Blog 12: Last Thoughts

This class definitely beat the expectations I had when first signing up. I’ve been on the brink of being interested in politics and not for some time. I always felt that it was important to vote (probably the only 5 year old who couldn’t wait to vote), but after the 2008 presidential election and before it I really didn’t pay much attention to politics.  This class has definitely opened my eyes to more political news and how to access it, and of course pushed me to my addiction of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. There were many aspects I liked about this class. I loved when learning about the presidential campaign and elections of JFK and Richard Nixon.

It was so interesting learning about Nixon’s fight to the presidency and made me want to find out why after all that work he would ruin it with the Watergate Scandal. I always think it’s important to know what past presidents have done to make sure that we can learn from their mistakes. I love how television was such a big factor and now we have so many different networking systems that can effect a presidential campaign. I also enjoyed the days where we would watch news clips from old reporters and from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I also loved how we watched that video on the Egyptian revolution. I just like how everything was tied into our everyday lives and what was actually going on currently.

What I didn’t enjoy was the Sunstein book. I found it really really boring and repetitive. I probably picked this book because we just recently reviewed it and it’s still fresh in my memory. I’m sure the information was very important, but I think it could of easily been a article instead of a book. After reading the first chapter I could have stopped reading and gotten the gist of it. All in all I really enjoyed this class and it definitely was one of my more interesting classes at Mizzou. 

Blog 12: The End/The Wrap-Up

Wooooooooooowwwwwwww…The most interesting that I learned in this class…I really don’t want to be that student who says “there have been many so many great things” just because that feels forced and phony, but in all honesty it is true.  If I had to choose one thing in particular it would probably be the time we spent covering late-night comedy and satire in politics.  That’s a broad subject, but there is no way to emphasize how important that information is.  It is not just young people that are tuning out political news today for the likes of Colbert and Stewart, but older generations are as well.  They tell it how it is and parody what is ridiculous and beyond outrageous.  Not only did I find that to be the most interesting, but I think my classmates did as well.   I cannot speak for them, but judging by how many people covered the satire topic for research papers that might be a fair assumption.

The most boring is quite easy.  It is everything that came out of the Sunstein book.  I literally would fall asleep at around 3 PM trying to read it.  Sunstein just gets repetitive trying to hammer his ideas home.  I understand that the best speakers have always had to repeat their rhetoric to get their message across to who was listening, (Dr. King “I Have A Dream”, Muhammad Ali “I am the greatest”, JFK “Ask not what you can do for yourself, but what you can do for your country”, etc.) but he really needed to give it a rest.

It’s probably too easy to pick on the book as a whole so one other thing that was irrelevant I believe to our course work might have been the way JFK won his debate against Nixon.  It is irrelevant to me specifically because I really don’t put much stock in the way a man looks on television.  I am typically more concerned with what these men are trying to sell me on and because people in 1960 didn’t necessarily see the way I see things I sat there thinking “a guy won a debate because he was more tan…”  I understand it, I don’t agree with it, but it is how culture operates.  Granted I somewhat fell victim to this in the 2008 election because McCain seemed like he was going to die at every speech he gave, but at the same time he was invoking more of the same policies that have already been in place with the Bush administration, which turned me off immediately.  While television changed the debate forever I really didn’t think people should have personally declared a winner because Kennedy “looked” better when actuality he had a crooked spine and wasn’t necessarily the healthiest man in the world either.

In all honesty, I appreciate you being a great professor this semester because with some of this heavy hitting theories and material, the course could have been much more difficult to deal with.  I mean that and you can quote me on it as well.

The good the bad and the useful

To go off of what my title is I am going to discuss what the good, the bad, and the useful was throughout this semester.

I will start with the news that is good!

I first want to say that if there is anyone out there reading this that isn’t in Political Communications at Mizzou, look into it.  The reading assigned are very relevent and compared to other Comm. readings I have had this semester I was able to enjoy them.  There is no other class that I have ever heard of where you can:

1.  Blog for your daily grade.

2. Tweet for participation points.

3.  Use your computer on an essay exam.

Coming in into this class I was interested in the material but to be honest, was taking it because I needed it.  The most useful tool I have used this semester was to be able to put reading together into my own thoughts.  For example:  the section where we read and learned about the Nixon campaign.  We didn’t just learn about this part of history, we were able to decide what could have been done differently as well as know in the future how to do things better so something like what happened to Nixon doesn’t happen again.

Now, on to the bad jazz…

I wasn’t big on the lecture itself.  I never have a problem with getting out early by any means.  I would enjoy things to be a little different from day-to-day.  Although, I know I have missed a few classes due to work, voting, and being sick, I have no room to complain on how my professor runs his classroom.  I did enjoy the days where we watched old campaign commercials, as well as the video with men who worked on the JFK vs. Nixon campaign teams.

I know these days people enjoy ratings so they can pin-point how classes really are.  If you were to ask me, how good was this class on a scale of one to ten compared to other classes at Mizzou, I would answer with a stong EIGHT this is a class in the Comm department that if you miss out on you will regret it.

Chase

From Then to Now

The era of black and white, still photo commercials, and dry debates have changed.  We now live in a world of You Tube where anyone can post a commercial if they wish.  For example Obama Girl was a hit in the cyber world of what I like to call, self ads.

As discussed in my class we see that self-image became a huge factor in the first Nixon campaign.  He was seen as a grumpy old man and as someone the American people didn’t want to see lead them. I believe this was a big part of the Obama and McCain race.  Many young voters did not feel comfortable voting for an older man and perhaps saw him as a grumpy man.

Now a days, when parties put up a person to run for president they have to be someone who can handle the press being all around them.  A way the Nixon campaign in 1968 was able to get away from the press was by doing controlled events.  You can’t control the press now, after lecture we agreed that it would be way to expensive to do anything like that these days.

Until next time,

Chase Ruble

BLOG 3: How Political Campaigns Have Changed

Since the 1960s and Nixon’s campaigns, political campaigns have changed in many ways yet in many ways have stayed the same.

With Nixon’s campaign in 1960 against JFK and later in 1968 public image became an essential part of political campaigning. If television had been present when President Taft ran in 1908 he would not have been elected President. Public image is everything in election these days. Like Nixon’s debate against JFK, television was and is vital. Again, this was shown in the 2004 election of Bush against Kerry. While Bush won the election against Kerry the debate damaged Bush’s political reputation and popularity which showed in the tight race.

However, things have changed since Nixon. The introduction of the internet, blogging, and fundraising through the internet has been a very important part of political campaigns. The website library, thinkquest shows how Obama’s use of internet helped his campaign

Barack Obama’s site opens with an appeal for funds; he has raised more money than any other candidate to date, mostly because of his success in soliciting through his website.

 This has opened a direct line of e-fundraising. He found a way to get a large amount of donations from many different donaters. He made it so that the candidates will have to continue to connect to the public because now they will have to rely on a lot of small donations to get money for their campaigns. The New York Times has an article which compares Obama to Kennedy and shows the connection between the two.

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet.

Kennedy and Nixon made the media a direct and influential part of the political campaigning. Media such as television and radio ads have continued to be a major part of the political campaigns. However, the new creation of internet and internet ads have created a new dimension within internet campaigning.