Liberalism versus and wealth debate dampens US electorate

Americans are baffled by the nitpicky policy debate about corporate wealth versus liberal democracy. Glamour has dwindled in the midst of the jackhammer roar of million dollar Ads trying to re-define—President Obama, already over-assessed to smithereens, while the challenger, Mitt Romney seemed indefinable and elusive.

The campaign has been described by many as a dull version of the throbbing debates people witnessed many moons ago—actually as far bask as presidents Reagan and Carter. It is highly consequential yet boring. Romney is calling President Obama a big-government anti growth liberal. Obama is calling Romney a corporate marauder trying to rob grandma’s health care.

To most Americans the country had gone through significant changes between 1900 and 1936, and then again between 1940 and 1976 and the current big government versus small government debate has become a tedious matter.

On top of that Obama and Romney are going at each other finding gaffes that will help them pin their opponents to the standard straw-man profile that denotes emptiness. Gone are the days when defining themselves with titles like compassionate conservative and the harbinger of 21st century good cheers that George W Bush and Bill Clinton did so well respectively.

The ideological debate has lost its momentum with time. We are seeing singing to the choir mentality taking shape as large audiences are given warnings of what the other side would mean to the country after the election in November

Obama still gives some serious intellectual speeches and Romney just talked of foreign policy priorities in Israel—those are rare. Is the electorate having campaign fatigue and audiences just gobbling up stuff without being discriminatory and critical? Has the electorate already got polarized to such an extent that those longer arguments and persuasive speeches are redundant?

Policy-free campaign

The policy debate itself has been reduced to small and medium-size doses of selective presentations, while Romney has not even thought of a major policy discourse so far—may be the Convention would be the place? Is a policy-free campaign becoming a reality?

Negativity has engulfed the climate through vicious attack Ads. Both sides feel it would be a catastrophe for the country if the other side won power in 2012.

Many politicians think Obama looks down on them as a bunch of lowlife villains. The Republican response toward Romney is such that he’s aloof and may have trouble recruiting people to work on the campaign.

When will the time come for attracting independents? That will require superb skills of persuasion through relationships which seemed hard to get by. The polarizing, negative tactics the candidates used trying to get elected will make it impossible to succeed after one of them wins.

The carpet bombing mentality that relies on smashing the other side so that the chances of rebuttal would be dim—so we have more spending hoping to get more votes—shades of things in Sri Lanka. Said one analysts, this is like what generals do when they fail over and again—repeat it.

High tech tit-for-tat

It is high-tech as sophisticated Ads crowd TV space—every agent has Blackberries and iPhones and it is like a war room inside the two campaign offices. Every news item is fact-checked and a response delivered within hours. The fussy high-tech tit-for-tat minutiae rules the waves inside a limited audience but gets repelled like dish water outside.

When internet videos can overshadow speeches, there must be something wrong—what happened to full-throated stump speeches—we are creating credibility void. In such a state of affairs, the known Obama may stand to fare better than the unknown Romney. Still how much the massive Ad outlays would determine the final election result seemed a wild guess. The latest polls show that more voters still view Obama favorably than unfavorably, 49% to 43%. Romney is in negative territory: 35% favorable, 40% unfavorable.

So most folks already know what they think about Obama. They knew him as candidate and evaluated him ever since —There's very little new information to look at. Romany Ads call him a failure which normally would not be that bad but when Obama has been over-assessed, that would be awkward--you are telling people what to think. We have to wait and see.

- Asian Tribune -