Merchandising the Monarch: Reagan and the Presidential Elections

Abstract

The prerequisite of political success in America today is to conceive your election as a product marketing exercise. The marketing dynamic is not the only way to interpret elections — the play of orthodox political factors also colours and determines them — but as it explains the conceptual, tactical and technological approaches taken it is a useful one. Elections are spectacular, like a circus; they have their ringmasters and their acrobats. They are for the audience but not of them.

‘The men who are entrusted with the direction of public affairs in the United States are frequently inferior, both in capacity and morality, to those whom an aristocracy would raise to power. But their interest is identified and confounded with that of the majority of their fellow-citizens. They may frequently be faithless, and frequently mistaken; but they will never systematically adopt a line of conduct hostile to the majority; and they cannot give a dangerous or exclusive tendency to the government.’

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America