Obviously, what seems strongest about this video is close echoing between Bush and McCain, not just saying similar things, but virtually identical things, and often in eerily similar ways. This immediately made me think of Shawn Rosenberg's description of "sequential thinking", which I've written about both here and at MyDD on various occassions since 2005. Rosenberg (no relation) described a 3-fold typology of adult reasoning:
Sequential thinkers reason "by tracking the world," recognize regularities in sequences of events, but have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences.
Linear thinkers understand cause and effect, limited to a one-direction, one-cause/one-effect model. The world they perceive has logical order and structure, but the structure is invariably hierarchical, causality flows top-down, and the world is divided neatly into cause and effect.
Systematic thinkers understand multi-faceted, multi-linear cause and effect, with mutual cause-and-effect relationships between different elements. The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects.
One doesn't need to make any cause/effect connections to get the point of this video. The repeated appearance of similar, nearly identical statements by the two men binds them together in a manner much more fundamental than any kind of logical argument could.
A couple of other points Rosenberg makes about sequential reasoning are also relevant here:
Sequential thinking involves conceptual relations that "are synthetic without being analytic. They join events together but the union forged is not subject to any conceptual dissection." Because such relations are non-rational, there is nothing rational one can say or do to change them.
But they can change, Rosenberg explains, based on changing appearances. These relationships "are mutable," they can either be extended, based on "share[d] recognized overlapping events" or changed, when the sequence does not play out as expected. Because it is a pre-logical mode of thought, "the relations of sequential thought engender expectations, but do not create subjective standards of normal or necessary relations between events."
Usually these work against us, and in favor of the right. But this video very effectively takes advantage of simple association in a way that clicks with the sequential thinker, even as it may stimulate more informed and reflective thinkers to bring additional considerations to bear. The simple fact that the appearances of the two men track so closely over and over and over again makes this video almost a textbook example of how to speak to the sequential thinkers of the world, taking full advantage of the fact that the relationships between objects and/or actors is mutable, and all the efforts to distance McCain from Bush can effectively be erased by sufficient exposure to a video like this.
