I’ve been paying attention to what’s happening with the US general elections for a while now, and thought I should note down some thoughts I had about Palin and Obama that have been occupying my mind of late.
I’ll make my stance clear on the subject – I dislike Sarah Palin. I hope all this (mostly negative) Palin publicity is actually going to help Obama win. However, over the last few weeks, I have noticed way more creative videos surfacing to defame Palin, if you will, than to popularise Obama and Biden. The news-related ones are well-known, not least her interview with Katie Couric, but some of the more inventive spoofs and videos are the Tina Fey spoof on Saturday Night Live and the P.Diddy video where he asks ‘children’ to vote in the elections because ‘Sarah Palin scares him’. Today I also found this, (it’s titled ‘Pumpkin’, which could be bad news for Palin when you consider the fact that Halloween is round the corner!) – but it is too reminiscent of this Obama image for my comfort. (In case you haven’t seen them already, other interesting election-related sites to take in are Apathy Party ’08, Brand Advocacy ’08 and Palintology – the last of which is a Palin-supported site but it’s interesting to see some of the videos linked there.)
When I keyed in ‘Barack Obama’ and ‘Sarah Palin’ in Google Trends, Palin’s graph does shoot higher than Obama’s when you take just this year into account. And this, when you consider the fact that she was only announced as McCain’s running mate on August 29th.
Palin doesn’t really have a personal campaign manager or separate agency for herself (Rick Davis is the manager for the joint McCain-Palin campaign), so this is a case of negative psychology, or publicity, as the case may be, being put into gear by Obama supporters. I fervently hope it doesn’t become a case of reverse psychology instead.
*UPDATE: Since I’m on the topic anyway and hope not to revisit it too soon, take a look at this Common Craft video, ‘Electing a US President’ – it’s a super simple explanation of the process behind electing a president, and why your vote counts. Also, if you haven’t already, the Google voter film featuring top Hollywood stars pushing you to vote is a good example of reverse psychology – and fun to watch as well.
One Size Fits One 
Some of the attacks take it too far as well. Especially with that stuff about the baby being Bristol’s instead of Sarah Palin’s.
I think in a time like this people will be kinda put off by that kind of talk.