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Friday, August 29, 2008
Nobody hits the Exacta…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Back on Aug. 16, I asked for predictions on who would be the running mates. I’ve gone back to check, and not surprisingly, nobody got ‘em both right.
RW gets credit for picking Palin, but predicted Richardson on the other side. @@ picked Biden — but as McCain’s running mate.
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Didn’t see that one coming….
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CNN is reporting that McCain’s pick is Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a 44-year-old who is halfway through her first term as head of a state of fewer than 700,000 people, less than the population of DeKalb County.
If true, that’s a pretty stunning pick, and it suggests McCain had to reach pretty far down his list to find someone acceptable to his party’s various interest groups. Palin may be very intelligent and well-grounded, and her youth and gender can certainly help McCain, but her inexperience in national and international affairs and her lack of exposure to big-time media demands make it a stretch in my opinion.
For example, would Palin be ready to step into the presidency as commander in chief to replace a man who turns 72 today?
Hey, I could be wrong — I’ve never even heard the woman say a word. But this is an odd pick.
UPDATE: On the other hand, a smiling Jim Wooten just walked into my office and slapped a dollar down on my desk, proposing a little friendly wager on the November outcome. He thinks this settles it.
And Jim doesn’t part with a dollar easily.
UPDATE II: I of course accepted the wager.
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Theater, pageantry — it’s just politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Modern political conventions are like a Super Bowl minus the game. They are the bling on the body politic: shiny, pretty and a touch goofy. They exist to be seen, more than to do. They are like a Miss America pageant where the fix is in. The Olympic opening and closing ceremonies without all that sweating in between.”
— Calvin Woodward, Associated Press
It’s a common refrain: Nothing important happens at political conventions anymore; they’re just theater. Some even argue that networks and reporters ought to refuse to cover the events because they’ve been reduced to mere infomercials.
That’s all nonsense, because if you were paying attention, a lot happened this week in Denver. Among other things, we saw the hopes and dreams invested in Hillary Clinton, the most serious female presidential candidate in our nation’s history, collide head on with the hopes and dreams invested in Barack Obama, the most serious black candidate in our nation’s history.
We also saw the Democrats struggle to reweave those two strands of their party back into one, a task they performed awkwardly but in the end effectively.
The doubters are certainly right — the image projected of party unity was created by drawing upon the entire range of theatrical skills: choreography, playwriting, lighting, music and not a little bit of acting. But politics has been just another form of theater for as far back as it is possible to trace such things.
The traditions of democracy and theater arose together, simultaneously, out of ancient Greece, two siblings born of the same mother. Politicians have long been actors, and actors have long been political —- the oldest plays in our possession are ancient Greek comedies that were satires on the politics of the day, and even now we acknowledge the link by joking that Washington is just Hollywood for ugly people.
So while the conventions have become nothing more than political theater, they remain essential for just that reason. A debate over tax policy or environmental laws doesn’t draw the public to politics; it is personality, drama, conflict. In fact, on the stage in Denver this week, we saw story lines and characters that themselves could be drawn from a Greek play:
The wife once scorned but now ascendant, and in the end denied the vindication she sought; the aging roue, reluctant to cede the stage to the younger interloper but forced to drink the bitter dregs; the mysterious, charismatic stranger who bursts upon the scene and alters everything.
Even the complaint that theater somehow pollutes politics is as old as history. In “The Republic,” written in the fourth century B.C., Plato complained about the rise of what he called a “theatrocracy,” in which those on the stage tried too hard to please their listeners. He believed “the sovereignty of the audience” gave the great unwashed too much sway over those who led them.
However, the theatricality of modern politics also has a purely pragmatic side. Leadership is a twofold challenge. First you have to decide on the right thing to do, then you have to persuade other people to do it. Campaigns exist to test that second skill, a candidate’s ability to communicate and generate support through the force of personality and intellect. And in that, a touch of theater is always useful.
Charisma — a Greek word, by the way — helps too, as millions of American voters no doubt saw last night in Obama’s acceptance speech. His Republican opponents have tried to undercut that appeal by dismissing Obama as “a celebrity,” but his communication skills clearly make them nervous.
That discomfort is understandable. In recent years, Republicans have vastly outperformed the Democrats in the theater of politics. In fact, if they had been able to run the government half as well as they could run campaigns, we wouldn’t have a country in which 76 percent of Americans now believe we have gone “seriously off on the wrong track.”
In next week’s Republican National Convention, the GOP will have their chance to explain that record to the American people, and explain how the next four years would be different. It promises to be an instructive performance, and not a little entertaining as well.
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