Little by little the camel goes into the couscous...

14 August 2011

Sunday Morning Political Theater

By Gage Skidmore
One thing I've missed while living in Morocco is television. I don't have a television there (much to the consternation of some of my Moroccan friends), and my Arabic isn't good enough for me to keep up with the soap operas and news programs broadcast in the cafes I frequent. Now back in states I've rekindled my relationship with television, only, as with all old flames, to be disappointed with the results.

This morning my Dad and I watched Meet the Press and This Week which were all about Michelle Bachmann's victory in the Iowa Straw Poll and Tim Pawlenty's decision to drop out of the Republican primary race. Both politicians sat for interviews and I was really shocked by how poorly both they and their interviewers performed.

I'm used to politicians speaking in talking points, but Bachman, in particular, took that to a new level dropping "Obamacare" as well as her birth town of Waterloo, IA in the most logically incongruous places. Pawlenty was laughable with his use of euphemism and childish metaphor; I felt like a little kid when he explained how his lack of success fundraising caused him to consider dropping out of the race: "You know, we just needed a little more fuel to make sure the car could get down the road..."

David Gregory and Matthew Dowd (filling in for Christine Amanpour) aided and abetted both politicians by allowing them to not answer their questions. To his credit, Gregory did get tough on whether Bachmann would allow an atheist/gay to participate in her hypothetical presidential administration. But Dowd was laughable.

I wonder about the rules of television journalism and why it seems that people, especially politicians, are able to avoid their interviewers' questions. The film Frost/Nixon made it seem all about preparation on the part of the interviewer. Through diligent research the interviewer crafts the questions that expose the dirty details that make his subject squirm. This also makes attempts to avoid answering a direct question appear obvious. Maybe reporters don't work as hard as they used to. But what do you do when someone like Bachmann attempts to explain away her description of homosexuality as 'personal bondage' by saying she has 'great respect' for homosexuals? Is it too far to say, 'that answer doesn't make any sense'?

There is also the viewer's responsibility to uncover a speaker's logical fallacies and determine for his or herself whether someone is trustworthy. But, as Neil Postmann argues, oftentimes our emotions overwhelm our logical faculties, and images communicate a great deal of emotion. Make them move and give them music, and you realize just how emotionally manipulative television can be. This is why The Onion and the Daily Show are so funny. They purport seriousness through the visual and aural tropes used by regular news programs and use that 'credibility' to make great satire. If by such meager means they're able to create the verisimilitude of seriousness, then how serious can the rest of the television news media really be? Based on today's performances, not very.

Beyond the interviews, it was shocking to see how superficial our political culture has become. Both programs featured roundtables which spent most of their time talking about who are the 'winners' and 'losers' of the straw poll and what it means for President Obama. While it seemed that the participants wanted to talk about the 'serious issues' surrounding this phase of the presidential election process, the talk boiled down to a discussion of appearances: an important factor for Governor Rick Perry was his 'Texas swagger' and how he will 'appear' to voters; both Republicans and Democrats 'look bad' as a result of the debt ceiling debate; Republicans are concerned that the primary with draw the party to the far right, forcing their nominee to 'lurch back to the middle' to 'appear' more mainstream for the general election. It might as well be a beauty pageant. As a politician in a television dominated society, how you look matters as much as or more than who you are. This is why we spend time discussing whether a candidate 'looks presidential'.

As we drank our coffee, my Dad looked at me and said, "What do you think about all of this now that your home?" After explaining the frustration I felt, I added, "It's all crazy and ridiculous. That's why Moroccans have a King."

3 comments:

  1. First off, I think it's ironic that your blog is subtitled "Morocco through American Eyes" when this post might be better captioned "America through Moroccan eyes."

    With that said, I think your allusion to beauty pageantry is right on. Sometimes I wonder if the American public is smart enough to dig through the fluff and pick out real candidates not for their looks or their charm, but for their vision of America.

    I think interviewers can be partially responsible, but I have to say that the Fox News interviewers (particularly Chris Wallace) did an excellent job in asking tough but fair questions to the candidates during the GOP debate. The answers were crap, but the questions were good. The only complaint I might have had is that I thought they let the candidates get away with bad answers too often. Too often the candidates would get asked a question they didn't have an answer for and so would then talk about "failure of leadership" or some other crap about Obama.

    The final thing I'd say is that there is hope. The Economist ran a great article (http://www.economist.com/node/18988422) a few weeks ago that talked about how a Rick Perry-Barack Obama election would be about competing ideologies about the future of America and less about the candidates themselves. We'll see if it actually unfolds that way.

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  2. First of all, I am not looking forward to coming back to this at all. At least here in Britain the stakes are a lot lower and the country takes itself less seriously. Not looking forward to seeing Perry and Bachmann on TV sets.

    Second, though, Jon, would a Perry-Obama election really be about serious issues? Bill White tried to make the governorship election about issues of Texas governance, but Rick Perry won by caricaturing White as a Washington stooge. I can't imagine Perry taking the high road against Obama.

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  3. Brian, you're probably right. But one can always hope, right?

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