4 posts tagged “elections”

It’s been interesting watching the MSM dissect the Clinton campaign with a whole range of experts saying why she will not be the Democratic Party nominee for the presidency. I would venture to say these are the same experts predicting a Hillary Clinton win a year ago.
   It’s that which I have found remarkable today as Sen. Barack Obama becomes the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party, rather than the very strong likelihood that Sen. Obama has won.
   For months, the mainstream media have been promoting Sen. Obama heavily. One reason is that he is newsworthy to the left. More often than not, his race is used as the reason behind that promotion. In essence, most New Zealanders, and I would say most non-Americans who watched the news from the US, were left in little doubt that he would take the Democratic Party contest.
   Image sells in American politics, and probably politics in many western countries. George W. Bush got people used to thinking about a Republican president in 2000 by forming his cabinet while lawyers battled Florida. When he did win, only diehard Democrats tried to tell the American people they had been hoodwinked. Everyone else awaited the January 20, 2001 swearing-in. Go back a few years and Tony Blair, too, gave an inevitable image of a Labour victory in 1997.
   This time, Sen. Obama has done the same, and it has been a well thought-out campaign: his book, writing from a humanist perspective and admitting any faults that his rivals were likely to dig up; a consistent branding scheme (the use of the Gotham typeface, for example); and vagueness (to give his opponents less of a target).
   On some of these aspects, Sen. Obama has fielded a very different campaign. Only vagueness seems to be the common thread with other winners. A pre-campaign book was clever as well as admitting to things no other potential presidential nominee would, such as his having tried cocaine.
   In fact, when he began getting specific after a challenge by Sen. Clinton, he actually lost traction.
   I do not pretend to like all of Sen. Obama’s policies if I were to look at his voting record in the Senate, any more than I find myself in accord with Sens. Clinton and McCain.
   As a minority, I am glad that a racial barrier has been broken in American politics. Even though Sen. Obama is biracial, he has been branded an African–American through his father’s homeland, showing just how people are habitual pigeonholers. If by the quirk of genetics he had his mother’s skin colour, would his race have become such an issue?
   That one matter shows how far his campaign has come, in a country that would not have fathomed a “black” president other than in fiction, in the form of Morgan Freeman or Dennis Haysbert.
   We can accept God being played by Morgan Freeman, but a black president?
   While having huge African–American support, I totally understand the campaign Sen. Obama ran in terms of race: he plain didn’t mention it.
   I wouldn’t.
   Any member of any minority in the world, whether that minority is black, yellow, brown or white, who has been brought up on the idea of hard work and dignity, would not make race an issue—with perhaps the exception of others making race an issue for him or her.
   I think that earned Sen. Obama brownie points among many of the United States’ immigrants and people descended relatively recently from immigrants.
   It finally proves so many of those lessons from our parents right: that if you work hard, you can become a leader.
   Once upon a time, parents said that but knew that it would take a miracle for a minority to get there, whether we are talking about the US or New Zealand.
   Barack Obama is proof not only of his own abilities, but he represents the hope that the presidency is no longer governed by skin colour, but by sheer hard work. That speaks to a large part of the electorate, including Caucasian–Americans.
   In some ways this has allowed his policies to be overlooked, which is actually unhealthy for democracy. Americans need to be voting on who can bring them true honour and meaning. But just as Sen. Obama began attacking Sen. John McCain’s policies as he presumed himself the Democratic nominee, it will be up to Sen. McCain to reveal his opponent’s policy shortcomings.
   However, it was not always in the bag.
   Those same MSM experts seem to forget that Sen. Clinton, using a campaign that broke the rules on branding (a confused message and confused visual communications) got so close to Sen. Obama that it actually was a miracle she survived and gained as many votes as she did. Writing in a country that has had two successive female prime ministers and, at one point, women in the Governor-General’s and Chief Justice’s role as well, the gender difference means far less to me. What I saw was a clumsy campaign that had more traction than logic would allow me to admit.
   Sen. Clinton’s progress was nothing short of amazing considering she did not play from the rulebook, and we brand consultants will have to at least acknowledge her case and say: anomalies exist in marketing strategy.
   The question is now whether there is a Clinton vice-presidency, but Obama aides are dead set against it. Equally, Clinton aides would not want their senator cosying up with Sen. Obama.
   If the Clinton image of “will say and do anything for the top job” is accurate, and as Sen. Clinton herself mentioned the possibility of assassination, I would not consider the senator from New York to be a vice-presidential nominee if I were Barack Obama. I might get “Arkancided” in the hope of her succession.
   But right now, Sen. Obama has a Democratic Party to reunite and invigorate, something that Sen. McCain may have difficulty doing for an uninspired GOP. Sen. Obama has media visibility on his side, reaching internal as well as external audiences.

