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Off the record - September 2008
Forty minutes in US politics
Timing was everything in PR masterstroke
Welcome to Off the Record, our occasional circular on topical communications issues. Here, New York-based Andrew Robertson, president and chief executive of marketing services network BBDO Worldwide, considers how the manner of Sarah Palin’s arrival, as much as the arrival itself, may have shifted the balance in the US Presidential race, or not.
“What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?... Lipstick!” This spontaneous remark, prompted by her seeing several signs in the crowd, was when Sarah Palin put some lipstick on the pig that was the McCain ticket.
She was already halfway through her forty-minute speech at the Republican convention. A speech in which she introduced her family, one by one: her high-school sweetheart, steel union member, snowmobile racing, husband – still her guy after twenty years; the son who’s leaving for Iraq in three weeks; her seventeen year-old unmarried, pregnant daughter; and her four-month old baby with Down Syndrome.
A speech in which she proved that she had no truck with the trappings of power. She had, as her first three acts as Governor of Alaska, put the private jet up for sale on eBay, fired the driver and then the chef.
A speech with which she pinned Obama into a pen of elitism, pomposity and puffery. A speech in which, most importantly, she connected – really connected – in a non-rational, visceral, but-oh-so powerful way with a huge swath of “ordinary” people.
She did it in a way in which the gruff Senator from
She had already rained on his parade. The timing of McCain’s announcement of her selection as his running mate was a stroke of PR genius.
Obama had made the speech of his life, accepting his nomination at 11.00 pm Eastern time to 80,000 adoring Democrat fans in the appropriately-named Mile High Stadium and 38.4 million viewers at home.
Excerpts of this brilliant speech were destined to be played over and over and over again the next day, were it not for the fact that, at 8.30 am the following morning, Sarah Palin was introduced.
It was an appointment so newsworthy – since nobody had ever suggested her as a possibility, let alone predicted her as a probability, and since almost nobody even knew who she was – that it wiped Obama off the slate.
The election of this year’s president is taking nearly two years and will cost in excess of more than $1 billion. It has filled thousands and thousands of hours of debates and town halls, of news programs, of commentaries, and late-night satire. You can’t escape the candidates. Sarah Palin is fresh, vibrant, different, and – we all know the importance of this – new!!
In a week the McCain-Palin ticket – for that’s what it is – went from 2% behind to 8% ahead of the Obama-other guy ticket.
Harold Wilson said “a week is a long time in politics”. That was then. Now, forty minutes is a long time in politics, at least in a Presidential Campaign.
This is a remarkable race. Take a deep breath. Where else could you have a pro-life, creationist, book-banning, hunting (her bumper sticker says, “vegetarianism = a bad aim”), working mother and a 71 year-old, pro-choice, four-term senator, who married a Budweiser-distributor heiress, and couldn’t remember, when asked, how many homes he has, up against a 47 year-old African American Harvard Law School graduate who did community work amongst those who don’t have a home at all, and who has spent less time in the Senate than his opponent did in a prisoner of war camp?
There are, of course, profound policy differences on taxation and the economy, on
There are phalanxes of highly-paid consultants, and unpaid volunteers, developing messaging and media strategies at national, state, and local levels. There are daily, hourly, tactical plays. Some hit their mark. Others backfired.
There are pundits who daily, hourly, comment on and assess the performance, not just of the candidates, but also the campaigns and the campaign managers. Some become celebrities in their own right and will be commentators in the next election.
Then there are the voters. “Ordinary” people like “them”, and like “us”, young people and old people, in red states and blue states, people who like country and those who like gospel, people who on November 4th will make one of the most important choices of their lives.
I have a feeling that these people will behave like people always do when faced with choices of enormous significance - a car or a new home, for example.
They will reach into their hearts, not their heads, for guidance. They will make a non-rational, emotional choice based on the brand (in this case, the ticket) they feel is most interesting, most likeable, and most trustworthy.
Right now I have a feeling that more of them will pick McCain-Palin. (Actually I am hoping they will, because the prospect of a Hillary-Sarah fight in 2012 is too delicious for words.)
But there are, as I write this, six weeks (or 1,512 forty minute sessions) to go and that, in politics, is forever.