Solipsistics
October 7th, 2008Because I cannot, for the moment, stand to listen to politicians speak any more, I observe the presidential debate by my new favorite technique, which is to watch the live Twitter updates on their Election 2008 page. It provides a nice melange of outrage and inanity that more or less simulates the experience. There is about zero probability of me altering my voting intentions at this point so it is all fairly redundant.
While there, though, I notice something that I think pretty much sums up the uphill battle poor John McCain (yes, I am actually starting to feel sorry for him) is apparently screwing up even as I write this: observe the comparative Twitter statuses of the two official campaign accounts that heads up the election page.
On top, BarackObama, smiling and looking hopeful, says “At Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. Watch the debate tonight at 9pm ET. Reply with your thoughts after.”
Below him, JohnMcCain, looking grim and doughty, offers this: “DEBATE FACT #5: RATING THE TWO CANDIDATES: Summary:. When rating the candidates, John McCain.. “
And then one of those bastardly tinyurls that I’m not going to bother to copy (I don’t feel that sorry for him), suffice to say that it goes to some page on his campaign site that looks like something straight out of the congressional register with a stack of unengagingly typeset articles that pretty much say that conservative think tanks think Obama is a liberal.
Those quotes are verbatim. I didn’t put that extraneous period after the colon or the improper “two dot” ellipsis in McCain’s statement to make him look bad. Obama’s message is simple, clear and self-contained: his plain invitation to watch the debate expresses confidence in his performance, his invitation to respond to him afterward expresses engagement and interest in whoever he’s communicating with.
McCain, on the other hand, is directing you to his own spin: he’s basically trying to “prep” you for the debate. But more interesting to me than the tactics is the ham handed delivery of the message. I’ve been doing some professional writing on the side for feeds that go to text messages and I’m sensitive as a result to the challenges of delivering information in a highly length-restricted format. The SHOUTY headline is utterly useless, the only information it delivers is that there are apparently at least five of these “facts” which should have been reinforced at the destination page (which it isn’t, it’s not intuitive to get to the assembled “facts” at all, and the page I eventually managed to find was a disordered mess). Then there’s this - “Summary:.”? Purposeless period aside, what is this, a book report? It’s not necessary to explicitly identify a brief statement as a summary. People will get this on their own.
And how about this gem: “RATING THE TWO CANDIDATES: Summary:. When rating the candidates…” Wait, am I correct in assuming you are going to be RATING THE CANDIDATES? Are there two candidates in this race, that is fascinating I DID NOT KNOW THAT. When you rate the two candidates how do you think that the two candidates will rate? The repetition of basically the same introduction just looks redundant and stupid.
In all it is 80 characters of almost completely useless preamble, and the upshot, so help me, is that the whole point - the distinction that is supposed to get drawn between the candidates, doesn’t fit into the tweet! Unless you click the link the post is 100% information free (aside from knowing that John McCain has at least five DEBATE FACTS up his sleeve).
Just for the sake of academic interest I rewrote the thing so that it maintained the URL but also replicated the full title of the linked article which pretty succinctly captured the sentiment that article was trying to express. Literally a minute’s work was all that was required to bring it in at 128 characters: this is the kind of thing I used to do routinely as a mid-level secretary. Great job, boys.
(p.s. no, I won’t reprint the improved version, John McCain will never learn if I keep fixing these things for him)