The Strange Death of Liberal America

Last week was one of those times historians like to term watershed moments when a nation is forever altered. Over the weekend as I pondered what had happened I recalled Benjamin Franklin’s famous remark at the Constitutional Convention in answer to what type of country we have created:

A Republic, if we can keep it.

Seven days and two very critical events will have historians arguing over the meaning of last week well into the next generation, for they have altered the very foundations of that Republic. Depending on your perspective, it is now standing on less firm footing that it was last Monday morning. This morning as people wake up and drive to work they will not see any visible manifestations of the changes, but when they arrive at work you can bet they will debate the changes over lunch conversations, coffee breaks and around the copy machine.

What occurred has taken me several days to gather my thoughts, causing me to miss my usual Friday posting. It reminded me of hearing about the death or serious illness of a friend or family member that leaves you so numb, you need time to process what happened.

Event One: the Vice Presidential Debate

Virtually all the commentary I have seen on the debate focused on who “won” and who helped or injured their campaigns, but I have seen little about “big picture” implications that will reverberate through our political process for years to come in ways that in the future we will come to profoundly regret.

These so-called debates have become political farces–bits of carefully-scripted theater–that are unworthy of a nation that produced Lincoln-Douglas, Webster-Hayne and rhetoric that justly deserves to be ranked among humanity’s notable achievements. The VP debate made a mockery of that tradition, promising to forever alter how we conduct politics in this nation, for we have become not a republic, but some perversion of the term, a mutant form sired by media, money, partisan politics and the candidates themselves.

Exhibit A

Exhibit A is one Sarah Palin, a woman, who by any rights is so unqualified for the office she seeks she has no idea of even what it entails. In the course of ninety minutes she managed to not answer a single question, launching into bizarre digressions that had about as little relationship to reality as something uttered by those street people who carry on conversations with unseen beings in loud voices while the rest of us stroll by casually.

The reactions to this performance showed how terribly far this republic has drifted off course. Even though she did not answer any questions, totally screwed up the Constitution and at times made no sense at all, her performance was deemed successful because she did not put Poland in Asia or mispronounce the name of some world leader. Even more, the critiques focused on her stage presence, as she were some actress in a bad television drama or one of those staged reality shows. So our chief qualification for VP has become whether someone can get through the equivalent of Oprah. That Oprah can be a tougher questioner than these debate moderators only shows how ridiculous these affairs have become.

How We Reached This Point

How we reached this point offers little hope that we will be spared Sarah Palin’s in the future. In fact, quite the contrary, we will see more of them now that the prototype has weathered the test. Palin’s performance was so shallow and dreadful that this nation should be ashamed of itself, but instead the reviewers had more praise than criticism and behaved as though they were assessing a high school drama, not an event that could well decide who is in charge of the most powerful nation on earth.

The Chief Culprits

The culprits should begin with the moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS. Her questions were such softballs that she should be forced to surrender her National Press Club card.

But then this trend has developed over some time. The erosion of the debates into something resembling Jay Leno’s fawning interviews with his celebrity guests and question time at the Miss America pageant has taken place over the last few decades; but last week’s debates hit a new low.

As the format has evolved, the moderator addresses questions about national issues to each candidate, periodically allowing for what passes for rebuttal. Candidates receive no more than 3-5 minutes to explain, say, international law as it pertains to attempting to capture Osama bin Laden in Pakistan or the nuances of the current financial crisis. We long ago passed the point where the candidates directly engaged one another except at the most superficial level.

In deference to their own inflated sense of self-importance, the moderators generally draw their questions from yesterday’s headlines, a strategy that enables the candidate and her or his handlers to infallibly know ahead of time the topics for the evening. It has become a bit like students knowing their exam questions before finals.

The Graders

Every media outlet now has its resident stable of graders who pontificate about the performance of the debaters. Sometimes the analysis lasts longer than the debate. In recent years these analysts are carefully chosen for balance from each political party. Some of them may have even worked for a candidate.

Predictably their responses have become performance art in their own right, complete with appropriate eyebrow raising, hand-wringing and what I call “the stare.” Bceause they represent each party their job has become less to analyze the debate than to serve as the first spinmeisters, trying to put the best light on their candidate’s performance.

This partisanship yields predictable results with the audience left in the cold as to what really happened. In the current format these post-debate discussions have become as, or more, important than the debate itself. What the analysts say has become more important than what the candidates say. Should one of these analysts screw up and accidentally praise the opposition you can be sure they will hear about it from their party and if it happens too often they will ge looking for another job.

The Handlers

It is telling that those who work with the candidates in these debates have been given the same name as those who sit in a heavyweight fighter’s corner whispering instructions. Actually they ought to be termed the script writers, for with the questions known ahead of time the task becomes writing a proper response that the candidate can convincingly deliver as if this were the first time they had ever heard of the issue.

:Like Hollywood screenwriters–or perhaps more appropriately ad writers–their task is to craft the “message,” that becomes the plot for the entire evening. By now every American knows that it is so important for candidates to “stay on message” that the standard for judging performance, just like that for someone on the screen, is how well they do stay on message even if they fail to answer a single question. This message is liberally salted with soundbites calculated to appear in the follow-up analysis and the next day’s media commentaries.

