Unlike South Africa or Britain, more important than the specific promises of a political party, US parties often make more headway with voters through a kind of nearly subliminal whisper of the things that can happen if voters will just come along. There is history here.
For political observers and analysts familiar with South African or British-style politics, close textual analysis of party platforms becomes extremely important. The fights within a party over the specific contents of the party’s political platform become versions of the likely future of a nation’s politics, rendered in miniature.
We will see bits and pieces of this revealed during the presidential campaign, but at the whim of the president. And if the incumbent president actually wins re-election , many of the specifics of the GOP platform will largely be filed away in file #13, and the initiatives of the new administration will be whatever the president decides they are on any given day, and as they are announced via a flurry of intemperate, frequently-illiterate tweets.
Instead of the pages of detail, would-be presidents seek to find a phrase or image that constructs a way voters can imagine themselves as supporters of that candidate and so voters can project their hopes and aspirations onto the image and persona of the candidate. As far back as 1840, well-to-do gentleman farmer, politician, and long-retired general William Henry Harrison’s people forged a winning campaign for him from some fairly unpromising material.
Twenty years later, Abraham Lincoln’s campaign managers could portray him as a real son of the soil , despite his more recent years of success as a lawyer for the rapidly expanding railroads. Honest Abe, “The Rail Splitter”, managed to best his long-time antagonist, Stephen Douglas, and two others in the election of 1860, although that victory confirmed the South’s rebellion and the ensuing Civil War that Lincoln’s fortitude guided the North to victory.
In 1928, Republicans, in a wordy broadsheet advertisement, promised voters “a chicken for every pot”, with the full text promising a future of unbounded opportunity – if only voters would pick Herbert Hoover for president. He won, but probably wished he had not, given what took place by October 1929, what with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange.
In 1968, Richard Nixon, this time running successfully as the “New Nixon”, had promised he would be the “law and order” president, confronting the social and political turmoil of the late 1960s. In fact, this has substantially provided an impetus for the incumbent president’s sloganeering that he would “Make America Great Again” and similarly be a law and order president as well.
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