Dale Carnegie revolutionized sales techniques by introducing elements of empathy and complicity. His best-known work, How to Win Friends and Influence People, was published the same year that the Civil War began in Spain. One of the techniques popularized by Carnegie was to repeat the name of your interlocutor to create a climate of false confidence. Today it is a widespread technique, also in radio and politics. In Pedro Sánchez’s desperate media tour, the president also repeats the name of his interviewers. And you suffer, because you don’t know if it will happen to him like those lovers who, in full sexual fireworks, pronounce the name of an inappropriate person.
A few days ago, in El intermedio (La Sexta), Sánchez was repeating the name of Wyoming until Wyoming corrected him: “If it doesn’t taste bad: Great Wyoming.” At another point, Sánchez realized that Sandra Sabatés was also on the set and then hastily added Sandra’s name. Domingo, in Lo de Évole (La Sexta), repeated Jordi’s name and accepted a type of interview that satisfies the interests of whoever does it, who grants it, of those who watch it and even of those who don’t plan to see it .
After an aesthetic-festive start like Wes Anderson, Évole recovered the nerve of other times. He knew how to prevent the digressions by aspersion and the spiral tabarras. The conversation confronted the interests of two progressive men who accepted the challenge of explaining themselves without betraying themselves and adding to the cause of fighting the rise of the conservative parties. Sánchez’s tactic? Pretending that he was playing attack when in reality he was insisting on practicing a defensive, victimizing argument, a slave to what he calls “the evil bubble of sanchismo”, a poisonous manipulation created, he says, by his adversaries.
Less rigid than other times, without giving up explaining –I wish he had done it sooner!– that the mechanisms of a government presidency are not the same as those of a Cuñadista tavern or a radio gathering, Sánchez repeated an idea that we often forget. often: do not underestimate the power of the vote. It was the way to ask for the vote, although Sánchez continues to make the mistake of stigmatizing as ultra-conservatives those who have felt excluded, disappointed or betrayed by his mandate. It was as if instead of wanting to win friends and influence people, he just wanted to keep the friends and supporters he already has. Évole couldn’t help but resort to the final battery of click-generating questions. Luckily, Sánchez did not know how to answer about the authorship of a phrase by David Bisbal (an example of the extent to which memes vampirize attention and promote a recreational and narcotic banality) and he did identify Shakira’s verse: “Women no longer cry ; women bill”. I take this opportunity to tell the president that I also bill, but when I see the tax treatment that the self-employed experience, I cry.
