The political bandwagon, picking up steam

There’s a great deal of fascination with Sen. Barack Obama right now, understandably, given his meteoric rise and charismatic appeal. He’s becoming the rock star of the campaign, so our pop culture is getting more excited about him, and the media are focusing more attention on just how this happened. Like this CBS piece on the anatomy of the Obama phenomenon.

So what happened? How did Obama’s campaign outmaneuver a Clinton team that many observers thought unstoppable?

They break it down, but not surprising that the first thing is his message:

Obama cast himself as the “change” candidate early in the campaign, and his competitors’ attempts to co-opt that message serve as a testament to its effectiveness. Clinton, realizing that an argument built on experience and competence had not won voters over, recast herself as the candidate whose experience could best bring change about.

(See post below on buzzwords.)

John Edwards, pushing populist rhetoric further than his rivals, cast himself as the only man willing to go far enough to affect real change.

And…

Even Mitt Romney, a Republican, has made the notion that he is a change candidate one of the central arguments of his campaign.

The candidates have good reason to cast themselves as change agents: Polls show that the majority of Americans – and the vast majority of Democrats – are now calling for it.

Aren’t all elections about change, really? But you’d think this was a newly discovered commodity. And the media are certainly propelling it.

More than half of Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa said the capacity for change was the most important factor in their assessment of a candidate. But change was not a Clinton campaign theme early in her campaign, which left the door open for Obama to claim it.

There’s this story out today about the American Dialect Society examining words that have worked their way into popular culture of the moment.

The group of wordsmiths chose “subprime” as 2007’s Word of the Year at its annual convention Friday.

“Subprime”?!

The choice signifies the public’s concern for a “deepening mortgage crisis,” the society said in a statement.

Seems to me the public has a great concern for “change”. Maybe it can be put in ‘the most overused word in a one week period’ category.

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