The Imaginary Campaign, by Joe Klein
On Aug. 31, the night after the Clint Eastwood empty-chair colloquy at the Republican Convention, Jon Stewart identified the radioactive ingredient that would provide the fuel for Mitt Romney's September meltdown. The Republicans, he noted on The Daily Show, were suffering from "cognitive dissonance." Like Eastwood, they were campaigning against a Barack Obama who was a figment of their imagination. "There is a President Obama that only Republicans can see," he said. That Obama--the Muslim socialist foreigner--was "bent on our wholesale destruction." The mad fact is, Stewart was only scratching the surface. We now know that Romney has been running not only against an imaginary President but against an imaginary electorate as well. This is an electorate in which 47% are looking for handouts, don't pay income taxes and won't "take responsibility...for their lives."
How utterly insulting to the legions of hospital workers, restaurant (and country club) employees and security guards who work their butts off servicing the plutocrats Romney was addressing at his now infamous fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. These workers barely get by, but they are helped a bit by benefits--like the earned-income and child tax credits invented by Republicans--that limit their exposure to income taxes (although they continue to kick in payroll taxes and pay a host of state and local levies). The great irony is that the vast majority of Romney's 47% would be shocked to learn that they're among the freeloaders, which is why this incident might not, in the end, have all that much impact on the presidential campaign. Romney was right about the larger picture in Boca: this election will be decided by a sliver of middle-class independents, the 6% who can't decide which of these candidates they disdain more.
The conservative commentariat and fat-cat contributors are mystified by Obama's buoyancy. This election should have been a rout, they believe, even for a candidate as lame as Romney. The President is weak, inept, a job killer leading the economy off a cliff. Ah, but there's that cognitive dissonance again: the Romney campaign is running against a phantom economy as well.Indeed, the Republicans--and the press--have latched onto the one economic statistic that Democrats usually emphasize and that has traditionally led Democrats astray: unemployment. Members of the public certainly are worried about the inability of the economy to create jobs and especially about the employment problems their children will confront. But let's face it: if you add up all the unemployed, underemployed and those who've abandoned the workforce, you're still looking at maybe 15% of the labor market.
And while the Romney campaign was sleeping, the other 85% have seen their circumstances change. "Their household income hasn't improved," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's. "But their household balance sheets are very quickly moving in the right direction." The soaring stock market has restored their 401(k)s to their former plenitude; the values of their homes are creeping back above the waterline in some areas and booming in others; and, Zandi says, we are approaching "historic lows" in delinquency rates on consumer credit-card debt and auto and appliance loans. Our nation's feckless freeloaders have behaved responsibly since the 2008 crash. They've reduced their debts. They're feeling better about their circumstances. And suddenly, the percentage of people who think the country is on the right track is surging, especially in important swing states like Ohio, where the economic picture has improved dramatically.
It is the business of a presidential challenger to overstate the dire situation the incumbent has inflicted on a betrayed public. Bill Clinton certainly overstated the extent of the economic recession in 1992. But there are limits. There is reality. In this country, successful politicians have always avoided apocalyptic predictions. This year, however, Republicans have routinely embraced the dark side. If Obama is re-elected, "I don't know that our country really survives four more years of all the regulations," Senator Rand Paul told CNN's Wolf Blitzer during the Republican Convention. Blitzer called him on it, saying, "Wait a second. If President Obama is re-elected, you think the United States of America, in four years, will not be the United States of America?" Paul beat a hasty retreat.
Best Served Cold, by James PoniewozikRomney has lived the past six years in his party's overheated shark tank, spending more time pestering plutocrats for cash than meeting with and listening to the general public. I suspect Romney doesn't really believe that 47% of the electorate are moochers; he was just dialing for dollars. But it's becoming increasingly difficult to see how the man who mouthed those words, whether he believes them or not, can be elected President.
There are plenty of people out there analyzing what Mitt Romney said in the secretly recorded fundraising-dinner video that Mother Jones magazine posted online Sept. 17. I'll let other pundits continue to debate what his comments about "the 47%"--who, he told a banquet table of donors, pay no income tax, depend on government and are destined to vote for Barack Obama--say about his campaign, his base and his character.
Me, I couldn't stop looking at the waiters.
We often talk about how campaign controversies, gaffes and images are "framed": presented by the media, spun by opponents. But the most fascinating thing about the Romney video is how it's literally framed. We're watching him from what looks like the polished surface of a serving table, the hidden camera surrounded by gleaming barware, a decanter of wine and a candle, tucked away behind the objects of service. We can hear him loud and clear, but we can see only the tiny blur of his head and the backs of his supping $50,000-a-plate guests.
We see and hear everything, in other words, from the furtive vantage point of the help. Whoever had the camera, he or she must have been able to inconspicuously access the bar, and the bar provides a very particular point of view. As Romney bemoans the culture of dependency in the background, servers in the foreground rustle up ice cubes. As guests ask about the stock market's prospects and why Romney doesn't more aggressively assert pride in his success, white-gloved waiters refill drinks. As donors loudly applaud a secondhand Marco Rubio story about aspiring to wealth through hard work, a waitress quietly asks for clean martini glasses.
All modern candidates, Republican and Democratic, spend time in banquet rooms indulging wealthy donors. (At one point, Romney listens politely as a guest rails against the penny.) We just don't usually see them. So knocking Romney for campaigning in a room of rich people is not in itself a legitimate critique.
But the picture was just awful. Campaign embarrassments are often unfair, in that an image or quote will hurt a candidate more if it reinforces an existing narrative. Your geopolitical fumbles matter more if you're the inexperienced governor of Alaska. Your haircut matters more if you look like John Edwards than if you look like Bill Richardson.
