check out this perspective on raymond ramcharitar's weblog. yes ah know, it long.
http://trinidadmediaartsculture.blogspot.com/Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Lie, Cheat, Win Second Place: The UNC Strategy
Looking at Jason Williams’s pretty decent interview with Basdeo Panday on Synergy TV on Wednesday (Oct 31) morning, I was forcefully reminded something about Panday that I’d forgotten: the guy has personality, and you like him almost despite yourself. I didn’t catch all of Williams’s interview, so I don’t know whether he asked him the hard questions (the brazen lying, the Warner-Mandela debacle, the now-I’m-leaving-now-I’m-not spiel). However, he did ask him about his history, his plans for transportation, for crime, drugs, and so on.
Panday handled Williams deftly, with grace and charm. If you didn’t know his history, you might be seduced. And that’s the thing with what’s happening in this 2007 election: the issues do not matter; the relevant history does not matter; what matters are the feelings that the parties can evoke, and whether they can sustain them to Nov 5. Lara Pickford Gordon in an article in the Newsday a couple of days ago wrote about this, and there was a brief story in the same edition interviewing a psychiatrist. Predictably, nothing came of it.
But in the media textbooks, this is called ‘branding’; the creation of an emotional link between a product and its consumer which causes the consumer to acquire it—or commit to it—before he has time to think about it. The link can be created by repetition, reinforcement, or genius: the scary reality is that anything you repeat enough, people will believe eventually, and sooner rather than later; you link your idea to something that’s already attractive, you get attraction by induction; or you could just come up with an image, word, or thing that’s so huge, loud, and brazen, you’ll force your way into consciousness—which is a good description of the UNC’s rally on Oct 7.
Of course, all this has been happening for several years now in the run-up to elections. The PNM and their media buddies worked overtime to link the words ‘corruption’ and ‘threat to democracy’ to the UNC, culminating in the Airports Authority commission of enquiry of 2002. The UNC also did itself a great deal of damage by its public coprohilia: the fiasco over Dookeran, Panday’s conviction, the Kamla Persad Bissessar ‘Opposition Leader’ ten-days, and ‘fixing’ its own internal election to make Vasant Bharat a VP.
But it seems the UNC learned an interesting lesson during that time: in the media age there is no such thing as history and reason only the present and charged emotional moments: and in this there is hardly such a thing as a lie any more; all observers looking in on the various debacles meet with staunch denials and evasions. And nowhere is this more apparent than in Ramesh Maharaj’s return: his selling out his erstwhile and present allies is ignored. You look at it and think: this is impossible; then you continue to see it, and it becomes just distasteful, then it becomes normal. And Ramesh’s complete lack of shame and scruple helps it.
The thinking people would pull out at that point; for the others who stay tuned in, however, their fates are sealed. And this has what the UNC campaign has focused on: keeping people tuned in; the mass events, the outrageous claims, the outright lies, like Ramesh Maharaj, after Manning outed him—saying he helped the PNM into government—just lied and said Baksh and Yetming also met with the Prime Minister; then these gentlemen were obliged to come out and deny, by which time Ramesh had moved on to the next lie.
The enormity of this is not to be understated: the UNC has actually jettisoned truth, rationality, and sanity from its campaign strategy and adopted brazen, outright lies (cf the NACTA polls which keep countering the intuition and other, real polls, and bolstering the UNC’s claims) and it seems to be working; the UNC between October 7 and October 29, had enjoyed approximately 30 % of the articles in the daily press (PNM about 22 %, CoP 20%) and the impression their rallies are creating is that they’re building enormous momentum (my own calculations). Whether this will translate into votes will be seen.
An interesting dimension of this is the mythology and brand imagery they’re playing with: the UNC’s images have coopted the iconic World War II image of soldiers propping up the [American] flag, the imagery of slasher flicks (a glazed window with bloody finger trails) and the mass events with the international stars, the talk of Nelson Mandela, the huge motorcades and the party-like atmosphere where food and drink are liberally supplied. To be sure, the PNM ain’t backward, but they are fighting on other theatres, too, whereas this is the only UNC battle ground.
The UNC strategy is the constant, rapid movement from one signifier, or set of signifiers, to the next, literally giving the public no chance to focus on the previous day’s lies, as they are debunked, because the present day’s lies are so much more interesting. It also reveals that the public views the election with a certain suspension of disbelief. (This is helped enormously by the fact that education and literacy declining fast in this PNM paradise.)
The suspension of disbelief pervades the PNM’s campaign, in its way equally brazen as the UNC’s. The latest set of TV ads show a series of young people saying things like ‘The country going real good’ and ‘I’m a Winner, and I voting PNM’ and ‘My children future secure under the PNM’: all blatant lies (the PNM base is poor, black, and oppressed, winners by no known measure; the country is worse of in terms of crime, institutional decay, and education than at any time since independence).
These are merely the latest in the incessant press ads which announce the announce progress in the school building (which the Newsday editorial examines on Oct 31 and found to be, ah, lacking in veracity) in crime, announcing drops (the newspapers and crime stats disagree); in housing, announcing an unprecedented degree of house building (neglecting to mention houses are being built on agricultural land and distributed to PNM supporters in marginal constituencies). And most of all, the PNM is capitalizing on the UNC’s attacks on the CoP (the Prime Minister called it a ‘blood feud’, Express front page, Oct 31). It’s the cultivation of this situation of vote splitting, or the impression thereof, that reinforces the mythology of the PNM as the stable, older party which is above all this destructive squabbling.
Where is the CoP in all this? It does not have the charismatic leader; it does not have the megabucks of the government or FIFA purse to create a mythology; and it has people like Judy Raymond writing dishonest garbage about them in the Express (see the Express letter to the editor from Richard Trestrail on Oct 31).
Dookeran has not been able to shed the fumbling, ursine image. His platform speaking skills have improved, but remain miles behind Panday’s and not even close to Manning’s (who has really become more comfortable in his skin). The CoP, in fact, has been feminised in the media mythology: the conflict with the UNC has been painted as domestic abuse, with Dookeran painted as the abused partner. The party’s very logo, the circles give the impression of femininity which merely dissipates into weakness and fragility, compared to the UNC’s masculine radiating lines.
Strangely this does not seem to have affected its support. I actually listened to the CoP meeting last night (Oct 30) on C. Mervyn Assam was brilliant, and Dookeran, while there were the few green verbs and mixed metaphors, actually came across as forceful, decisive, and, well, prime ministerial. The numbers at their meetings—which, unlike the UNC and PNM are honestly got, and not bussed in or rented—are quite impressive, and lend some credence to the fact that the party’s ground campaign is working as their media campaign is non-existent. The sick thing is, this is the strongest, most rational party in terms of all the standards the public claims to desire: incorruptibility; technocratic knowledge; and proven competence, yet it's the least visible and most vulnerable of the three.
But we won’t really know how much of this manipulation has worked till Nov 6. Again, goldmine of media research here being ignored by UTT, UWI, and the media. Nice going, guys.
