This has been the most followed electoral campaign of all, and I can tell you over here in the UK George and John have been on our screens constantly, I can only imagine what the last 18 months have been like over in the States. What has been fascinating for us is the ferocity with which the campaign has been fought, and in particular the extremely negative emphasis. We have seen the adverts with farmyard animals, wolves, bears, and we have watched with amusement the creative editing which makes George look like an imbecile and John look as if he couldn’t even decide on what to have for dinner. Since I know a bit of NLP and Hypnosis I thought it would be fun to watch the speeches and the adverts and see what I could pick up. I expected it to be subtle, but quite frankly it was anything but.

Here are a few examples for you. Did you notice any of these?

* George W always stood with someone in uniform and the American flag behind him at rallies. The camera that had that shot (obviously fixed) was the one that was on him when he was saying the words Pride, Honesty etc.
* Before George came on the national anthem was played, the pledge of allegiance was recited, and a prayer was said for the President. Great state generation, great anchors.
* He was very often seen not wearing a tie (being one of the guys?)
* He waved at individuals in the crowd as if he knew them.
* Clinton came out for John Kerry in the final weeks. Many good things are anchored to him, and I watched him give his anchors to Kerry (he didn’t even have to steal them).
* George’s campaign symbol the big W.

The advertisements were even less subtle, as well as being overtly negative, they used simple patterns such as: show a dangerous animal, add scary music, make the image vivid and clear, then show a picture of the candidate you want the voters not to vote for. This I call the giving-voters-a-phobia-of-the-other-candidate pattern. If only the creators of the advert could be sure of association, anyone who watched the ad would have a panic attack every time they saw, or made an internal image of whichever candidate. Now, there are some people who already do that when they see a picture of George Bush !! My favourite is the advert which has people not making their mind up, specifically the groom who decides to kiss the bridesmaid and not the bride, then of course it cuts to John Kerry and the connection is made. We may laugh, and we know that the American people can see right through these ads, but we do know that the information goes in. We just can’t stop it.

These unsophisticated techniques are similar to the ones we may use in therapy, communication, coaching, and we all know how effective they are (Bandler for example loves to give people phobias of not very useful things like laziness and untidiness). As an outsider I am amazed at how overtly these techniques are utilised to generate negative states and associate them with specific people. Of course there are a lot of positive anchors used as well, especially the flag and the pledge of allegiance, and lets not forget Bruce Springsteen and Britny.

One thing that surprised me was, that in our field it is generally understood that the negative is ignored and that only the positive parts of a statement remain. So that if I said 'Don’t vote for George W' your subconscious would automatically hear and install 'Vote for George W'. However I heard someone from a group that had been making these ads (of course the candidates themselves would never associate or endorse such slur) say that she felt that if you re-enforced the negative enough, in many different ways, when the individual went to the polls they would remember not to vote for a specific candidate, but would not remember why. But then even if we accept this logic, as both sub-campaigns are essentially doing the same thing, then the poor voter would go to the polls and the only thing that she would remember is not to vote for either candidate!!

Then again, if you accept the NLP logic that only the positive sentiment is retained in a negative sentence, they voter want to vote for both candidates. The result of either of these would be total confusion and random voting.

So if the negative sub-campaign was ineffective, how did George win and Kerry not? My view, from outside is that George had 4 years to work on building up very powerful anchors and connect himself with the core values of the population -security, patriotism, pride, integrity. Essentially he built rapport with a nation (lets not forget that he broke rapport with a number of other nations!!), and then when the campaign trail started he fired the anchors, generated appropriate states, and sustained them all the way to the voting station. This is a bit like the way in which I might work with a client on confidence and motivation issues, except that George (and his team) did it to a whole country.

Of course, they would never allow this manipulation of the populous in Britain, the land of Tiffin, cucumber sandwiches and stiff upper lips. Would they? Its just not cricket. I suppose we will find out in march when Tony (Blair) starts his bid for a new term. Perhaps he has asked George for some advice. He could do with some. Then again maybe he could take my NLP practitioner class!!