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I don't know how narrowly or generally you meant this statement to be, but I agree with it, almost no matter what, (except for those cases where actual information is needed from consultants, to do a job correctly, or etc.; not for the usual "trick the people and cover up your real opinion until it is too late and they can't stop you then" type). The appearance of "consultants" anywhere and everywhere--whether they are fulfilling any actual purpose or not, is just a further encroachment of capitalism and the corporate way, to the detrement, even loss and death, of everything else. It is the killing of every other kind of approach taken, to anything.
This is why people feel that, no matter how much they read or listen, they still do not know the candidates' positions on issues important to them--they never get a "for" or "against" answer, but only some damned "win-win situation," "making it easier to empower the..." whatever, that is not telling them anything. Consultants tell these people not to commit to an answer, so they won't lose votes along the way. Further, they flip back and forth, with a totally blank face like they did nothing even noteworthy, let alone outrageous, giving different answers to what certainly seemed like the same question.
It cuts the people themselves out of the process, when everything is a "media production" and not the real unvarnished life of our Nation. It introduces ugly "corporate/media-savvy" concepts to campaigns, such as that some people are just not "acceptable" to be on camera or microphone (because they don't "sell" the "product")--not "pretty" enough, overweight, not the "demographic" "we" were going for, etc. Poison, under a system where everybody's vote counts for exactly as much as everybody else's vote, no matter how rich. Grinning, smiling all the time, because "focus groups" like it, this or that phrase used, because "focus groups" like it--what is the difference between this, and a facist or Communist government that will never give you a straight answer on anything, because the "peasants" are not really part of the system?
Consultants (certainly the ones I have been listening to on C-SPAN) are snide and "superior," and laugh at the strangest things, because everything is attempted propaganda and "opinion-management." I heard one laugh at the thought that Bill Clinton is still popular and influencial. No matter what you may think of Clinton's pro-corporate policies, the thought that someone would so completely poison the debate with this constantly recurring contempt, just for the effect, is maddening. You can never have an open discussion--or democracy itself--in this calculating, back-stabbing, angling-for-an-opportunity, atmosphere. Only when people speak freely, and do not weigh every word for "usefulness," will there be a return to just doing things for the general, common good.
Being concerned about "my makeup," "throwing in this phrase so I can sound like I pray for the troops every day," when they probably never do, etc., derails the whole process, from a large scale concern for our country and history, to a puny, petty fixation on the most bizarre little details of conduct. It does not even get at the real scandals that might be uncovered by these people's personal behavior, like Huckabee's labored efforts to get rapist-murderers freed early, or the prolonged torture of a dog by Huckabee's son, then gotten out of the consequences by Huckabee.
Can you imagine what might have become of us all, if Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had had to worry about being "media savvy" and throwing around the right jargon for big corporate donors to be happy, instead of casting all aside, and un-selfconsciously going to work on solving--however it took--the desperate problems of the Nation? It would have killed everything, and replaced it all with only what the corporate world and its strange little concerns of "seeming, but not being" instruct the puppets to do.
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