At last! We now have an answer to the question that has been bugging political pundits each election for the past nine years: "Why does Helen Clark get under the skin of the male young Nats and really infuriates the older ones, like Ian Wishart, who have to resort to homophobic rumour mongering to explain their own reactions?
Researchers have discovered the reason: Women in red drive men crazy. It would appear that men rate a woman as being more sexually attractive if she is shown in an image framed by a red border rather than some other colour (like blue for example?).
So what happens in the NZ political situation is that old Nats, living on past memories, and young Nats, living in hope, see the photos of Helen framed in a warm glow of red on the Labour Party billboards and become overcome with a feeling of being attracted to the icon of social democracy. Then, because they cannot cope with the revelation that they do and are attracted to Helen and the Labour Party can only retreat into good old fashioned reactionary abuse or, in the case of the billboards, scrawling offensive grafitti across her image.
We must thank the US researchers for this exhaustive study and the explanations it now gives us for the viputrative commentary that sometimes passes as investigative political analysis in New Zealand.
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