The 2012 campaign is well under way now, especially after Romney picking his VP candidate in Paul Ryan.
Having said that, the PR messaging is nothing to be impressed by. Both candidates are pressing full-steam ahead with messaging points that have little or no relevance to the real issues facing Americans (and the world).
Obama is not running on his record (because his record sucks), nor is he running on where he will take America by the end of his second term. Instead he is attacking Romney at every turn in an attempt to convince Americans not that he is good, but rather that Romney is bad.
Romney on the other hand is using the age-old technique of taking the low road while acting like you are taking the high road. He recently told the president to take his 'campaign of division, anger and hate back to Chicago."
Ummm... Mitt, just a heads up, that sounds pretty divisive and angry. It also fuels the hate those may have towards Obama.
It's a clever messaging technique that Mitt is using. It's the same circular logic that is used to justify wars. "We believe in peace. But I say you believe in war. Therefore, we have no choice but to pre-emptively attack you so that we can ensure peace." (Define your stance. Define your opponents stance (even if it's not their actual stance). Then use your definition of their stance to justify why you have to behave in ways that are contradictory to your originally stated stance). This is how you say one thing, do another thing and actually blame your opponent for your hypocrisy.
Mitt Romney is down in the mud and muck just as much as Obama and is a total hypocrite to suggest he is any more or less partisan than Obama is. He just wants different things than Obama.
So it looks like we've got another three months of childish, mud-slinging type messaging from the two candidates.
Full disclosure, personally I don't like Obama or Romney. They are both merely figure heads who act like there will be a massive difference if you choose one or the other, but in reality, they would each govern almost identically to each other.
That said, it's getting nearly impossible to project who is more likely to win this race because both candidates are fatally flawed from a PR perspective.
Romney's Fatal Flaw
The fatal flaw Romney has is that he refuses to release his taxes prior to 2010 I believe.
Romney says it's not required that he do so and he's not going to do so simply because Obama has asked for them. He has said it will only lead to the Obama camp muddying the debate by bringing up endless tax-related questions.
Romney does have a point. It is true that if he released his taxes for say the past 10 years he would end up having to answer hundreds of questions. He doesn't want to spend the last three months prior to the election explaining every line item in his past tax returns.
Having said that, from a PR perspective, not releasing the taxes is dumb. It gives the Democrats a club that they will beat Romney on the head with for the next three months. And justly so.
It would be different if Romney wasn't mega-rich. The fact that he is mega-rich though, and the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, means that its relevant to voters whether or not Romney's taxes are in proper order. Which is to say he didn't take advantage of every loop hole known to man to essentially pay as little tax as humanly possible.
Now, we all know Romney will never release his taxes because we all know that's exactly what he did. I don't know a single business person on the face of this planet who doesn't take advantage of every legal tax break they can find. Rich or not, who wants to pay taxes if they don't have to?
Where Romney is messing up is in hiding those past tax returns for fear that Americans won't want to vote for him knowing that some years he may have made millions and paid virtual no taxes. But what Romney should do is simply own the fact that he doesn't believe in paying any more taxes than he is required to under the law because the government just pisses away the money that he worked to earn.
This is the mistake a lot of people make when it comes to PR. They think people won't understand so they try to hide something. The problem is that in hiding it, people assume you've done the worst thing they can imagine. So not only do they assume Romney dodged every tax he could, they now have doubt regarding his character that he isn't man enough to own up to it.
Obama's Fatal Flaw
Obama's fatal flaw is much simpler, he has failed. Almost everything he promised Americans in 2008 he has failed to deliver.
- End partisan politics in Washington - Fail
- End lobbyist influence in Washington - Fail
- End the wars (he did get the Nobel Peace Prize after all) - Fail
- To be truthful with the American population - Fail
- Get unemployment below 8 per cent (and I think he project 6 per cent by the end of his first term) - Fail
- To move America away from 'small petty' politics - Fail (his attacks on Romney are exactly that)
Obama is like a really good snake-oil salesman. Just buy this elixir and you'll be cured.
The only problem is that four years later when the elixir still isn't working, it's hard to pitch people that it just needs another four years and then it will work.
That's Obama's fatal flaw, can he sucker people in to buying his snake oil after burning them the first time around? Time will tell, but this is why he's attacking Romney so much, because his best bet of winning is not offering another round of snake-oil, but rather convincing people that Romney is a far bigger crook than he is.
Obama may have broken promises, but Romney shipped jobs over seas and left Americans jobless while getting rich off their misery - that's the Obama pitch.
Po-tay-to / Po-tah-to
In the end, the 2012 election will be nothing more than mud-slinging because the reality is that the president cannot fix the mess the economy is in.
The system is broke:
- Gap between rich and poor is greater than ever and there is no way to close it (unless you implement a 75 per cent tax on the rich like France has done)
- Chronic unemployment has left 20+ million Americans in dires straight and even if the economy rebounds, the damage to their lives is permanent
- The stock market has returned nothing over the past four years. It's still in negative territory compared to where it was in 2008. Which means, baby boomers do not have the nest egg they were counting on to retire. This reality will become very clear over the next 5-10 years.
- The banks continue to make crazy investment bets, using a mix of customer funds and tax payer money to back their bets
- The pension system will implode when the stock market crashes. And even if the stock market doesn't crash, it's not going to return the annual seven per cent required for most pension funds to meet their pay-out obligations over the coming years.
Anyway, you can go on and on about the fundamental breakdowns in the system (which are going to result in unprecedented hardship over the next 10 years), none of which can be fixed merely by putting in a different president.
The system will only get fixed after it has crashed and enough people are suffering that consensus forms as to what needs to be done to clean the mess up.
Until then, it's a fool's dream to hope that either Obama or Romney will actually do the things required to return America (and the world) to the standard of living of the 80's or 90's.
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