As the Democratic party argues on national television for global consumption about how bad each other is, lost in their behaviors is the foolhardy approach that mudslinging is.
The first rule of selling is not to disparage your own products or company. This flock of birds sound more like crows arguing over who gets the roadkill squirrel than canaries singing a melodic song in harmonious but different voices.
Lost in this rhetorical mudslide are clear, distinct differentiators.
No good salesperson trash-talks the competition. He or she delivers benefit statements to the Worry Circles of their target audience. These are absent from the off-key choir of debate performance for a very simple reason: The candidates do not know how to persuade properly in order to create actionable interest in the mind of a targeted decision-maker. They wouldn’t know a benefit statement if it knocked them on the head like Fu-Fu the Bunny. Not only do they not know how to debate, they do not know how to sell. While our current president does not know how to debate either, he certainly knows how to sell using old-school tactics. He knows his customer and feeds his customer. The Democrats can’t do that because they cannot even agree who the customer is.
Rather than a shared strategy targeted at unseating a bumbling, untrustworthy incumbent, the aspirants seem hell-bent on telling the nation and the world with great conviction that none in the lineup is suitable to for the job.
What the heck kind of strategy is that? Taking down the Republican party’s bull elephant with a peashooter is very difficult to do. Until the Dems figure this out — and can communicate to the nation what the party does and does not stand for — they will continue to wallow for traction.
For what we are enduring, I blame them all. Negative campaigning might be in vogue these days, championed by a bombastic loudmouth-in-chief, but influence comes one of two ways. Either the candidates must decide that it is smarter to emphasize positive change than attacking each other or paint a shared picture of negative consequence avoidance by replacing the guy in office. Absent of this, the Dems run the risk of further discombobulating the minds of an increasingly disenchanted electorate.
As I watch this continuing series of Whack-A-Mole strategic positioning that pretends to be in America’s best interest, what I yearn to see is a pragmatist who “gets it.” You do not need to insult others to be persuasive. You need to sell yourself; and as of now the noise is garbled silliness.
Will this change as the field mercifully winnows down?
“We shall see,” said the blind man, “we shall see.”
Hopefully these desperate, attention-seeking campaigners with zero communication skills will someday fix what is currently, and sadly, broken.
Time will tell soon enough.
Ocean Palmer