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TexasTowelie

(112,167 posts)
Thu Sep 25, 2014, 09:35 PM Sep 2014

Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton are Perfecting the Non-Campaign

In her 1988 campaign classic, “Insider Baseball,” Joan Didion wrote that political campaigns had little to do with democracy, and were not about “affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs.” Instead, “the process” was a “mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals”—policy experts, reporters, pundits, pollsters, advisors—”to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”

In her essay, Didion coolly dissects the 1,001 bullshit ways Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush are manufactured as candidates, abetted by a media all too game to play along. But the meta-narrative she documents emerged from public performances—no one involved tried to hide what they were doing. (The title of the essay comes from an “eerily contrived moment” in which Dukakis tosses a baseball to his press secretary on an airport tarmac while reporters and camera crews diligently take notes for stories on Dukakis’ authenticity and “toughness.”)

This is simply how modern political campaigns—at least high-level ones—are conducted. Didion’s complaints now seem a tad antiquated, though still righteously spot-on.

But now comes a new twist: the art of the non-campaign. The candidate who doesn’t even bother to put on a show, doesn’t even pretend to reach the broad middle of the citizenry and instead appears behind closed doors to small groups of like-minded voters, if he or she appears in public at all.

Read more: http://www.texasobserver.org/dan-patrick-ken-paxton-art-non-campaign/

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Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton are Perfecting the Non-Campaign (Original Post) TexasTowelie Sep 2014 OP
Damn Towlie malokvale77 Sep 2014 #1
Lately I've been thinking about throwing my hat into the ring also. TexasTowelie Sep 2014 #2
I can assure you... malokvale77 Sep 2014 #3

malokvale77

(4,879 posts)
1. Damn Towlie
Thu Sep 25, 2014, 10:14 PM
Sep 2014

I should run for office. I know small groups of like-minded voters, and I'm pretty sure that I could master the art of "Non-Campaign".

I could just through my hat into the ring, say nothing, and everybody would be so intrigued, they would just have to vote for me.

What a freakin' concept. Ain't politics grand?

TexasTowelie

(112,167 posts)
2. Lately I've been thinking about throwing my hat into the ring also.
Thu Sep 25, 2014, 10:19 PM
Sep 2014

It's a shame that I can't have my name listed on the ballot under my nom de plume so that the opponents could dig up the dirt already filed under my actual name.

malokvale77

(4,879 posts)
3. I can assure you...
Thu Sep 25, 2014, 10:38 PM
Sep 2014

my name is clear under whichever one I choose to run as.

Actually that is probably a detriment to win office in Texas.

Texas is a political mess.

Rest assured, you would have my vote. Be sure to PM me the name you will be running under. I will spread your credentials far and wide.

Take care darling.

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