Thoughts and enumerations

What do voters respond to? Do our blog comments have any value in the vast scheme of things political? Perhaps a boring post, but I feel the need to pass on some of the understandings I've picked up over the years, and it has been a few.

If, as I often posit, economics is the arbiter of electoral sucess, why isn't it screamed from the front pages of every newspaper? Why aren't the network news shows pushing it everyday?

Why? Partly because it's not sexy and for the most part ordinary folk really don't relate to the the complex dynamics of the economy. Another reason is that they are living the bad news, they want some diversion when they hit the media.

That is why the Rove approach is failing to spin the otherwise bad economic news. It just isn't an easy sell. Oh there are sexy economic stories, we've discussed them here before. Those warped comparisons; what did $1 buy 20 years ago type stories. They are the negative ones which reinforce the negatives of a bad economic situation.

But it doesn't need newspapers or TV to tell most ordinary voters that things aren't great. “You don't need a weatherman...”
People don't generally want to hear about those other issues we tend to obsess about either, which doesn't mean we should stop obsessing.

Politics is an insular business and political players don't look very far outside the main game for their clues. That is, they will watch what the five or seven percent of politically engaged are doing and saying and ignore the unstated attitudes of the rest.

Those figures are something I've determined over the years. They are moveable depending on circumstances. The figure for closely or fully engaged is around 2%.

In the pre-internet days there was a rule of thumb that the attitudes expressed in one letter to the editor represented 100 people, which I expect keeps things well within the 7% range, even on the internet.

Even in Australia, where voting is compulsory and media tends to be more politically focussed, selling news is essentially based on two issues; sex and violence. I'm not really sure why this is, just that it is. As these are not the sort of issues we generally canvas in our blogs it is unlikely we'll draw the attention of the majority out there.

But we do draw the attention, at least as a collective, of those 2% of politically engaged. Putting aside obsessions with quantatative polling, shared by the 5-7%, the 2% actually take measurements from just those 3-5% of us who who express opinions.

I'm not saying they agree, or are swayed by our opnions, but the fact is we are all they have to go by. The trick for us is to not become trapped and blinkered by any false sense of power or indeed of powerlessness.

Occasionally the political influence will break out into the wider culture, for a time. The WoT is a good example of capturing the attention of the masses, though that has obviously been mismanaged. The religious right managed for a time to capture an audience of the masses, but they screwed that up.

On the other side Michael Moore and Al Gore have had short runs. But in the end, from WoT to the environment, these issues have as short a shelf life as the latest issue of pop culture.

The only certainty, borrowing from pop culture, is repetition. It seems pointless most of the time but I do believe our repetition of socially important themes eventually helps break down the political barriers.

When a powerful party becomes tired and frrayed, like the Republicans or Britain's New Labour, our constant repetition of their failings helps to entrench their weariness. It also gives fodder to the occasional curious visito from the masses, no doubt confirmning a growing prejudice.