The virulence unleashed against Jorge Castaneda for expressing that the missing component in the struggle of Xochitl Galvez by Presidency It is a negative campaign, it is not necessarily disproportionate. Castaneda He could have abused the language and made light remarks due to the way he presented it during the program La Hora de Opine in Foro TV, when mentioning “gossip” and “dirty war” as part of that strategy that left him in the middle of the whirlwind of polarization, but what explains his lynching is that his argument is correct and for a long time, “gossip ” and “dirty wars” have been used by politicians around the world to gain advantages.
You may like the resource or not, but only the hypocrites, the naive or those who fear this strategy can be surprised by the approach, starting with Lopez Obrador, who for almost 30 years has used it as one of his most effective political tools. The reaction against Castañeda is not exaggerated, given the possibility that his cry will resonate wherever it should and cause an avalanche.
López Obrador mobilized his forces to bury him politically, and it can be argued that it was not a reaction limited to the personal sphere, but rather to what was raised by a voice that is heard. The president must fear a negative campaign, not only because he suffered it – “it is a danger for Mexico,” was the label that the PAN engraved on his skin in the 2006 elections – but because he knows, because he and his propaganda machinery in the past, the scope it can have if realities, verisimilitudes, “gossip” and “dirty wars” are connected with the electorate.
Negative campaigning, a politically acceptable form that synthesizes Castañeda's characterizations without generating the turbulence he caused, is very popular in modern politics, although it is nothing new. Almost 180 years ago, the then presidential candidate in the United States, James Polk, was accused of branding his slaves, which was a lie. In the last quarter of the last century, the team of the Republican candidate, George HW Bush, invented that the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, when governor of Massachusetts, pardoned a criminal, showing him as a soft-on-crime politician who could not shake the rest of the campaign.
The Democratic candidate for the White House, Gary Hart, was searched for his secrets, and one, a love affair with a beautiful Washingtonian, ended up on the cover of the tabloid weekly, National Enquirer, which forced him to withdraw from the race. They sought to do the same with Hillary Clinton in 2016, with the so-called “pizzagate”, which came to life on social networks as a pedophile network linked to the Democrat. In that campaign, Republican Donald Trump used Cambridge Analytics, which illegally managed information from 50 million Facebook users to fill them with fake news about candidates, spread lies and seek to discourage electoral participation.
Negative campaigns are risky strategies and, as seen with Castañeda's words, highly controversial. But they are used broadly because what it is about is winning elections. López Obrador, who has said that the end does not justify the means, used the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa normalistas through his propagandists to say that it was a state crime and to put Enrique Peña Nieto's government officials on trial, who did not has been tested. They mounted a dirty campaign on the regime's candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, to say that she was born in Bulgaria. Felipe Calderón was labeled “drunk” by a collaborator of López Obrador, a gossip that stuck with him forever, even though the person who did it publicly apologized after acknowledging that he had lied.
The campaigns include contrast, where the adversary's errors or deficiencies are emphasized. López Obrador could face a negative campaign based on the counterfactual analysis derived from the question: Are we better off today than in 2018? Sheinbaum will most likely be forced to respond to the collapses of the “Enrique Rébsamen” school, when she was a delegate in Tlalpan, and the collapse of Metro Line 12, when she was head of Government of Mexico City. For several weeks, López Obrador's propagandists have had a line of attack against Gálvez to sow in the collective imagination that she is the PRI candidate, so that she sucks up the negatives of that party.
Betting on a strategy of this nature has risks, such as rejection by the electorate, although this happens more in mature democracies, not incipient ones like the Mexican one. Here, as López Obrador experienced in previous elections, it is an incentive for the mobilization and cohesion of his electoral clienteles that translates into votes. But based on his own experience, he knows there may be a turning point for him and his candidate Sheinbaum. Could this be the motivation to lynch Castañeda and inhibit efforts and resources that could be injected into negative campaigns? Namely.
The presidential campaign has barely begun and there will most likely be materials on social networks that damage the image of a candidate and modify the narrative. This, at its core, is what a campaign is about, control of the narrative, for the potential to change the course of an election. Castañeda was telling the truth when he observed Gálvez's lack of a negative campaign, an idea that López Obrador is trying to kill because if the opposition finds the right format that penetrates the brain of the electorate, which reacts to the negative, not the positive, it can turn the picnic that the president thinks this election will be into a nightmare.
Note: Tatiana Clouthier, currently on Claudia Sheinbaum's campaign team, stated that the information published in this column on March 6 about her participation in raising resources for Andrés Manuel's presidential campaign is “inaccurate and unfounded.” López Obrador in 2018, and that the private contribution proposals he received were channeled to the party.
X: @rivapa
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