[Cross-posted] This has been official for a while (or so I think—not that I ever heard what the Electoral Commission thought, but I did see it on its website). However, I wanted the party to approve the news first before sharing it with you all. The following is the overseas release which was rewritten from the one sent to domestic newsmedia. One that includes a mention of the Bush–Cheney campaign of 2004 was sent to US media.

JY&A Consulting revamps logo for New Zealand’s Alliance Party

Wellington, May 9 (JY&A Media) New Zealand political party, the Alliance, is looking more modern and relevant, thanks to its new logo by JY&A Consulting (http://jya.net/consulting).
   Devised by JY&A Consulting’s Jack Yan, the new logo signifies a new beginning for the democratic socialist political party.
   Mr Yan says that he has been a keen observer of general elections in the UK, US and New Zealand since the 1980s and that played a part in his team’s design.
   He says the Conservatives in 1983, Labour in the UK in 1997 and 2002 and Labour in New Zealand in 1999 and 2003 had certain commonalties in their campaigns, centring around typography.
   He also said that in those years, the party’s name was important, not the symbol—hence the traditional Labour rose was not present on that party’s election materials in 1997 and 2002.
   By abandoning the old A symbol of the Alliance and concentrating on the word, Mr Yan says that the party looks more professional and ready.
   The Alliance has contested every General Election in New Zealand since 1993. However, due to party changes it is trying to rebuild itself for the country’s General Election later this year.
   ‘We have two major parties in New Zealand that vote pretty much the same on all issues,’ says Mr Yan, ‘and minor parties that get ignored because of a lack of visibility. I wanted to change that. Why should minor parties be laboured with second-rate brands?’
   The logo is based around the Frutiger typeface and its lettering is predominantly in red, with a red dot over the i in Alliance to signify its environmental awareness.
   He says the letter i also shows the humanizing aspect of the party.
   ‘As a piece of design I think it looks more cohesive than the committee-led logos of National and Labour,’ he says, criticizing the major two parties in New Zealand.
   ‘I was given a lot of freedom, which is a good sign of how the party leadership handles matters. It clearly believes in trusting the right people.’
   As well as heading JY&A Consulting’s parent, Jack Yan & Associates, Mr Yan co-wrote Beyond Branding in 2003 and is a director of the Medinge Group, a branding think-tank based in Sweden.
   In October 2007 he was a keynote speaker for the Alliance Party at its annual conference.

