It is interesting to see how the media hype with all their analysis of who is leading and not has generated an interest to the second presidential debate that is just a day away. It, kind of, brings back memories of the previous debate, and, the hype that was created prior to the debate, and, the aftermath of why it happened the way it happened, who won and lost and why.
While all our eyes are on this presidential debate that is formatted to suit a town hall type meeting; while we understand that the audience will be mostly people who are undecided, nothing can be said with any certainty about the TV audience. I think the worst thing that can happen is trying to be the one that you are not.
While the format is meant to bring the candidates close to the people, it is difficult for the candidates to debate when one candidate is the current president. While the president is burdened by the facts he knows, the same cannot be said about the other who is not a president. He or she can say anything and get away with it as long as the audience can believe in what is being said. Fact checking that comes after the debate does not seem to water down the performance.
While everyone wants specifics, we have experienced that specifics are not easy to narrate in a political setting. The nature of the political process is such that the specifics that are said today will be forgotten after the election or given a different color to paint a different picture of the same. Even when specifics are achieved during a presidential term, the specifics stand no chance of getting noticed when people are getting hurt due to those stand-offs that we all witnessed among congress, senate and white-house.
Since the political process set a time-table that sometimes crosses the first term of a president, the policies enacted in the first term can never be felt – good or bad in the first term. So no one knows. So it will be a constant struggle to have some early wins to show that the direction the nation is heading is quite sound and is not littered with obstacles of all kinds for an economic recovery that is still on its knees from the fall it took in 2008.
I very much like to see not the aggression, but a passion to serve the country and a desire to lift the country with the processes that are either detailed or tuned to ‘nation building’. In my other blog on ‘global citizenship’ I talked about the wasteful processes that are inherent in the current immigration system and I can talk about such processes in other industries including insurance industry, transportation industry, service industry, manufacturing industry and in distribution industry. We all have seen the finance industry burdened with regulations that are sometimes making mockery of the very structure in which banks serve the population. If every individual who opens a mortgage loan or a deposit account tries to read the fine print that runs for pages, the whole country will surely be losing billions of dollars in unproductive work.
So let’s take our eyes off from the debate and settle them on the wasteful spending of the campaign that serves no purpose when there is ‘nation building’ message. I would like to see everyone completely disowning all those ads that are negative in their message. Let’s just stop and think on each and every school going kid on how he or she was encouraged with positive reinforcement and the negativity tackled with subtle pushes in the right direction. When it is so much a part of our early childhood days, why then we transform ourselves to push the well wishing citizens towards the wrong direction with all the negative ads that not only consume billions of dollars, but also spread ill-will among the entire population?
Is there a way for us to move our eyes away from such wasteful scenarios?