political-campaigns

Fillmore lost his party__ nomination the next year to yet another military hero, General Winfield 'Old Fuss and Feathers' Scott, an anti-slavery candidate who then lost the election to General Franklin Pierce (whose party__ slogan was 'We Polked you in 1844; we shall Pierce you in 1852').

Efforts by Democrats to portray Jackson as 'manly' and for the 'common man' were apparently more effective than were the campaign tactics of Adams__ supporters, who attempted to depict Jackson as violent, unjust, a paramour, and even a poor speller. It is quite possible that this anti-Jackson propaganda actually reinforced the positive image of Jackson as a masculine commoner__specially when contrasted with that of Adams, whom the Democrats depicted as an over-refined aristocrat.

Yet, some things do not change. Overall, designers have stayed with techniques that work__n different countries and historical periods. Flagg__ 'I Want You for U.S. Army' design in World War I, with 'Uncle Sam' looking directly at the viewer and pointing a finger at him, was derived from a British poster produced three years earlier; in the British poster, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener is pointing a finger at British males, with the words 'Wants You, Join Your Country__ Army! God Save The King.' Other countries__taly, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, France, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Red Army in Russia, and later, the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War__esigned similar posters. The British applied the same design idea in World War II, featuring Prime Minister Winston Churchill, instead of Kitchener, in the same pose; the U.S. Democratic Party resurrected Flagg__ Uncle Sam image, including it in an election poster for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the decades that followed, however, anti-war protest groups issued satires of Flagg__ 'I Want You' poster, with 'Uncle Sam' in a variety of poses: pointing a gun at the audience; making the 'peace sign,' bandaged and accompanied by the slogan 'I Want Out'; as a skeleton, with a target superimposed on him; and with the 'bad breath' of airplanes dropping bombs on houses in his mouth.

In the years that followed the Harrison campaign, many candidates__rom Colonel James 'Young Hickory' Polk in 1844 to Lieutenant John Kerry in 2004__ad their 'humble origins' and/or 'war leadership' highlighted in political material. Often coupled with these tactics was a corollary, to create an image of the opposition candidate that was highly negative__rom John Adams as a 'monarchist' to John Kerry as a 'flip-flopping, windsurfing elitist.

Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there's no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We're averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we're back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

[I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.

The key to holding a logical argument or debate is to allow oneself to understand the other person__ argument no matter how divergent their views may seem.