The American Elections: The American Way of Campaigning

I started this series of posts about the American Presidential Elections and its campaigns to see the differences between their elections and ours in order to have our baby "democracy" learn from one of the oldest of democracies in the world. Leave your hatred/love to their politics aside and focus on the two big parties and what they do to win the elections. My posts will be only about the Democrats and the Republicans.

The American way of campaigning is almost always about making negative propaganda about the opponent. They find the worst speeches, videos or people in the opponent's campaign and spread them all over the country. I personally see this as a sign of weakness, it's as if there is nothing good about my candidate, but at least he's better than yours. During the elections, Americans look for the worse candidate and choose the other one. But after all this has always been the American way, and it has always worked.

During the last elections the fight was very hard between Barack Obama and John McCain until the Democrats sent out some negative propaganda about his vice president, Sarah Palin. But this has also been after the Republicans sent negative propaganda about Obama's priest which had made him lose some supporters. Taking into consideration that politics is almost always dirty and full of scandals, the PR people always have a lot of work to do and they succeed in having Americans at least partially vote according to these scandals.

If you remember Shafiq's speeches before the runoffs, he used the same technique against the Muslim Brotherhood, and although he lost, his words might have drove many people away from his now ex-opponent, President Morsy.

The Democrats' homepage is 75% negative propaganda against Mitt Romney and only 25% was for how good President Obama was in the past almost four years and how good he plans to be in the next for years if he gets elected.

Americans treat their elections as if it were war. "Fight back against the Republicans" the Democrats would say. They make it sound as if the Republicans' ultra right plans would bring the country down. They talk about the opponent as if he were the devil himself. And the truth is that when I went through their website and read their propaganda (tomorrow's post), I was horrified of Mitt Romney winning. I guess it really works!

And of course it's the same thing with the Republicans whose frontpage's title is "Obama's Countdown To Medicare's Bankruptcy" and on their page they actually have a counter. Obama being president has given the Republicans more space for negative campaigning. Their frontpage is Obama's yearly failures with a great number of videos of Obama promises and failures. There is not a word about Mitt Romney on there, not even his name.

To be continued...