 12 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A147121274