Why Barack Obama must now zip up

Listening to Barack Obama's 'change' rant, today, has me even more convinced that its time he zips up, talks less and talks policy. His 'simple folk needing to beat the odds' stories are surely on their way to sounding more hollower by the day.

What he has fallen prey to, is the state of 'sensory adaptation'. A state where the recipient gets used to certain sensations; becoming accommodated to a certain level of stimulation. The earlier perceptions of 'statesmanship' generated by Obama's long winding talks are now being cracked open, partly by Hilary's direct attack on Obama's lack of substance.

Sound bites are great stimuli to generate perceptions. So are visual stimuli too. On both these counts, the Obama express was chugging along fine, until now. He looked boyish and fresh and he sounded like a seasoned politician. But these very same stimuli are now deserting him. If not his looks, his sound bites are now jarring with the emptiness in them becoming even more pronounced.

For him to buck this downward spiral, he needs to be well versed with Weber's Law which explains the concept of 'differential threshhold'. The Law talks about, perceived differentiation between similar stimuli of varying intensities (i.e., the stronger the initial stimulus, the greater the additional intensity needed for the second stimulus to be perceived as different).

Having gone overboard with his sound bites, Obama will now find it difficult to generate new ones that can sustain the kind of interest they did, when he began.

Is it therefore any surprise that his talk in Texas today sounded like he was reading out of a poorly written work of fiction, where the 'marginalised' ultimately prevail.

Nice story, but at the end of it all, everyone knows, that aint the way it really is.