Praise for Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008:

“I honestly look at [Obama’s] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers,” said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions

h/t, The Distant Ocean, who notes that Chomsky observed:

They want uninformed consumers, uninformed voters to make irrational choices based on the success of illusion, slander, and effective body language or whatever else is supposed to be significant. So you undermine democracy pretty much the same way you undermine markets. Well, that’s the nature of an election when it’s run by the business world, and you’d expect it to be like that.

Chomsky also said:

This year, Obama won the prize. Beat out Apple company. The best marketing campaign of 2008. Which is correct, it is essentially what happened. Now that’s quite different from what happens in a functioning democracy like say Bolivia or Haiti, except for the fact that it was crushed.

And:

What he had was an army that he organized of people who got out the vote for Obama. For what the press calls, Brand Obama. They essentially agree with the advertisers, it’s brand Obama. That his army was mobilized to bring him to office. They regard that as a good thing, accepting the Lippman conception of democracy, the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders are supposed to do what they’re told and then go home. The Wall Street Journal, at the opposite end of the spectrum, also had an article about the same thing at roughly the same time. Talked about the tremendous grassroots army that has been developed, which is now waiting for instructions. What should they do next to press forward Obama’s agenda? Whatever that is. But whatever it is, the army’s supposed to be out there taking instructions, and press work. Los Angeles Times had similar articles, and there are others. What they don’t seem to realize is what they’re describing, the ideal of what they’re describing, is dictatorship, not democracy.

C’mon, Noam. Don’t you remember what a great man once said?

BEST-PRESIDENCY-EVAH PROPHYLACTIC: I’m not saying that Obama is a dictator or that he’s “done anything yet.” I’m saying that abnegating the role (h/t Avedon) of wary citizen is, essentially, volunteering for a dictatorship. Acknowledging that the Obama campaign’s “movement” jargon was a mere marketing gimmick would be a healthy step away from the abyss of being uncritical followers of a charismatic leader.