Political Rallies have no Place in Azeroth

On my side of the Pond, we tend to ignore news tied to the US presidential election at least until the primaries nominate the front-runner (and then go back to not caring until the election is actually decided, which nowadays should happen between election day and late January 2009 when the winner is actually sworn in).
There are times however when US politics trespass beyond what should be acceptable, like what happened when one of the candidates organized a political rally in WoW.
WOWInsider’s favourite wannabe-polemist Mike Shramm (funny, there seems to be a definite trend with Shramm) talks about the thing here, and states:

But I, and others, maintain that this is not a complete fantasy world– it’s a world populated by real people who should be allowed to express their opinions. Sure, nobody wants to have an opinion forced on them (this kind of thing shouldn’t fly on a roleplaying server, obviously), but the World of Warcraft is a big one– if you couldn’t go somewhere else on Whisperwind Monday night, you could sign on to a different realm.

This misses two major points (and that’s definitely part of the Shramm Trend), the first one is, when you have your mains on Whisperwind and have a raid planned that night, no, you definitely wouldn’t sign onto a different realm, but more importantly, that this kind of real-life propaganda simply has nothing to do in Azeroth. That people would discuss politics in specific chats is one thing. To create characters and guilds just to hold a political meeting is about as out of place as holding a funeral in-game.

People are entitled to opinions, of course. I doubt that any US player, having an Internet connection, will have been able to escape the campaigning in the real world around him. The information is there, the points have been risen, the take of the issues exposed.
When you start having to hold a political rally in a game to try and fish for voters, what kind of image does that leave of your politics? How does campaigning in a virtual world, in particular in a fantasy setting, reflect on your political message, on your stance on the issues?

To me, this is making a mockery of whatever the candidate’s campaign is supposed to stand for (unless it’s about free games and broadband Internet access for everyone). Social security? Medicare? Foreign politics? Fiscal policies? Iraq? The death penalty? All of this gets dragged into ridicule by the first character emoting “For Gnomeragan!” in the game.
Of course, in our times where the constant media barrage forces a candidate to produce a show rather than political discourse pretty much everywhere on the planet, such things are to be expected. But at some point in time, I hope that people genuinely interested in politics because they believe in changing the society they live in finally wake up and stop submitting to the media circus on the campaign trail. Turning any political action into a big show, in the end, does more to diminish voter turnout in all democracies than unpopular policies, at least that’s my impression.

When the candidates become entertainers first and foremost, I as a citizen have more and more trouble taking their politics seriously, and the less serious politics become, the more it will turn away the more talented and smarter people from public offices, leaving us with nothing but mediocre clowns attracted by the limelights, the power, the headlines with their names in it, and the fake glory generated by the media circus. Which, in practice, leaves little place for the genuine betterment of society.

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