With Election Day only (thankfully) a few weeks away, people who have lives are starting to pay attention to the two major party candidates. Even with her campaign of joy (which sounds a lot like the Hope and Change campaign of Barack Obama), many voters still aren’t sure what to make of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. What exactly do they bring to the table?
That’s…hard to explain at this point, mainly because the candidates themselves aren’t talking much to reporters, and those reporters who do talk to them throw more softballs than a pitching machine full of Nerf balls. Needless to say, the Harris/Walz ticket is not burning up the campaign season, even though their friends in the media are doing everything in their power to explain away the ticket’s lack of talkativeness.
Well, I’m here to help. Sure, I’m not going to vote for Barack Obama 2.0 and the Mirror Universe Dick Cheney ticket, but I still want to help, and I think I have a way.
First off, it’s time to drop the easy “We’re Not Trump/Vance” strategy. We know you’re not them, but we do notice you’re taking a few of their ideas to make them your own. You learned well from the current President, Madame VP!
Anyway, the point is it’s not enough to say who you aren’t. You have to convince people of who you are. And that may be a problem in and of itself. For politicians of all stripes, honesty isn’t the best policy, nor does it make for the best policy statements. Right now, the Democrats have a loose coalition of special interest groups that all want the same things often at the expense of other members of the aforementioned coalition. That makes it hard to appeal to a wide swath of voting blocs.
Hard, but not impossible.
With reviews of the Harris/Walz media tours being more negative than a Goth nihilist reading Sylvia Plath (or a typical Gen Xer for that matter), it may be time for a different approach to campaigning as a whole. The current President managed to win the White House by staying in his basement and having his messaging be extremely controlled for reasons we now understand. With all of the questions surrounding the Harris/Walz ticket, though, that’s not gonna work.
So, let me borrow something from my childhood and retool it for the modern day. Back when I was a wee lad, we had these books called Choose Your Own Adventure. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, you controlled where the story went based upon decisions you made, which each decision being played out on a page specified in the book. If you decided to go into the spooky looking house, turn to page 43. If you decided to walk past the spooky looking house, turn to page 59. If you decided to buy the spooky looking house and turn it into an apartment complex, turn to your local real estate office. That sort of thing.
In this particular situation, I think the Choose Your Own Adventure concept could be useful. It would just take some work from campaign staffers to make it happen. And it can start with the Harris/Walz website.
Instead of putting together an expansive laundry list of policy positions, turn it into a Choose Your Own Adventure game. If you want to ban fracking, go to page 28 of the Harris/Walz policy book. If you don’t want to ban fracking, go to page 18 of the Harris/Walz policy book. Then, each page would outline that particular decision’s outcome and instruct the reader to make another decision which will take him/her to a different page, and so on. It may not be the most innovative, but it would be a nice change of pace from the current campaign status quo.
Plus, think of how much easier interviews would go! If a reporter had a question, he or she could just play along and find the answer. No more embarrassing word salads! And if a hostile reporter or a political talking head says, “But that contradicts what’s on page X,” you can point out how that was based on a decision made on a different page. Pretty nifty if you think about it!
So, if anyone from the Harris/Walz campaign reads this, please know I want to help if for no other reason than to encourage more applications of the Choose Your Own Adventure approach. And if you don’t like my idea, turn to page 69 and get out!
