The constant reminder that this election was a marketing spectacle came every time a TV reporter stood in front of a focus group of undecided voters. The irony of an uninformed, politically uninterested group of people dominating the media was more than most viewers could take. Swing voters have determined elections for a long time now, but something else was happening here. Camera lenses were trained on the hapless undecideds in the hope that, under the glare of national exposure, the process of persuasion itself might be revealed before our very eyes. Eager journalists hoped for definitive answers, yet the undecideds always managed to disappoint.
Persuasion is always a frustrating affair.
When The New York Times decided to run a front-page story on the subliminal message created by notorious Republican media consultant Alex Contellanos, other media followed suit, reveling in the moment with stories made more fascinating by Bush's mangling of the word he repeatedly pronounced as subliminable. While Dubya was learning to pronounce the word, the rest of us were becoming experts on hidden messages. Advertising practitioners got airtime and column inches as we learned that Madison Avenue couldn't agree on whether subliminal advertising really worked or not. In an age inundated with commercial messages and marketing strategies, little was surprising about the story except that this was advertising of a different sort, something vaguely unfair, with residues of a kind of brainwashing that seeks unconscious acquiescence to a message never recognized. Nothing could be further from a democratic process.