If you don’t think the smiling face printed on a sheet of Corflute and hung from a front yard fence is scary, think again. Chances are that smiling face is the effulgent kisser of a politician and it is indeed spooky.
Politicians do not set out to be purposely scary– most are ordinary people in everyday relationships facing everyday concerns like most citizens. It is the system that turns them into Hannibal Lecter–okay, perhaps that is over the top, but stay with me on this one– or Baby Jan Hudson with the sugary appeal of Willy Wonka. Your average politician can be as unsettling as a blind date with Norman Bates in an empty tea room off the main road. The adversary system of getting to the top in government forces them to act, and act in a very creepy way all in the respectful manner of diplomacy.
The techniques candidates are coached in to get ahead in the system of government turns a nice person into a monster, albeit a smiling, cheerful one, and is part of political strategy. Just as a football trainer gets his or her players to bulk up through weight training and toughen up by ignoring the pain barrier in endurance workouts, so must the representatives toughen their minds to eradicate weaknesses such as compassion and empathy and tune into their disturbing, nightmarish traits.
The following are ten key techniques to developing a formidable persona.
1. Discrediting: Sometimes called the ad hominem argument is a technique where research is done on an opponent’s history to discover indiscretions like that time as a uni student getting busted for a nudie run in the car park.
2. Fear Mongering: Is essential in garnering the opinion of the voting public to scare the bedevil out of them first. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it makes people jump at noises outside their window.
3. Heroism: Boasting about past successes is a technique for success. If that fails, get a selfie with the latest sporting sensation or a six-week-old puppy.
4. Lying: Universally accepted as an essential skill in the tool box of creepy behaviour– lying is at its best when pointing out that the opposition is liars… bigger liars than you are.
5. Obstructionism: Delaying tactics is the deliberate preventing of a process for no other reason than to show you can.
6. Filibuster: A truly frightening politician can summon the power of rhetoric to bang on ad nauseam until the house is comatose to prevent the passage of, or a vote on a bill.
7. Passing the buck: No candidate of a political persuasion can hope for success if they accept responsibility, regardless of their guilt. To become spine-chillingly good in the service of the public you must believe someone else is to blame.
8. Placating: Is a must-have skill in all public and televised debating whereby the audience is singled out as being clever, smart, or just damn sexy. It is a most unnerving skill when used properly—that is, your opponent’s arguments suggest the audience is a bunch of low-life jug-heads.
9 Smear Campaign: employs the technique of logic conflation. It means that complicated notions and ideas are merged into thirty-second sound bites or simply one or two words; climate change science becomes ‘enmeshed corruption’, civil rights becomes ‘leftwing ideology’, and a complete screw-up by a government minister is reworded as ‘favourable spin’.
10. Image: the public persona as seen in the media. The smiling face printed on rigid plastic sheets and hung on star posts outside polling booths is not the result of a casual happy-snap, but hours of tweaking in photo-manipulating software to reduce jowls, lightening eye-bags, remove grey hair and whiten teeth. To use an unaltered image would be in total disregard of political strategy and would require further training in the ten points to success, or how to be frighteningly nice in the political arena.
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