One day, you"re sitting at the dinner table discussing politics with your wife, and you realize that everything you have to say about issues is better, and more productive than what the politicians in Washington are saying and doing. With this realization, you decide that you should run for an office. There are two congressmen that are retiring from your state, one of whom is in your district, and you feel you have a good chance at getting elected. The question now is, how are you going to go about getting elected?.
First of all you realize you don't have much money to put on a campaign, so you have your wife become your campaign manager. You then go to all of your friends from local business, being you have been a community pillar for many years, and ask for donations towards your campaign. Having gotten more donations than you ever expected, you have enough for signs and a couple spots on television. Now comes the next question, what image?.
As shown in our movies, image was a very important aspect of everyone's campaign. In The War Room, there was a scene in which the campaign staff is deciding on whether or not to have homemade signs in the audience of the Democratic National Convention. There is also a scene in Bob Roberts, where the campaign staff is deciding on both what type of sign and their new television ad. And lastly Bulworth perhaps contains the most amazing display of how image can affect a campaign throughout the whole movie. .
As Wayne says in his article, "A favorable image, of course, cannot be taken for granted. It has to be created, or at least polished." When Jay Bulworth was running for re-election, he only had support from the big businesses that gave him campaign dollars in exchange for legislative help. His image at this point was not one of the everyman, or of the common person. Without this image, he would never achieve the 72% vote. Once her became delusional and started saying what he felt, he "created" the image of the common man, and reached those who had not been reached before.
