I am afraid of becoming a bag lady (with poll)

Yes, I suffer from "bag lady syndrome"- the irrational fear of being poor and homeless in my old age.  I am afraid I won't have money for health care or necessities as I age.  I am less afraid than many women, since I have been working all my adult life, minus about 6 months when I didn't work to stay home with my infant children.  I saved and put away, but we are still not living in a home we completely own and I can't throw things out- junk like happy meal toys and soap from hotel.  Even my daughter fears becoming a bag lady.  

But this fear, "bag lady syndrome" is one reason Hillary Clinton resonated so well with American women voters, and why they can be persuaded rationally (or subliminally if needed) to vote for Barack Obama over John McCain.  

There is a great story today on the CNN website about fear based advertising.  Essentially the best and most effective advertisements play on people's fears.  CNN did a study with an Emory University psychologist named Drew Westen who has developed software to look at people's emotional responses to advertisements .  Drew Westen has written a book called "The Political Brain" which focuses on the role of emotion in political decision making.

Remember the very damaging advertisement in Ohio- the 3 AM ad that Hillary Clinton put out.  That advertisement convinced my husband and then me to vote for Obama, but it persuaded a lot more people that Obama was too inexperienced to be president.  I was annoyed too when Hillary Clinton said that McCain passed some sort of Commander-in-chief threshold but Obama didn't.  But that stump speech and advertisement played on subconscious fear that Obama was too inexperienced to be president.  Westen shows people the advertisements and then checks their reaction time to certain trigger words.

The undecided voters in CNN's group watched the ads and were then asked to identify the color of words such as "weak," "inexperienced" and "terrorist." If they hesitated, even for one-thousandth of a second, before they clicked on the color that corresponded with the word, Weinberger (Westen's business partner) said, it meant the word had an impact.

"If the word is on their mind, if the word was activated, it will slow them down," Weinberger said.

Westen predicted that the undecided voters would say they didn't like the ads and that the ads had no impact on them. He was right.

The group watched Hillary Clinton's "3 a.m." campaign ad, which was intended to make voters question Barack Obama's experience. Viewers said that the ad was fear-mongering and that it did not make them think Clinton was a stronger leader than Obama. But the data, Westen said, showed that their brains reacted differently.   Voters had the greatest hesitation with words like "weak" and "lightweight" during the color test. Westen said this meant the ad made them question Obama's readiness.

"The purpose, too, is to make him seem scary, dangerous. 'You need to be afraid of this guy as president,' " Westen said. "That message unconsciously got through."

 

So when the Republican kos blogger draylogan wrote a diary today I was somewhat dismissive- since continuing to look back on the primaries does seem to be pointless to me.  

But then I read this article on CNN and I actually got draylogan's point.  The "Obama is a lightweight on national security" meme is a bad one since it plays on this fear.  

Now of course people were also very afraid of John McCain's leadership.  

The undecided voters also watched an ad attacking John McCain for saying the U.S. could be in Iraq for the next 100 years. After watching the ad, the group gave it a thumbs-down. But researchers said the data showed that it left them feeling McCain has poor judgment and is too close to President Bush.

Fear based ads work on the amygdala of the brain, responsible for controlling the emotional responses and physical responses to threats.  The role of the amygdala in fear and panic is interesting indeed.  This article states:

"Anxiety is characterized by the anticipation of being harmed in the future, where as fear is characterized as the anticipation of being harmed in the present. Distress is characterized by the awareness of being harmed at this particular moment. The three emotions can diffuse into one single diffuse state."

I am completely convinced Kerry lost the election with Bush because on the Friday before the election Osama bin Ladin came out and released a scary videotape, reinforcing Bush as our next leader being a mistake.  That news item played on our fear of terrorists as well as our distress that he could do something to us immediately and we had to make a big electoral choice.  The news organizations didn't release stories indicating Bush was wire-tapping us all and lying us into the devastating war in Iraq either to counter this fear-inducing story.

My conclusion is that Obama needs to emphasize the economy and McCain's inability to correct for the problems we are facing to capture the anxiety and fear of older women of becoming a bag lady.  McCain is rich- his second, younger wife wife won't be a bag lady.  But if McCain trashes Social Security and America enters the inflationary spiral, all of us, and especially older women like me, we are already anxious of being on the street without a safety net.  I promise you, Hillary Clinton would never ever have left old women afraid to be put out on the street.  

It won't take much for Obama to reassure women that he will make sure they aren't going to be left behind.  It would be easy to put together a bunch of McCain statements about taking personal responsibility for actions and not having the government bail you out which translated to "bag lady syndrome" sufferers as "out on the streets."

We can also train our primitive amygdala to be better and more rational.  While researching this diary I came across this excellent link"
8 Ways to Train Our Primitive Brain—for Life in the 21st Century by David L. Weiner.  His final piece of advice for dealing with the fear and anger emotions in life are to "practice rationality and take the high road."  I think this is definitely best suited for Obama- he is appealing to our rational selves.  But we also need to appeal to the irrational anxieties and fears in some television and radio spots.  We need to make Obama become the rational caring choice vs. a more scary John McCain.  The supreme court decisions are too distant and unpredictable to be a persuasive argument.   Energy prices, high food prices and Republicans wasting time for 7 years ignoring environmental issues and dealing with energy by starting a war: these issues make people very fearful  and even distressed.  We know what McCain will throw at Obama- and Obama needs to be ready with this sort of advertisement to counter that and persuade the voters there are bigger problems facing them.  Therefore, casting McCain as McBush is a good way to convince voters on the "bad lady syndrome" anxieties and fears.