John McCain and Barack Obama were going at each other this week and the loser was: Hillary Clinton. It’s not the pledged delegate math, it’s not the endorsements, no it’s the narrative that shows that Hillary is not competing anymore. When you’re not part of the narrative, you’re the tree that fell in the forest that no one heard falling.

McCain and Obama clashed over the GI Bill, but both of course weren’t too concerned with that bill; every narrative line needs a vehicle. Obama kicked off the ball by criticizing McCain’s opposition to the bill. Show ▼

The main theme that Obama was using is the ‘McCain is a Bush replica’ meme. He mentions ‘the president’ twice in the space of just a couple of sentences. Why Obama does this is obvious. McCain keeps this narrative line credible though by doing fundraisers with Bush. The fact is that McCain didn’t appear with Bush in two months, but I am convinced that people’s perception would place this interval much shorter. I believe perception, and not so much reality, would make fertile ground for this narrative line.

The second theme in Obama’s quote is partisanship. He presents himself as the bi-partisan candidate, so he wants to frame McCain as a partisan player. The mention of ‘posturing’ comes close to a character assesment but it is just a minor theme here, so I’ll ignore it.

McCain then responded. Show ▼

There is a lot more to McCain’s response than the unsurprising touting of his military credentials and Obama’s lack of these. There is the mention that Obama would need to do some learning according to McCain — a theme we’ve heard more these days. But the most interesting piece is that McCain’s campaign clearly has taken notice of Obama’s habbit of questioning his opponent’s character and how assertive they deal with this.

As I said, Obama’s ‘political posturing’ claim is a minor one but the McCain campaign picked it out and enlarged it to bigger proportions by branding it ‘impugning the motives of his opponent’. It seems that the McCain campaign is actively using Obama’s practise of assessing his opponent’s character, using it against him, even magnifying it where necessary. And then of course McCain, ironically, goes on to asses his opponent’s character himself, saying Obama is ‘exploiting a thoughtful difference of opinion to advance his own ambitions’. McCain takes another leaf out of Obama’s book by making the Democratic senator’s behaviour part of a pattern with ‘as he always does’.

Obama comes back swinging. Show ▼

One hopes that the candidates will care just as much about veterans when they make it to the White House, but that won’t be the case; the veterans are just a vehicle here for the narrative. Obama uses his trademark ‘yet another lengthy personal, political attack’ claim again. Let’s hope that the candidates are going to try some new narrative lines, otherwise this is going to be a campaign with very few dimensions…

Additions to Obama’s Narrative Chart

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Additions to McCain’s Narrative Chart

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Two of the main themes of Obama’s primary campaign often went hand-in-hand. The first theme consisted of charges that the other side was attacking him and this almost always catapulted the second theme: ‘See, my opponent is untrustworthy.’

The Obama campaign often repeated the claim that Hillary Clinton will do or say anything to win an election. This charge contains both themes. There is the reference to her alleged attacks, while at the same time making it something that shows her doubtful character. This radio ad makes the connection between the two elements more obvious:

Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected. Now she’s making false attacks on Barack Obama.

It’s good to mention here that this blog doesn’t analyse the truthfulness of such allegations from either side; it just analyses the narrative. Obama’s narrative during the primaries was riddled with claims that he was being attacked and that this made his opponent distrustful. Show ▼

These two themes in Obama’s narrative have a particular dynamic. He takes one specific incident, staking the claim that this is an attack by his opponent. Then come the two key components. Firstly he makes the incident part of something bigger. With Hillary there were the claims that ‘this is part of a disturbing pattern’, that there was ‘a constant barrage of attacks’ and the subtler ‘once again’ and ‘day after ‘day’. Next he makes the incident about something yet even bigger: his opponent’s character. The Obama campaign labelled Hillary as someone ‘who isn’t seen as honest and trustworthy’ and who has ‘issues around trustworthiness’. To put Obama’s narrative in plain language:

• This Monday morning you deliberately stepped on my toes.
• You are always stepping on my toes.
• What a wicked person you are.

Why am I discussing this when this blog is about the narrative in the general elections? Because it seems that Obama is clinging on to this double-barreled shotgun for the next round and it is firmly aimed at the GOP and by default John McCain.

There’s a video on YouTube from the Tennessee Republican Party. It has clips of Nashville residents talking about why they feel proud of their country interspersed with clips of Michelle Obama saying: ‘For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.’ It finishes with: ‘The Tennessee Republican Party has always been proud of America.’ In a Good Morning America interview Obama responds to this video. Show ▼

On three separate occasions in the interview Obama claims that the GOP is ‘attacking my wife’, which is ‘unacceptable’, ‘low class’ and ‘detestable’ — setting the stage again for the familiar narrative. Then he goes to the next phase: making it part of something bigger. He talks about ‘the kind of campaign that they want to run’ and the ‘restoration of decency to this process’ — equating a video from the GOP department in Tennessee to a campaign and even the electoral process. And then comes the kicker: the character assessment.

I think that the American people also would like to see some restoration of decency to this process. And when you start attacking family members, there’s a lack of decency there.

