Manipulation and politics have been a hand in hand combination as long as time its self. The issues of major importance to the United States are no different. In each issue in the American conscious, manipulation plays a major role for each side of it. The issue of choosing a president is certainly no different. In this an election year, the American public will be subjected to manipulation from all sides and every angle by the two candidates. The focus of this paper will be on the types of manipulation used by both the Bush and Gore campaigns, and why they use it. .
Every four years the United States under goes a process that drips with just about every kind of manipulation possible, a presidential election. Manipulation is a key to an election and those who can master the ability to do so will have the best chance of winning. By manipulating the image, issue and tone of a campaign a candidate can control the environment in which they are running in and can make the playing field very uneven. Many have called this process the down fall of an democracy, but if you had an election process that was purely based on policy records the public would be very uninterested in a very boring system. The real problem facing democracy is the ability for the public to discern between pure manipulation and factual information. The next two sections of this paper will start with a look at the campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush and his attempts at manipulating this process, followed by Vice President Al Gore's campaign. .
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The first candidate we are looking at is the Governor of Texas, Republican George W. Bush. In his speech announcing his candidacy Gov. Bush repeated called himself a "compassionate conservative- and a better alternative to the Clinton/Gore years. This is the first sign of manipulating an image in the Bush camp. The reason he labeled himself a "compassionate- conservative was to set his own image before the Gore camp could have the opportunity to do so.