Ali Safaa Ibraheem
Dr. Joan Bitterman
IDS 1150 Learning Strategies
March 3rd, 2015
Campus lecture by a visiting speaker: Mayor Nat Robertson
On Friday the 23rd of January I attended a talk by the mayor of Fayetteville, Nat Robertson. He is Fayetteville’s current mayor and is in the election race to be the mayor again for another term. Throughout his presentation he discussed how he beat his previous competition in the last election race when he was competing for the first time. As he was successful in gaining the position as mayor, his tactics and plans where very interesting to listen to. As a candidate for mayor, he had to use every opportunity he got to weaken his competition and gain advantage. This included using their weaknesses against them. He used their voting history that portrayed a negative image as well as aspects of their personal life to make himself seem like the best candidate to the town’s people.
All candidates running for mayor had a specific group they would target, this could be church groups, or political groups such as democrats or republicans. Robertson was ethical in this sense and did not go after the target audience of his competition, and instead he did the bigger thing and concentrated on finding a target area of his own.
This obviously worked to his advantage though, he was successful in winning the votes of the people he targeted as well as winning round the people his competition had gone after. Some aspects of his tactics where ‘dirty’ –