Especially for people who purport to be promoters of family values, who claim that they are protectors of the values and ideals and the decency of the American people to start attacking my wife in a political campaign I think is detestable.

Obama implies that the GOP is lacking values, bringing his narrative line to:

• The GOP launched a detestable attack on my wife.
• This kind of campaign brings indecency to the electoral process.
• It shows that the GOP is lacking values.

A narrative line like this has to be credible to work though. With Hillary Clinton this was probably simple because Obama was tapping into the widespread perception that she is untrustworthy. And now with the current post-George W. Bush mood we should be expecting to see a lot more of this from Obama in the general election campaign.

Additions to Obama’s Narrative Chart

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Everyday I go through the images of this presidential campaign to keep track of the visual narrative. It’s easy enough to find pictures of Barack Obama. There are the regular Obama-amidst-a-crowd images, there was the fist bump, screaming paper front pages, childhood pictures and loads of fan art (examples 1, 2 and 3). But everyday I’m struggling to find visuals of John McCain. There are some editorial cartoons, usualy mocking his age or comparing him to Bush, and often I run into pictures of McCain the Vietnam war hero. But that’s about it. There are of course also McCain’s campaign trail pictures. They’re distinctive for how indistinctive they are; there’s nothing that catches the eye. Actually sometimes it’s hard to spot the candidate himself. This morning I was struck by a McCain picture where I could literally not distinguish the Senator:

This photo was taken during a town hall meeting at Federal Hall in New York. McCain is obliterated by the architecture; no logos or whatsoever can be seen. Compare that to this picture that was shown across the media:

Obama’s face and logo fill the whole image.

I looked up the visual coverage of McCains’s NY event, made a compilation of it and couldn’t help but wonder: “Where’s Waldo McCain?”

Branding has become a central part of presidential elections. That’s not good or bad; it’s a reality and an understandable one for that matter. It is part of the gradual decline of ‘ideological politics’ and the growing importance of the ‘politics of trust’. John Thompson writes about this in his excellent book on political scandals—a phenomenon that has great impact on political branding. He states that the rise of the service sector and knowledge-intensive industries has transformed the social context of politics. Parties can no longer simply rely on the old social classes which once provided the core of their electoral support. Increasingly parties and their leaders have to struggle to win the support of a growing pool of uncommitted voters. It is important to emphasize that traditional class-based politics has not disappeared; political affiliations are just less likely to be handed down from one generation to the next and voters are more likely to decide on the basis of the specific policy packages offered by the political parties.

This has two major impacts. Ideologies are an interconnected set of believes that give people a framework to view the world. With the decline of these, many people feel increasingly uncertain about how best to tackle problems. In a world where there are no simple solutions, we have to place more and more faith in our political leaders to make sound judgments. Thus people become more concerned with the character of the candidates and with the question of trust.

The second impact of the gradual decline of ideological politics is that politicians move increasingly towards a common centre ground. Therefore they search for other means by which they can differentiate themselves from one another: character. The Democratic nomination race was a clear example of this. Obama and Hillary didn’t differ much on policies. So where there were differences they were amplified. But the main means of differentiating was the packaging: change versus experience.

The growing importance of trust and the growing importance of character slash packaging, make political branding essential.

What is the connection between trust and branding? One only has to look at the definition of the latter. Brand is the recognition and personal connection that forms in the hearts and minds of your customers through their accumulated experience with your brand, at every point of contact. Ideally the brand that emerges is a positive one, leading to trust, loyalty and advocacy for your offerings. Short version: with branding you can stimulate trust.

And the connection between character/packaging and branding? Well, branding is about character. An analogy between Obama vs Hillary and Pepsi vs Coke shows how powerful this can be. As I said before, Obama and Hillary didn’t differ much in factual flavor—i.e. their policies—just like Pepsi and Coke, but the more in character. And what does an interesting experiment show us?

The experiment, a laboratory-controlled version of the famous Pepsi Challenge, revealed that flavour seems to be the last thing that consumers rely on in their preference for Pepsi or Coca-Cola.

When asked to taste blind, they showed no preference. However, when the participants were shown company logos before they drank, the Coke label, the more famous of the two, had a dramatic impact: three-quarters of the tasters declared they preferred Coke.

Branding is so influential it alters our perception of the product—in our case presidential candidates. Actually it is so powerful that it doesn’t simply differentiate two similar products, it sets a preference based on how we feel about a product: Coke over Pepsi.

But how important is packaging when there are substantive differences, like between Obama and McCain? Well there’s enough proof that packaging is still essential. First, many people might see the difference between the candidates but don’t have a preference. People might not be well-informed to know about the differences. People might rather stay at home at November 4. And there’s even proof that packaging prevails over substantive arguments—for this read the great book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. In all these cases packaging can be the lever.

So we come back to the question why branding is so important in elections. First, branding can stimulate trust from the voter in the candidate, an important feature in a world where ideologies have become less important and we therefore have to place more and more faith in our political leaders to make sound judgments. Second, branding helps differentiating on basis of character/packaging where voters have no preference.

And how is McCain doing in this department? Later on I’ll continue on McCain’s mixed message.