We’ve ended January 2008 here in New Zealand with 10 murders. The government is saying this is an anomaly, but is it?
   Crime has been rising in New Zealand steadily since I have been observing the numbers and for older New Zealanders, the latest figures are a disgust.
   I am not overly surprised, given the rising gap between rich and poor, suggesting a mismanagement of the economy and an absence of jobs, while values and education have suffered at the same time.
   Those older New Zealanders who can remember back to the 1950s remember a country with roughly half the population and 18 convictions for murder between 1951 and 1957.
   I realize actual murders and successful convictions are different, but assuming that there were a couple of murders in this period that didn’t lead to a conviction, then we’re still looking at 20 over a seven-year period from January 1951 to December 1957.
   That’s roughly three per annum. If there’s double the population now, then we should expect statistics to show that there are six per annum for 2008.
   Remember that medical science wasn’t as advanced, so if we adjust for that, then maybe this estimate isn’t actually that far off.
   In this election year, I wouldn’t buy any party line that says things are all right. I wouldn’t even buy policies that talk about tougher sentencing. Because neither of these address the root problem.
   We need policies in New Zealand that say: we will address this rich–poor gap.
   How? Well, how about recognizing what’s going on instead of kowtowing to multinational corporations operating here?
   Since the end of Muldoonism, New Zealand has become the poster boy of the technocracy, doing everything that the economic experts said should work: privatization, free markets, the ending of tariffs.
   Ask yourself, even in the last five years, can you afford more or less of the things you want in your life? I don’t care if you are a student or a wage-earner or even a small business boss. The answer is probably no.
   When will we wake up and realize that these policies have driven a wedge between the rich and poor in a nation that once prided itself on being a fair, just, middle-class country?
   Since Labour sold off so many state assets in the 1980s, something National continued doing in the 1990s, we now have a lot of things in the hands of foreign corporations.
   Now, if these corporations were running these assets more efficiently, logically the government should be able to increase its tax take, which leads to more money for hospitals, schools and social services.
   But the idea of being a private corporation that spreads its activities across different countries is the ability to minimize the tax you pay, by writing some of it off with the operations you have in other places.
   So the opposite has happened. Meanwhile, these corporations have shed staff so the people who used to work there wound up on the dole, and there’s less money to pay out.
   The rich in cahoots with the big companies have done well while everyone else has suffered.
   To make up the shortfall in government coffers, the Labour Government introduced Lotto and basically became the biggest attraction for gamblers. Now we are reporting a rise in calls to gambling helplines.
   The other idea behind liberalizing our markets was so New Zealanders could go and compete globally. But how were we expected to make that leap? Even the richest New Zealanders of the 1980s didn’t survive the decade in good financial shape.
   We need to innovate and create and start new businesses but the support, as any entrepreneur will tell you, is not there.
   Yet New Zealand is a place of great, novel ideas that often stay dormant, unless that Kiwi goes offshore and has a foreign company become interested.
   I have repeated this example many times: if TradeMe was really that successful, it would have bought Fairfax, not the other way around.
   The solution must be to have New Zealanders own New Zealand businesses, so that New Zealanders have jobs and taxes and profits stay in New Zealand.
   This is not about putting the barriers back up. The multinationals have embedded themselves too much into New Zealand.
   We can only hope to create global businesses that do for us what the multinationals have done here. We also need to encourage entrepreneurship at the small- to medium-sized business level so that everyone can have a chance to get his or her idea off the ground, beating the world. We are still blessed with a fairly good internet infrastructure that can become a useful tool for New Zealanders. 
   We need to consider tax policies that help the poor and penalize the sources for the inequity in New Zealand. The next government needs to play, essentially, Robin Hood. It needs to create policies for the middle class of New Zealand and what makes them happy wage-earners or self-employed business people, because that is where the majority of the tax will come from. ‘Teach a man to fish and he will eat for life.’ Time to stop handing the fish out and pretending it was a conjuror’s trick. (It was only cool when Jesus Christ did it with the 5,000, anyway.)
   And while I am a globalist at heart, this economy is too small at this point to allow technocratic policies to have free reign, without someone seeing to the interests of the Kiwis that need the most help. I want to see food banks disappear in five years because everyone has a job.
   An innovative government that might create new businesses itself can be a useful agent in the business community. In the 1970s and 1980s, New Zealand’s dual-fuel natural gas infrastructure is still a dream for most countries. Yet a huge percentage of the nation’s cars ran on natural gas back then, able to fill up at the majority of stations across New Zealand.
   Government participation in a modernized Keynesian model could just work in 2008 and one only needs to look at Singapore and Malaysia for nearby adaptations of the very policies New Zealand had only 30 years ago.
   No one can claim they are paupers, and Malaysia itself did find, in 1997, that the technocratic way of thinking didn’t work for them. Having a strong man as a prime minister worked in its favour as Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad was able to say what he thought of the corporations wreaking havoc on his country’s financial markets.
   And with relatively little corruption in New Zealand, government innovation is not a bad idea, provided these state enterprises do not get overmanned to the levels they were at in years past.
   Remember, Absolut, the people who make the vodka, is a government-owned enterprise. No one seems to urge the Swedish Government to divest for the sake of the technocracy.
   Then, those who might find themselves in similar situations to the 10 murderers won’t suffer from envy, depression or rage.
   In the 1950s, New Zealand had about nine people unemployed. In the 2010s, we should be looking at 18. Full employment is key and the policies we are following now—policies which Labour and National predict they will essentially follow—won’t lead to any change in our rising crime rate or the widening gap between rich and poor, which neither party has even mentioned in the lead-up to the 2008 elections.

If I was an American and part of the anti-war movement, I would be pretty pissed and wonder who the heck would actually get the boys and girls home from Iraq. These are excerpts from the latest Democratic telecast or debate, from what I understand.
   We all know the dangers of quoting out of context, so if anyone has the full transcript, please feed in a comment and I’ll make sure it’s linked. I am always suspicious of any message with the words Rush Limbaugh in it.

Tim Russert: Senator Obama, will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term, more than five years from now, that there will be no troops, US troops in Iraq?
Barack Obama: I think it’s hard to project four years from now. I think it would be irresponsible. We don’t know what contingencies will be out there.

Rush Limbaugh: Senator Clinton, you have said that you will not pledge to have all troops out by the end of your first term, 2013. Why not?
Hillary Clinton: It is very difficult to know what we’re going to be inheriting. You know, we do not know, walking into the White House in January 2009, what we’re going to find.

Rush Limbaugh: Senator Edwards, will you commit that at the end of your first term, 2013, that all US troops will be out of Iraq?
John Edwards: I cannot make that commitment.

   Remember, folks, a lot of the Democratic candidates voted for the war in Iraq, and they’re still for it, it seems. I could have sworn that only a few weeks ago, the Senator from New York pledged to have US troops back.
   Maybe it was all conditional: it’s hard to tell with sound bites in the media. But these little nuggets will be enough for some.
   I can bet that the conservative media are rubbing their hands in glee over another chance to say, ‘Flip flop,’ regardless of whether any of the leading Democratic candidates for the White House have actually changed their positions.
   Whatever the case, Iraq could be set to be another US base as Germany, Okinawa and South Korea are, regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat gets in to the White House.
   And it makes candidates like Fred Thompson look pretty good: I’ll stay the course, but I’ll drag the Frenchies in. Darn that Arthur Branch and that straight-up Tennessee image.