You might as well be done with politics altogether... Politics pulling unsubtly on people's emotional heartstrings to gain leverage ("won't anyone think of the children?") is the kind of systemic hacking technique that sometimes gets revered over here, applied to a different domain. Politics is all about gaining legitimacy, the feeling of legitimacy is an emotion, and thus emotional manipulation tends to be present in every political process, at various levels of egregiousness. It's just about as core to the process as factoring common bits of logic into functions is to programming.