Think about it – is politics based on facts, realities or emotional persuasion? It’s a no-brainer. Politicians do their best to activate our emotional triggers. Fact and reason do not persuade. Try your own logic and reason to persuade a friend or relative who strongly believes in one party to change their affiliation. Won’t happen. Can’t happen. A study in futility.

When the ancient Greeks came up with their crazy new form of government more than 2,500 years ago, they quickly realized that to govern successfully in a democracy, one needed great persuasion skills. Persuasion became so important that Aristotle wrote 3 volumes about the persuasion process in the fourth century BCE. He correctly determined that there are three main elements to persuade successfully. He called these elements Logos, the appeal to logic, Pathos, the appeal to the emotions and Ethos, the credibility and authority of the speaker. Aristotle wrote that the best route to persuasion should be logic and reason.

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One of the 7 key emotional triggers is consistency. We are emotionally forced to be consistent with our past beliefs and actions. And we are hard wired to be consistent with our respected peers. This powerful trigger governs much of our decision process. The databank we build from birth serves us well for future easy, automatic emotional decisions.

How, perhaps even unknowingly, do the politicians activate our emotional consistency trigger? Overall we tend to go with whatever party we aligned with before. Yet politicians do their best to activate the consistency trigger. And they try hard to activate the consistency we have with respected peers.

The first presidential debate was a study in the consistency trigger. Each participant tried to tie the other into a consistent pattern with negative overtones. Obama, referring to the financial meltdown stated “This is a final verdict on the failed economic policies promoted by George Bush,” constantly implying McCain would be consistent with Bush. No fact, no logic, no rationality explained, just a hope to activate peer consistency trigger.

McCain attempted to show that Obama would be consistent with his failure to back American military interests. By emphasizing Obama’s failure to vote for the Iraq surge, his criticism of the surge, and by not admitting he was wrong about the surge’s effectiveness, Mc Cain connected these issues with future probabilities for Obama’s poor military judgment.

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