Cleavage in Politics
Useless Gimmicks in Campaigning
By Daniel Muniz

When candidates do not have enough fundraising acumen or cash on hand to mount an effective advertising campaign that informs the public of their positions and articulates their agenda, then that’s where the grassroots comes into focus. Smart grassroots campaigning can generate enough positive publicity about a relatively unknown candidate which also has the ability to tap into local support that can negate or minimize an opponent’s financial advantage so that an election race can truly become competitive.

And that is about the only way to defeat someone who has so much more money and financial support.

On the other hand, bad campaigning is totally worthless regardless of what kind of gimmicks that the candidate can come up with to persuade the public but office seekers still try them anyways.

For instance, the Libertarian Party of Alabama was unable to collect a miniscule 40,000 signatures that was needed to place their candidate on the ballot of the 2006 governor’s race. And even for a small state like Alabama, 40,000 signatures is still a pretty paltry figure that an established national third party like the Libertarians should have easily come up with but they didn’t. It also brings into sharp focus about what kind of appeal they have with the public and about what kind of remaining strength they still have left.

And that is also why nearly all states place these very minimal thresholds on third parties in order to prevent too many nuisance candidates from filing and wasting taxpayer money with their egomaniacal campaigns.

As a result, the best that the Alabama Libertarian Party could do was to promote their gubernatorial nominee, Loretta Nall, as a write-in candidate. They really had no other recourse because of their lack of infrastructure.

However, Loretta Nall was undeterred. She decided to employ a rather novel approach to attract media attention and inject enthusiasm and support into her rather seemingly hopeless campaign.

She opted to use her breasts as a means to promote her candidacy and garner press coverage of them throughout the state of Alabama. The Libertarian nominee had also hoped that her jingling cleavage could be used as leverage to get the public to focus on her candidacy and her issues as well as being a viable alternative to the mainstream parties and the well known candidates of the state.

Overall, Nall intended for her breasts to give her the lift that she needed in order to get more people to take her campaign seriously and to provide the backbone of grassroots support for her drive to the governor’s mansion. The public will indeed be focused on something but it won’t be on her talking points.

Although she may have a nice pair of boobs but slapping them in people’s faces is just not going to be good enough to create the kind of enthusiasm and notoriety that she would need to present an authentic challenge to the political establishment. It may make for good entertainment on the local news wires but this Libertarian realized that she would have to take her campaign to the next level. Accordingly, Nall resorted to in-depth discussions on her web site about why she doesn’t wear any panties.

After all, celebrities like Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton created media firestorms by not wearing any underwear and giving the whole world an eyeful of their privates. However, these Hollywood starlets always had a horde of paparazzi trailing them at any given moment so it was easy to generate enormous publicity whenever they flashed the cameras because they had a national audience (albeit in tabloid magazines) that was eager to splash their sordid escapades on their front pages.

But that is not the case in Alabama. Although such publicity stunts would generate some interest from the press, Nall doesn’t have the same kind of magnetism and allure that rich spoiled celebrities already have. Yes, if she did pull up her top and her bra to flash her breasts or pull up her skirt (without any panties on), there would be pictures taken and stories written up. And yes, she did gain a level of media access that other write-in or third party candidates are not normally given because of her antics.

Her signature issues such legalizing marijuana, withdrawing the Alabama National Guard from Iraq, tax credits for private schools and home schools, non-compliance with the Real ID Act and Patriot Act, and getting out of the No Child Left Behind Act are now completely secondary to her breasts. Each one of those points would require quite a bit of convincing but instead, the media only focused on her boobs.

Not surprisingly, she was trounced in the election.

Nall did get a lot of free media attention but that was about it because the gimmicks will not cover up some of her positions that were already a hard-sell to start off with. It may be tempting for some candidates to think that unhooking their bra strap or not wearing any panties in public may be their ticket to elected office but it takes more than cleavage to win an election.

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