Campaigns & Elections' Politics - February 2008 - (Page 24) Eve Fairbanks If Only They’d Play Hard to Get It’s tough to swoon for someone who’s invading your space. had a strange dream the other night. I was living in some sort of Orwellian state where strongmen were running for high office, and wherever I went—my car, my house—their voices beamed right into my brain. It was as if even one minute spent thinking about anything other than their Greatness was a prosecutable crime. I tried to go chill out with friends at a party, but the Big Brothers showed up there, jabbering away stupidly in kid slang. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, but when I took it out, it wasn’t ringing; it was playing a clip from one of the candidate’s speeches. I went to church, but an aspiring leader was there as well, holding forth from the pulpit. It seemed like I couldn’t get away, and I began to hyperventilate in fear. I looked up into the sky— help me, Lord!—but a huge blimp was blacking out the sun. On its side was painted the name of yet another strongman. Geez—a campaign anxiety dream! I must be doing too much trail reporting, followed by too many crummy sidecars at my favorite watering hole. Or maybe I’m just trying to cope with today’s weird reality. After all, my dream is actually playing out this election year. Remember the blimp that sailed for Ron Paul? (At least airspace restrictions kept his zeppelin from flying directly over Washington, D.C., preserving at least one shred of dignity in our political life.) The person corralling votes at church is, of course, Mike Huckabee. The voices on our cell phones are the candidates’ downloadable ringtones. The people crashing the party are those same candidates again, invading social networks like MySpace and Facebook. (If you don’t believe they’re pretending to be young and 24 Politics I hip there, just check out Barack Obama’s Facebook page, where he tells us his “favorites” include “SportsCenter” and the Fugees.) The voices beaming into our cars and homes? The endless streams of robo-calls and television ads. Our presidential candidates are now intruding more and more aggressively into more and more parts of our lives. Just how bad is it? Last fall, Mitt Romney shattered a record by running 10,000 political advertisements—by the first of October, three full months before the Iowa caucus. Commenting on the CNN.com story touting Romney’s ad bombardment, Shawnie from Grants Pass, Ore., reasoned, “Romney is awesome! He aired 10,000 ads because he can. He is a winner.” This might sound like a flawless argument, except that it would logically yield us a President Wii and Vice President Oreck Eight-Pound Vacuum. There’s no evidence the overflow of attention is making us love our candidates any more. Ten Thousand Ad Mitt was not, in fact, a winner in Iowa or New Hampshire. And a Pew survey recently found that half of people who receive robo-calls from political candidates hang up immediately. The other 50 percent are probably people like Jennifer Stanley’s son. Ms. Stanley, a voter who was on the receiving end of a barrage of Hillary Clinton robo-calls, told the New York Daily News: “I just hang up, but my son thinks it’s fun. He has fake conversations with her. He’s 13.” Then again, does anybody have non-fake conversations with Hillary? Nevertheless, despite low dividends, this level of intrusion is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Every year the candidates rake in more money to hire more people, mix up their strategies and further exploit old and new technologies. So don’t be surprised if Big Brother (and Big Sister) find even more inventive ways to plague our lives. In fact, I’ll make a few predictions as to what these politicians could pull on us next. Candidates need some way to reach those last pesky holdouts who manage to evade their clutches. How about amplifying a strategy used by hopeless Duncan Hunter, the Re- February 2008 ILLUSTRATION: PATRICK MEREWETHER http://www.CNN.com
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