All’s fair in love, war… and politics
Why we have more in common with global leaders than we know
Over the past 13 months or so, we have sat and felt an immense disassociation from those who have been bestowed with the responsibility that comes with national and international leadership. Never has their world seemed to be situated such a profound distance from our lived reality. There seems to be no single thread of commonality linking the sometimes fraying patchwork of our lives, to theirs. But this isn’t a comparative analysis of privilege and immunity, God no. I’d like to extend this invitation to you the reader, to examine the lesser-researched and more unconventional affinities we have to those in seats of power.
For a moment, please cast your mind back to the first Sunday in January; statistically speaking, the busiest day of the year for online dating apps. You have consulted with your extended backroom team regarding your campaign visuals, agreeing that the aesthetics need to represent the ethos of your well-crafted profile, I mean, manifesto; approachable yet sophisticated, driven but always empathetic.
And so you set out on a laborious three-month stint of swiping, I mean, canvassing. Countless daily meetings with strategists (close friends, sometimes family), and multiple setbacks from parties who aren’t in support of your ‘brand’ later, the ballots are in, and would you believe, there’s a vote with your name on it. But this is where things get complicated.
Navigating the minefield of public appearances and more intense correspondence once elected, you run the risk of making a move that contradicts the key points outlined in your bio, I mean, your election brochure. Should any of our claims or visuals raise suspicions of fraudulent behaviour, we face the dehumanizing and down-right degrading penalty of immediate redundancy (enter, Casper.)
Another cruel similarity between these realms is the lack of control over the information that the general public have access to. The ghosts from a previous life of rogue behaviour, are never too far from the mic of a keen journalist. As we have witnessed in very recent times, the ironic and timeless saga of a disgraced electoral candidate is as inevitable as taxes and death.
Although the consequences are worlds apart, consider a time when you ‘matched’ with say, a friend of a friend. Once that mutual connection is realised, unleashed to you is a body of specialised knowledge (generally of a defamatory nature) that your potential love interest probably wouldn’t have offered up, willingly. Within minutes, you have a database of photographs, videos, exam results, familial standings and projected earnings over the next fifty years, at your disposal.
Both sets of campaigners utilise the web as a promotional device, where our heavily filtered sales pitches are streamed to the masses. All the while, we pray so very hard that rumours of our shortcomings, don’t surface before voters have had the opportunity to change their minds.
Both dating apps and elections, exploit and capitalise on the complex flaws of human nature. We all embellish the facts. We all exaggerate the traits society deem to be most sought-after. We echo the thoughts and beliefs of our target market, aware that this is a sure way to charm their ego. We all do our utmost to conceal the parts of ourselves that don’t reflect perfection. And most of the time, we all get caught.
Lastly, and ultimately most importantly, both cohorts rely on human connection in order to experience success in their field. To know human connection, is to feel emotionally understood and supported by another. This, of course, requires quite a measure of vulnerability. Regardless of whether you are making a call on a life partner, or a political candidate, you are choosing someone in whom you are investing the most fragile of all emotional currencies; your trust. When unveiling their authentic selves, the subject of said investment leaves a lot on the table, but reach far greater heights when things work out.
Politics and relationships of all shapes and sizes have something very fundamental in common; we only ever have a small percentage of say regarding the result. In any situation where there are multiple entities in interplay, we can only ever hope to have command over how it is that we regard, react, and record a moment in time.
With that, I wish to leave you with some of the most iconic campaign slogans of all time, which just so happen to provide good counsel, no matter the arena.
“This time, *vote like your whole world depended on it.”
*swipe
Richard Nixon (1968)
“Our best **days still lie ahead.”
**matches
Joe Biden (2020)
“Building a Bridge to the ***21st Century”
***altar
Bill Clinton (1996)
