Weekly Analysis III (Assign 3-1): Who’s your Candidate?

With the popularity spotlight of our current electoral process now pasted over every television channel, mentioned in every newscast multiple times, and yard signs starting to become scattered everywhere I felt it appropriate to blog about how voting has become a pop culture hot topic.

Have you ever just sit back at work and listened to the conversations around you? I mean actively listened to what topics people are conversing about? I think you would find yourself greatly surprised. In fact, I did just this just the other day. Of course it was by accident since I wasn’t feeling that well and didn’t feel like participating in all the gossip. On any other day I would have been in the middle of all it, enjoying every last word of it, but this day was amusing to just listen to what everyone had to say about their favorite presidential candidate. I was so amused I actually started to feel better.

I heard things like, “Did you see how Hillary’s hair looked the other day?”, “Don’t you think McCain looks like the Vice President, what his name again by the way?”, oh and my favorite one was “I’m not going to vote because I don’t like any of them.” I sat back and briefly analyzed these statements and came to the conclusion that we as Americans are so wrapped up in our pop culture fads that we cannot get away from the popularity in the culture itself. I think that if we objectively analyzed our pop culture we would realize it’s the popularity that’s really defining our culture.

When’s the last time an independent has won the presidential race? How about never? The reason for this is because we don’t look at the issues we look at the popularity and the paparazzi following that candidate. Why does a presidential candidate need the endorsement of Oprah Winfrey, shouldn’t his stance on the issues be popular enough?

There are a multitude of arguments that can be raised in defense of the candidates and the actual issues they represent. Probably the best argument is the fact that the candidates gain financial backing for their stance on certain issues allowing themselves an enormous commercial advertisement budget. I can accept this but there is a point when it becomes a race of popularity.

I’ll conclude by saying that a lot of my candidate inferences are slightly slanted to a single party but that is not due to my own political views. I am merely writing about who I see the most on TV and thus currently appearing to be the most popular.