> In my experience, most people are literally aching to find a
> politician with real
> ideas, authentic, real-time reactions, and an actual honest, open
> approach
> to politics. Dean might be this, in some major ways, but the major
> media
> are bashing him for it, for the very reason Louis Proyect (!!!)
> discusses
> today on Pen-L -- such authenticity and spontaneity suggest a lack of
> submission to elite handlers.
That may be true of most of your acquaintances (and perhaps most of mine). I would enjoy seeing such a person in the White House, too. (His or her policies might be as bad as any other president we might have, but at least he or she would be a lot more interesting to watch than these media-handler-handled cardboard figures we have to put up with.)
However, I'm afraid that McLuhan was right to a large extent about TV -- it shows "cool" people to much better advantage than "hot" ones. Up against Bush's low-keyed, Texas-marshal imitation -- sentences that take 5 minutes each to deliver, with a no-nonsense, silent-but-tough defender-of-defenseless-women-and-children sort of drawl -- I fear that the good doctor would spontaneously combust in the eyes of most viewers.
What is already being called the "I Have A Scream Speech" is actually probably not, in itself, the nail in the coffin of the Dean campaign that some people think. It's just a rather extreme example of his general style. Even if he keeps a lot tighter lid on it from now on -- as I'm sure his advisers have already told him to do, judging from his first appearances in New Hampshire -- his TV image will still be inferior to Bush's, I'm afraid. This would be especially harmful in the TV debates at the end of the campaign, assuming, as all the experts say, that it will be a down-to-the-wire campaign. A bad image on the debates can be devastating, as Nixon discovered on the very first debates when his 5-o'clock shadow and excessive perspiration contributed so much to doing him in, and as W's dad found when he glanced at his watch -- just once!
This has nothing to do with my estimation of him as a person -- I admire his passion and commitment as much as anyone else. I just don't think -- and I may very well be wrong -- that his style comes across well on TV. And like it or not, presidential campaigns now are essentially TV serials -- most voters don't get their information about candidates from printed sources, and they don't analyze candidates the way those of us who grew up in the pre-TV, newspaper-reading era do. However much we may curse the fact, they react primarily to the way the images on TV make them feel, and vote on their gut feelings, not on reasoned analyses of position papers. I'm very sorry that this is the case, and I don't of course approve of this state of affairs. But that's the way things are, and there ain't nothin' none of us can do about it.
(Eventually, the medium we are using -- the Internet -- may change that, if a large part of the electorate ever gets addicted to e-mail lists and blogs. But only a small fraction of the electorate does that now, and a cursory glance at most of what the Netizens are saying about the campaigns will show, I think, that most of them are primarily TV watchers -- they only turn to the Net to vent their opinions about what they see on TV.)
> If the media were spinning Dean's demeanor as something that apathetic
> Americans have been waiting for, Dean would have won 80 percent in
> Iowa.
> Instead, he's "unelectable" and "unpresidential."
As Carrol says, what else would you expect the media to do? Quoting him:
> The electoral process (insofar as it
> involves the DP & RP) is precisely designed to keep Americans
> "apathetic," and to blame the media for this is to blame them for doing
> well what they exist to do.
Or as the well-known Scott-Heron saying had it: "The revolution will not be televised."
Quoting Michael again:
> Nauseating in the extreme. And, btw, ain't no way, no how I'm ever
> voting
> for that fake-ass boob John Kerry!
I find Kerry awfully hard to take, too, and I hope he isn't nominated. But remember the watch-word of 2004: Grit your teeth, put on a happy face, and repeat the mantra: "Anybody But Bush, Anybody But Bush, Anybody ..."
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. -- Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile