Signs of a Real Leader
// The price of the question
It has been a long time since there was such an entertaining presidential campaign on the United States. An African American has never been so close to heading the world’s greatest power and no veteran of the Vietnam War, which had such a monumental affect on the American mentality, will ever run again. The veteran’s time is passing, and only John McCain can extend it. Never has an American woman, much less a former first lady, collected almost 19 million votes in her favor. And never has a woman in the United States been so close to the vice president’s office either. The current elections are a unique mix of drama and soap opera, a fight for ideals and mudslinging, well edited truth and even more carefully constructed lies.
As they say in America, the victory doesn’t win the election, the other competitors lose. There is one thing to which the elections are not an exception. They have to be won on the television screen by trying to ruin the competitor with compromising information and making him struggle to save his reputation. The task is not to show your own rightness, as much as it is to knock the wind out of your opponent.
It is preferable to do that elegantly and prettily. Blunt accusations of financial irregularities or former romantic indiscretions are not enough. I remember the furor George W. Bush made in 2000 when he was talking about Russian corruption at the candidates’ debates and he pronounced the name Chernomyrdin. His Democratic opponent, Albert Gore, even had to recover for an instant before he continued the dialog. Gore never raised the subject of Russia again. He and the Russian prime minister were the cochairmen of the famous Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission. By mentioning Chernomyrdin at the right time, Bush convinced America that, having been abroad exactly twice, he had a better grip on foreign affairs than Gore, who had visited dozens of countries in his eight years as vice president.
Four years later, when John Kerry accused Bush of secretly owning a lumber mill, it sounded so silly that even hardened opponents of the Bush left the subject alone. It was clear that Kerry had already lost and that was his political death thralls. But Bill Clinton’s answer to the accusation of smoking marijuana in his youth was one for the books. Everyone knew it was true and was ready to catch him in a lie. But Clinton was smarter than that. Of course, he said, he smoked marijuana. But he didn’t inhale. And he became president.
You don’t have to convince your supporters. You have to convince those who want to vote for your opponent and those who are undecided. The latter are 20 to 30 percent of the electorate. It is for their benefit that smear campaigns are waged. Those are the campaigns that can wipe out months of high ratings in an instant. Because elections aren’t won in August, September or October, but on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November of every leap year.
Nikolay Zlobin, director of the Russia and Eurasia Project, World Security Institute
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 07, 2008
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