So I google Barack Obama just now.

I’m a voter* so this seems like a pretty obvious place to start looking for information about 44 and why the campiagn thinks I should vote for him.
I click and brings me to a page where they ask for my email address and zip code. Great for field use if I am already a supporter but not so good for making a first impression on a voter looking for information. No Barack, I don’t want to help you identify me or affirm that “I’m in!” yet. I just wanted to hear you tell me why I should vote for you.

Seems awfully presumptuous and disrespectful to not let me even see what the talking point of the day is before I give my the first clue to address, voting record and phone number. I type in no@isaidjustlooking.com and a bullshit zip, click the off-putting “I’m in!” button, and go the next screen.

I’m still a little taken aback by the fact that website wants me to commit to supporting BHO before I even get any information about him but gamely I plunge ahead. OK, to be fair I know that what I describe is a common campaign tactic but that doesn’t mean it is the best appraoch. I mean, I can know industry standards and still compartmentalize enough to know that it doesn’t warm me over as a soft voter.

Like a bad date where somebody is trying to take your clothes off without buying you a drink first I am directed to a fundraising page that not only wants all of my information but money from me. Yikes! My bad date just asked me for cab-fare!

My desire to follow the path the campaign’s web designer mapped out for me loses out to my utter and overarching desire to avoid being subjected to this bullshit and I click the header banner at top. There was nothing I saw where I could have clicked through the main website without being strip searched and asked to tip my assailant for the pleasure.

This lead me to yet another screen where I’m being asked to sign up for the email mailing list. Sigh… Why would I want to sign up for daily attempts to filch money of me when, for all the website knows, I am an undecided voter? Can you imagine being an undecided voter who signs up for information about the candidate and starts getting overt solicitations multiple times a day on their phone, snail mailbox and inbox? Talk about off-putting!

To be fair on this third screen I have come to a small link  in faint gray that would lead me to the website but honestly, this date sucks. I am definitely less interested in hearing about what this guys thinks and what makes him tick than I was before he told me he assumed he was going to get into my pants without even any issue based foreplay. Besides, come clean! The page is designed to get every person who browses to it to give up their information and sign up for the mailing list whether they intend or not.

I give up go back to avoiding pictures of my friends’ children on facebook.
Way to hide your attributes from the undecided bonehead!!!

voter*

I was going to write casually interested voter. I think I would be classified that way by campaign staffers. Well, to splits hairs, on the usual 1-4 or 5 scale of whether or not a potential voter is in the campaign’s corner I would be a 2; not a 1 but a firm 2. They wouldn’t want to waste time fruitlessly calling me to volunteer or give money or whatever, and I might be someone a campaign would classify as needing a bit GOTV (GOTV or in non-campaign-speak: Get Out The Vote) contact, but I would be marked down as someone going to vote for their candidate.

The point is that I can’t really say that that I am a voter is merely casually. It’s not true. I am interested in voting and the issues. I’m just not very interested in hearing any of the campaigns or press tell me about voting or the issues.

I’m not even talking about a healthy degree of skepticism towards politicians or the whole, ‘politicians are liars’ doublespeak. I’d be more interested in listening to the politicians speak -even the ones I degree with- that have to listen to any more over-produced, missing the mark, thinking the entire voting public lives in Television Commercial Land bullshit from the pundits and the spin doctors. It grates on me so much I avoid exposing myself to it. I’m not alone in that. In fact, I’d wager the future of country on the fact that a lot of people do the same thing. I’d also wager that although the best practice process of identifying and cultivating voters in the field that any successful modern election campaign has historically employed allow these people to fall through the cracks.

We hear a lot about swing voters and people voting against their own interested. I’m not saying these aren’t very valid ways to describe  groups of the electorate but I am saying they are very tired ways of doing so. Couldn’t it also be true that these disinterested voters are actually just disinterested in hearing the same, canned and trite bs for what seems like eons on end before every election and just end up listening for the side that makes their ears bleed and their head explode less?

Is it so earth shattering to suggest that pundits, pollsters and everyone else in “the industry” who so closely follow every little tidbit of feces that is reported as breaking news, every fifteen minutes, by every media outlets, for literally days on end (a.k.a. the sort of thing that Jane and Joe voter, or any sane person for that matter, tunes the hell out) are in such an insular bubble spun by layer after layer of carefully scripted talking points that they cannot see outside the tired language contemporary politics? Are they all really that stupid? Really? How can it possibly true that there is never more than one way of seeing a story than adhering to some arbitrary definition of liberal and conservative? I mean, really?!!!

TMZ soundbites and tired talking points are a discussion of the issues. The American people aren’t as stupid as the industry seems to think. They are smart enough to stop trying to in depth information in any of the reporting available to them after all….

Barack Hussein Big Ears Liberal-Disappointment Wall Street Loving Better At Foreign Policy the domestic Obama, get your presidential head out of your ass. Break through the bubble. Stop allowing people who can’t real people anymore to give you your information. think about how real people see issue, now pretend you have 3 minutes in line in the grocery store to convince them that you speak their language. Get out there Barack. Stop playing to the pundits and the pollsters. I know cautious is how you roll but if you are going to save your Presidency and the country from more of the same old bullshit that got us into this mess you are going to have to go off script and speak humbly to the people about your ideals and what is in your heart. Tell them where you want to lead them but have enough respect for them as equals that you don’t tie them up and make them late to pick up their kids or get dinner on the table.

Or to put it in da kine….
Ho brah! Choke image problems,eh? Everybody talk stink. Bodda you? Wat doing? You try move and maki die dead so you hana hou da kine? Fo wat? Aznut, lolo. Nuff already. No can work. You got planny peepo who want fo like you, garrens. Get your okole in gear. Give ’em. Bussum Out. Try talk story with ’em but chillax. Keep it simple and fast kine mo better. Olu Olu.