A Step-by-Step Guide for Success
Yesterday we began the journey on how to launch an effective grassroots political campaign. You may read part I here. Here are the next two steps in the process, which will help lay the foundation for successful campaigns.
3. Build your social networking presence.
a. Start with a website. Do not get too fancy. Nothing stinks more of special interest money than a well-designed website. Build your own HTML-coded pages, even if you don’t know what that means. Alternatively, use GoDaddy’s free blog platforms as your new website when you purchase your domain name from GoDaddy (NOTE: Always use GoDaddy.). Leave the GoDaddy advertisements at the top of the page so that your constituents know just how independent, in-touch and down-to-earth you, in fact, are.
b. Enable the God named Youtube. Create some do-it-yourself, self-made videos. Be sure to use an inexpensive video camera (never use a tripod) – or, better yet, no camera at all. Take photographs from other websites and insert those into a video with you narrating your platform – which is, you’ll remember, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM – interspersed with quotes from your enemies. Be sure to take your enemy’s quotes out of context so that everyone knows just how corrupt and dysfunctional they are.
c. Take your campaign to Twitter. Because Twitter is new, that means that it is automatically better than doing time consuming things such as walking door-to-door to spread your message. Twitter has plenty of benefits like gaining 16,000 new followers just by clicking a single link. These new followers will most likely translate into 16,000 new “Yes!” votes for you come election time. Also, because Twitter limits your “tweets” to a mere 140 characters, you have less opportunity to explain yourself but can easily link to examples pointing toward corruption by your enemies.
4. Exploit wrongdoing (or invent it)*. Look carefully at your enemies. Bought by special interests? Late night, discreet trysts with transsexual prostitutes that involve latex undergarments, ball gags and artifically flavored fruit popsicles? Bushels of methamphetamine in frozen caskets buried deep beneath organic or floral gardens? Whatever it is, find it and exploit it. NOTE: Sources for political wrongdoings are best found in two places:
A) Opinion columns and pundits broadcasting on TV or radio (this is the least credible source);
B) Anonymously written blogs (this is the most credible). Because bloggers can write and post anonymously, they are more likely to tell the real truth than if they use their real names. People who use real names will often censor themselves and therefore won’t print anything truthful. This is the problem with newspapers.
Other sources for information that are not very credible but can potentially help your platform are organizations that have names containing words like “institute,” “research,” “independent” and/or “policy.” The problem with such entities is that although they can provide intelligent sounding source material, and they don’t always have to publicly disclose their funding sources, their literature, especially if they are called institutes, think tanks and the like, may be too confusing for the common man.
The main point, though, is that even if you find marginal examples of wrongdoing, you can easily make it wrong by simply saying it is wrong or by creating a reason for why it should be wrong. Always demean your opponent to make yourself look better and strengthen your campaign.
*NOTE: Finding where the enemy goes wrong may be difficult (which is why you must invent reasons on occasion), but it’s far more challenging to find out anything wrong with your own party and its members; even less so, with yourself. Obviously, since you are running for office, you must be a good person with good ideas or, at the very least, much better than what currently is running the show. Note that the same does not apply to your competition (read: the enemy with a checkered past, dull wit and various conflicts of interest). Moreover, since you are most likely the member of a political party, that means that your party, or the one most ideologically aligned to it, must inherently be more saintly than the opposing party. Evidence will support this supposition if you look for it selectively.
Part III, the final steps, will be posted tomorrow morning.
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Mike McDowell
1 year ago
Darn those artificially flavored fruit popsicles!
I don’t mean to jump the gun here, Bob, but what about Myspace and Facebook? I heard EVERYBODY is on those. My nephew has 500 friends on there – that sounds like 500 votes to me. How can I leverage Myspace and Facebook into people understanding that I’m the “grassroots” candidate?
: )
(PS – Don’t bother talking about Reno Baby! I checked it out. Not impressed. Plus, babies can’t vote.)
bconrad
1 year ago
You are correct, sir. I forgot about the three other important outlets in which to launch such a campaign. My biggest oversight is that, in fact, the bulk of the campaign should occur in Second Life. I have, once again, failed to adequately get across my point.
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