Candidates send messages, avoid interaction using tech

In 1955, student elections at Forest Hills High School were memorable. The front-runner for president was Chester Brewsky. The cheerleaders extolled his virtues; posters and pamphlets praised his name. He was wildly popular, even though no one seemed to know him personally.

Chester won by a landslide, but when the principal went looking for him he couldn’t be found. That’s because he was fictitious. Those who created him, inspired perhaps by a popular beverage, had hijacked the election. They had used the mass marketing of the time to elect a nonexistent candidate.

The lessons of Chester Brewsky live after him. With current technology, a candidate can surface overnight and gain viral fame through multiple media, none of which actually require him to exist. Unless we do our homework, Chester could win again today.

Get ready for a big year of elections and campaign messages. Tech enables greater automation than ever before. Candidates use it to go wide with their messages but then minimize personal interaction with the voters. While they drown us in email, when we write to them we get automated responses.

Today, election professionals send social media to demographic cohorts, betting on the odds and hoping that will work well enough to win. The only voters they mingle with are the check writers. It’s pragmatic if not cynical, and has the effect of de-personalizing the candidates into modern-day Brewskys.

Just as we must learn to separate spam from real mail, we must learn to separate social engineering from social media and not to be taken in by political gambits. As Lee Cataluna observed, the "Be Nice Ben" ploy against Ben Cayetano was itself not nice. It deserved to backfire, and did.

Likewise, we can’t let candidates who held office before rewrite what happened. Mufi Hannemann and Linda Lingle tell us how well they did, but how can we forget his mischief on potholes, sewers and rail, and her hypocritical war against tech tax credits, punctuated only by a myriad of questionable trips?

Watch out. Just because candidates use new technology to blitz us with claims of accomplishment, that doesn’t mean those claims are true or accurate. Today, we have the power to fact-check everything they say. We should do just that, and if we find their claims disingenuous we should vote accordingly.

Mazie Hirono’s disinterest in debates shows her preference for automated rather than interactive campaigns. This is strategically understandable, but troubling. Hiding out doesn’t work. If she can’t defend her policies in a local debate, she’ll never be able to advance them for us on the floor of Congress.

Negative tactics like the fake-out hit piece Hannemann orchestrated in his 2010 campaign are also troubling. If candidates engage in tricks like this, including deceptive distributions and push polls, they should be measured accordingly. If they trick by disguise or sneak attack, they should pay dearly.

Barack Obama has spent $3 million on TV and $19 million on the Internet and social media. This enables him to do more than just deliver messages and raise money. He can also analyze our responses to learn how to approach us going forward. This is very high-tech stuff, but where is the line for privacy?

Tech has certainly changed the conduct of campaigns and the results of our elections, and thus the nature of the winners and the way they govern. These changes are not necessarily desirable. We saw that in the recent debt ceiling stalemate, in which the national interest was subordinated to partisan politics.

Through technology, mass marketing has come a long way since 1955. While we face increasingly difficult choices, candidates routinely send us messages conceived, written and delivered by someone else. Elections have become more like sports or entertainment than the solemn process of selecting our leaders. When your candidate begins to look like a celebrity, vote for someone else.

Today, many of us vote for the likes of Chester Brewsky without taking the time to know who he really is. This is not in keeping with our duties as citizens. Neither is it the road to good government or the preservation of the republic.

A candidate who isn’t fair in running won’t be fair in office. A candidate who isn’t candid now won’t be candid later. We need to look behind the facade to know what they will do. Here in the 21st century, there’s no room for error.