August 20, 2008
Simple slogans for simple ideas
I read recently about Miller Beer reviving their popular late-80s slogan “tastes great, less filling.” The ad campaigns built around this platitude were very popular, and why shouldn’t they have been, it’s a simple slogan that explains a simple beer and that’s just great for selling low-end beverages.
Unfortunately Republican Presidential candidate John McCain is following a similar model of offering simple catchphrases while on the campaign trail to explain his future policies. He’s rebranding Our Fine President’s war on terror as “The Transcendental Challenge”, promised to balance the federal budget in one term in office while at the same time promising tax cuts for all, and is telling everyone who will listen that drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico will solve the nation’s energy problems and fix the economic downturn in short order.
The public seems to be eating up these simple answers to our nation’s complex problems (along with McCain’s low brow attacks on Democratic opponent Barak Obama) and that’s very troubling. Sure catchphrases espousing simple solutions are easy to get across to a nation with a flashbulb attention span that prefers everything in single serving size, but none of what he’s saying will offer any real world solutions.
The war on terror has been a misnomer from the beginning because you cannot fight a noun, and the reality of a complex battle against a not-always-obvious enemy is a lot more difficult to explain. It’s a conflict that can’t be fought in a traditional sense and will involve a lot more communication than pursuit of evildoers to “the gates of hell” as McCain has become fond of saying.
With record budget deficits, balancing the nation’s finances will either need to be a long slow project or involve slashing a majority of the government’s services. It certainly is not going to be an achievable goal with more across the board tax cuts, but McCain is promising both. He says he can fix the economy too, but with the number of people he’d have to put out of work to balance the budget, it doesn’t seem likely he can do all that.
Then of course there’s his promise that offshore drilling will be a cure-all to oil issues. McCain certainly knows that allowing offshore drilling will not impact the markets for more than a decade, and his aides should be making sure he knows that the projected reserves there are barely enough to satisfy a year of our current consumption. Yet he presses on with expanding the myth of a quick fix oil solution.
There’s one word for all these simple solutions McCain’s been peddling of late; misleading. Right there, that word says it all. McCain desperately wants to take over the helm of this country and to get there he’s willing to say whatever it is people want to hear whether or not those statements are based in any kind of reality. It seems that someone who’s willing to be so misleading in his quest for position of power will not make the best leader when he gets there. His words take things in the wrong direction and if he’s elected, his actions will certainly follow their mistaken leads.