The importance of the handlers is confirmed by the fact that the standards for judging “debate’ performance are not substantially different than those used for judging the Academy Awards. The “debates’ have become what ranks as the number one exhibit of the much-discussed and dangerous trend that our politics and entertainment have become increasingly intertwined.

The World View of Hollywood

What the debates illustrate is that this development has less to do with former and present entertainment figures becoming candidates than it does with politics adopting the strategies and world view of Hollywood. This view holds that it is not substance but style that matters; that in fact substance in the form of anything intellectual is a negative.  One commentator on the VP debate criticized Joe Biden for sounding “professorial,” but no one criticized Palin for sounding like one of those guests on Dr. Phil or Judge Judy.

When style and presentation rule over substance it becomes possible for the Professor Higgins of the political handler variety to take a small town mayor from Alaska and with a bit of coaching sell her a legitimate candidate for the highest office in the land. Than this woman who could not survive a snowball interview with Katie Couric–who is hardly the toughest questioner on television, in fact she has a reputation as a softball pitcher which is why the Palin people agreed to the interview in the first place–suddenly should be transformed into someone who could survive a one-hour debate shows how ubiquitous and accepted this world view has become.

It is now longer important that our candidates BE Presidential, they need to look and sound like what Hollywood considers Presidential.

Joe Six-Pack

I find the term Joe SixPack a prime example of the media’s disdain for the American people. Invented by some ad executive back so long ago no one knows who created it, it pictures the so-called average American as what down South they call “bubbas,” beer-swilling ignoramuses who sit in front of the tube with the clicker looking for Hooters’ waitresses to ogle.

Note the rhetorical addition of the use of six-pack. That anyone who drinks beer these days knows the six pack has become as extinct as the Edsel doesn’t matter. The fact Joe carries a six-pack means Joe is going to drink all those beers and we all know the mental and physiological results of that. The term betrays its ad executive origins by its similarity to that staple–that “message”–of all ads: those who the very same ad executives would send packing if they ever ended up at their front door are the font of wisdom.

The wise fool was not merely a staple of Shakespeare but a common character of dramas dating back to before we even have scripts for them. The original character of Yankee Doodle was based on the wise fool, the rube from the sticks who out foxes old John Bull. But what the ad executives have done with this is not borrow from this venerable tradition, which asserted that intelligence and cunning had nothing to do with breeding, but to turn the entire tradition on its head.

Joe Six-Pack is testimony that stupidity IS wisdom. If some dumb, ignorant rube who really is stupid uses our product then surely you, who are far more intelligent and sophisticated can fail to see the wisdom of the choice. The current ad campaigns based around a cave man who sells insurance along with a talking duck and a lizard show how pervasive this has become.

The Afflac Candidate

If the “handlers” can make household words of a duck, a gecko and a cave man, why not a Vice President? The whole point is, of course, you can’t or every ad would become a household word. Here we need to give credit to Sarah Palin, only not in the way everyone else has done, but in a far more frightening analysis that helps exemplify why last week changed America.

What amazed me about Palin last week had nothing to do with the quality of her answers and everything to do with her stage presence. In the short time they had to prepare her since the Couric interview, Palin’s handlers conducted her through a crash course in media relations that should land them contracts well into the future. The fruit of their efforts cannot be denied. The woman who appeared on stage with Joe Biden had what can only be called media presence.

Credit for this should also go to Sarah Palin, for she showed she may not be a quick study when it comes to foreign policy, but she is a quick learner when it comes to camera presence. In Hollywood terms she is a “natural.” Whether this was a major part of the McCain team’s choice of her only they can say, but if it was not they must be rejoicing at capturing the equivalent of media magic in a bottle.

The Frightening Implications

It is time to draw all these threads together into a vision of America that should scare the heck out of you. The mixture of politics and entertainment is not new. William Jennings Bryan was a major media star during his day. Before Bryan they turned the hero of a series of popular books about Davy Crockett into a politician.  Politicians have always sold and packaged themselves and the contemporary equivalents of Spiro Agnew, Warren Harding and Dan Quayle are nothing new.

What makes Sarah Palin and last week such a watershed moment is the universality of media values that has come to be adopted as the chief standard for judging fitness in office. Time and time again one heard everyone from the “person on the street” interviewee to intelligent pundits who should know better say that Sarah Palin looked like she belonged on stage with Joe Biden. Notice the emphasis on look.

What they meant by that was that already after only a few months on the national campaign trail Palin already seems more a media natural than John Kerry or Al Gore. She appeared comfortable, even of potential star quality, on camera. Because they camera “likes” her as the Holly wood types say, she is qualified to be Vice President.

When Susan Sontag made the profound observation that in America reality has come to be what is seen by cameras, I had little idea that when she uttered that phrase many decades ago, that she would be speaking about the Vice Presidency and the American political system. If the handlers can take a small town mayor “liked” by the camera and put her within a heartbeat of the Presidency, who else might they be able to “makeover?”

As for Sarah Palin, what political force will she become after several more years of training and time before the cameras? The answer is: very scary.

NOTE:

The follow-up to this series on the week that changed America will focus on the financial bailout, which forever altered the long-standing relationship between government and business as surely as Sarah Palin altered our politics.