We crunch the numbers during every elections season. Crunching numbers is important. After all, at election time, it’s the numbers that count; and the numbers-crunching has started all over again.
After the PPP/C’s Albion campaign opener the state media gave us numbers ranging from 20,000 to 10,000…….the same numbers thing in Kitty and the same thing in Linden. Oddly enough there seemed to be no numbers available after the Enmore event. Perhaps the numbers there simply didn’t add up.
Of course it’s not the actual numbers that count……….its the impact that the numbers are believed to create. Somehow, our political spin doctors have gotten it into their heads that if they can come up with big enough numbers at these political rallies, those, somehow, will be converted into numbers at the polls.
What they do not realize is that first, media people are not particularly competent at counting numbers. There are other downsides to the numbers game too. People have long caught on to the practice of busing. If you want to understand the significance of the numbers what you really need to do is not to count the people but to count the number of buses and mini vans and trucks parked in the vicinity of the rallies. Therein lies the real story of the numbers. When crowds of people are photographed at political rallies and those photographs appear in the newspapers, it really means little since it’s hard to tell for example, whether the crowds at a rally at the 1763 monument are people who come mostly from Little Biaboo or whether they live in the particular constituency. Professional crowds, they are called. People who are available to endure bus rides from one end of the country to another; to do their rent-a-crowd thing. It’s a costly job since the rented crowds must be fed and otherwise compensated and the mini buses, and vans and cars and trucks that are pressed into service don’t run on water. But never mind that; it all counts as part of campaign budgets and in a country where there really are no rules regarding where the money comes from to run political campaigns it really does not matter anyway.
Of course it’s not as if the PPP invented the rent-a-crowd campaign trick. The PNC were pretty good at it their day. But crowds cost money and there are advantages to be had from incumbency. State transportation can always be pressed into service and there is of course no telling whether those costs are covered by the political party doing the rent-a-crowd thing or whether those are not just written off as state expenses. It’s easy to do these things when you know how and when no one is checking anyway.
