The Republicans Have Deliberately Chosen to Campaign on Emotion Rather Than Issues

McCain Campaign Manager Rick Davis: “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

I find this to be a reprehensible statement coming from the manager of a presidential campaign.

Wow, nice. I’ve added the quote to the post.

You have the idea, but missed the target. You have to remember REPUBLICANS WILL VOTE REPUBLICAN. The only mouth breather votes they are out to grab were the PO’ed Hillbillery supporters. All republican presidential candidates backed out in hopes of fighting an incumbent Democrat in 2012. They thought there would be no way they could beat either candidate, but didn’t anticipate them beating each other up and splitting the party in half. This left McCain in a race that the Democrats fighting to lose. The battle between Hillary and Obama ruined the D Party for this election, and now McCain will win. Keep in mind, it’s the liberal idiots out there that put “feelings first”. – Can’t have kids know what real life is and shelter them all from loosing. – We have to treat everyone as if they are equal in all aspects – We have to take care of everyone including those unwilling to care for themselves.

The reality is….

• You will loose sometimes in life and the sooner you come to terms with that the better you will know how to handle it and move on.
• Not all people are equal physically and mentally, you can’t have an 80lb person in a position where they may have to carry possibly over 300lbs.
• You can’t save every person out there, because some don’t want to be saved.

Playing to “feelings” is a tactic to win over the idiotic and out of touch with reality Democrats. McCain is winning, and all these types of posts just seem like bitter tears of the dying party. BTW, the republicans are about money and such, but if you don’t agree try living off of hopes and good feelings for a change. You will soon become reliant upon those responsible enough to actually do what it takes to make it in this world. If this happens to be the case, thank that conservative republican.

“The Republicans Have Deliberately Chosen to Campaign on Emotion Rather Than Issues”

Doesn’t that make you angry?

-=T=-

This is a comment on your screed about the civilization two guys stumble on on a hike. I loved your analogy. Two people who have no idea, and one makes one up. He reminds me of your beloved scientists.

Talk about a big bang! Don’t even have the first idea what matter is. They just built a bazillion dollar collider over in france so they can try to take apart an atom. Do you know what they’re going to do with it? They will observe some things they never saw before and give them some zippy new name, like zarks or thlogs, and still not have any idea what they’re holding in their hand when they pick up a rock.

And listen to them talk about extra-terrestrial life! For all we know there could be life on the moon. Life as we know it!?! Take a biology class man. You mean life as we don’t know it!

All that collider is going to do is give Steven Hawking a chance to invent another wonderfully thought out theory. Maybe the bubblegum theory. And some new terms. (Scientists love terms.) Maybe the string force, or dork matter.

If your science can’t even figure out what it’s holding in it’s hand, then it should be carefull what it calls preposterous.

Love, Dad

Mr. Miessler,

With all due respect, scientists have quite a good idea what matter is and are pretty adept at taking apart atoms without enormous atom smashers. What you may have heard is that they hope to find the (hypothetical) Higgs particle which is a part of current physical theory that explains WHY particles have mass. Scientists can understand how the the world works pretty well without knowing WHY the numbers are as they are. For example, they know how much mass a proton has (about 1.67262158 times ten to the negative 27th kilograms)(aka 1.67262158 yoctograms)(really), but they don’t know WHY that number isn’t 1.67381239 or even 2.5. This is the question that they hope to answer with the new particle accelerator in Europe. It isn’t so much an atom smasher as a way to concentrate an enormous amount of energy in a very tiny place. Imagine two cars colliding head on at 15 mph. There’s a lot of energy there at the point of collision. If they collide at 30 mph, there is twice the energy. The more energy each car has, the more energy is concentrated at the point of collision. Of course the “point” of collision is fairly large (compared to an atom say).

So scientists take protons (quite tiny – radius approximately .00000000000001 meters) and pour enormous amounts of energy into them (by accelerating them) and then run them into each other head on. They’re not atom smashing, they’re proton smashing. And, they’re not doing it to see what’s inside a proton, they’re doing it to concentrate all that energy into a TINY amount of volume. What they will see is not what was inside the protons (physics doesn’t work that way)(truth is far stranger than that). The energy changes into new particles including ones that are heavier than (the rest mass) of either proton. The (energy content of the) mass of these new particles can’t exceed the energy of the collision (E=mc^2 and all that). Since this new collider is capable of greater energies than any previous colliders, scientists hope that they will see new particles that are predicted by current theory (particles that have never been detected but that current theories predict ought to be there — though theories differ on what the masses ought to be).

As for life, I’m not sure which of Daniel’s posts you’re talking about, but it does seem pretty unlikely that there is life on the moon. On the other hand, there could very easily be life as we know it tucked away in a niche on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system. Of course when we say “life as we know it” we don’t mean people. There are bacteria on Earth that would thrive in certain places in the solar system. Bacteria are (one form of) life as we know it.

Carl

@TIMM

My answer is YES.

Carl,

I wouldn’t give an affirmative too quickly. It exposes the pretext of this piece, that Obama supporters are capable of engaging in politics via emotional manipulation.

Mr. Miessler,

Hi!

-=T=-

@ TIMM

I’m not so sure. Obama supporters (defined as those who have already made a decision) are unlikely to be swayed by the Republican manipulation ads. McCain supporters are similarly unlikely to change their position. It’s those in the middle who are being aimed at. But, that’s really not the point. Even if one side was more likely than then the other to be swayed by emotional manipulation, I’d be angered by the fact that a campaign manager thought that a corollary was that this was an appropriate way to run a presidential campaign. If we are to have any hope of doing more than stumbling into the future, I think that we need some real debate on the issues (and an admission by the candidates that there are no easy answers to some of the more challenging issues out there [like the economy, like education, like terrorism ... it seems that only in the last of these issues do candidates admit that there are no easy answers]).

Given the fact that Fox News is the most emotionally manipulative major news source (in my opinion) and that it is directed at Republicans (in my opinion), it strikes me that this might be an indication that it is Republicans who are most capable of engaging in politics via emotional manipulation. (But, again, that isn’t really the point in my view.)

Correction …

A few posts back I said “this is THE QUESTION ..” and I should have said “this is ONE OF THE QUESTIONS ..”

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/14/campaign.wrap/index.html