And if you are Mitt Romney, with Mitt Romney's biography, résumé and bankroll, there are certain things you don't want to be filmed saying in a dining room full of toffs in a Boca Raton, Fla., mansion that looks like a location from Eyes Wide Shut (and whose owner reportedly threw a tabloid-notorious sex party at an estate in the Hamptons). The visual and class ironies couldn't have been better laid out by the set designer for The Remains of the Day. As guests and candidates discuss the intractability of the dependent classes, cutlery clinks, stemware tinkles, a cork pops. You half expect someone to hoist a champagne flute, adjust his monocle and declare, "A toast, gentlemen! To industry!"
Secret recordings are damaging, first, because they're secret. The mere caption "Caught on tape" puts you on the level of a shady car dealer busted by the News at 11. It suggests--as it did when Obama in 2008 said working-class voters "cling" to guns and religion--that you're saying things about people that you wouldn't say to their faces. The Romney video goes beyond even that; he was saying things about a group of people--that 47% includes low-wage service workers--with them in that same room, serving dessert, enjoined against talking back.
I have no idea what the catering staff thinks of Romney or the election. For all I know, Romney's message of striving and individual enterprise resonates with one of them who wants to own that mansion and sit at that table someday. But when Romney talks about the "entitled" 47% whom he could never persuade to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives," I'm thinking, So does a cater-waiter in south Florida, maybe with kids, earn enough to owe income tax after deductions? When a guest asks, "How are you going to do it, two months before the elections, convince everybody, You've got to take care of yourself?" I'm looking at the server grabbing barware and thinking, You think she's got a health-insurance package? Does it not feel the least bit awkward up there? Because it sure does back here with the wine glasses.
The Upside of Mystery, by Evan ThomasI don't trust anyone who claims to know how this video will affect the campaign. It's a tight election, and the media have pre-emptively called too many things "game changers" that changed nothing. But if it has any effect, it will be the images that do it as much as the words. For one evening in Boca Raton, the people who fund the multimillion-dollar election machine well and truly got served.
President Eisenhower would have disliked just about every aspect of the 2012 presidential election. He would have thought President Obama was debasing his office by getting personal in his attacks on Mitt Romney. He would have cringed at Romney's heh-heh-heh laughter over jokes that are rarely funny. In his own time, war hero Ike was a huge celebrity, but he would have been appalled by today's celebrity culture. He would not have understood why candidates' wives should give speeches to humanize their husbands or why presidential aspirants should disclose much of anything about their faith or private lives.
It's easy to look at Romney and Obama, slopping about in today's politics, and lament, Why can't they be more like Ike? (And they might wonder the same: Eisenhower averaged an approval rating of 65%.) In important but little-noticed ways, maybe they are. Romney and Obama don't like parading their emotions either. Romney can come off as plastic, Obama as aloof; they are both deeply private men who would have been more comfortable as politicians in an earlier, more buttoned-up time. (As an African American, Obama, of course, could not have been elected until fairly recently, but that's a different story.) It's an irony of the 2012 campaign that in a populist age, with resentment running high against the so-called elites, voters will be choosing between a pair of cold fish from Harvard.
To the public, Ike seemed like a much warmer man than either Obama or Romney. But few people understood Ike; even his wife Mamie admitted she didn't really know him. For my new biography of President Eisenhower, I asked his son John about the apparent even balance between the sunny, genial Ike and the cold-blooded Ike. "Make that 75% cold-blooded," John said with a slight smile.
But the presidency is, inevitably and necessarily, a very lonely job. Presidents are constantly forced to make close-call decisions, sometimes in real time and with inadequate information. Presidents get plenty of advice, but often it's bad or timid. I was struck, while reading a revealing profile by Michael Lewis in this month's Vanity Fair, by how much Obama resembled Ike behind the scenes. He operates like a Socratic professor with his advisers, constantly testing and challenging their logic and insights. President Eisenhower would sometimes take all sides in a National Security Council debate, never revealing his own position. Likewise, other reporting suggests that Romney, the shrewd businessman and investor, demands data and hard facts and is dissatisfied with pat or doctrinaire answers. As President, the great war hero Ike also "led from behind," as an aide defined Obama's role in liberating Libya from Muammar Gaddafi. Operating by indirection and doing one thing while seeming to say another, Eisenhower avoided American military entanglement in Vietnam, Suez and Hungary. Romney is criticized, deservedly, for his all-over-the-map foreign policy pronouncements. But as Ike navigated between isolationists and hard-liners in his party, he was often elusive and even contradictory. (Eisenhower used Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to play bad cop to the President's good cop.)
The private nature, the essential shyness of Romney and Obama, gives fits to their consultants and handlers, who go to painful, sometimes laughable lengths to "demystify" their candidates. Presidents, without exception, grow to hate the glare of the press. Obama doesn't watch cable-news shows, according to Lewis. Seeing, as he entered a room, a cable-TV commentator holding forth on the President's reasoning and motives for a particular decision, Obama remarked, "Oh, so that's why I did it," and walked out.
Eisenhower was less wary of the press, whom he met every other week--far more often than modern Presidents. Ike was so confident, he could afford to play dumb. Warned to be careful before one particularly contentious press conference, Ike laughed. "Oh, don't worry. I'll just confuse them."
A present-day President would not try to get away with playing dumb. And it's perfectly true that Presidents need to be good at p.r., that the bully pulpit is an essential part of presidential leadership. But it's worth remembering that the most important decisions a President makes--in a crisis, with the clock ticking--are lonely ones. Presidents look inward (or upward) to know what to do. Their inner selves, not their outer selves, are what really matter. If Presidents do not readily reveal themselves or their intentions, they can have more room to maneuver. Ike understood that there can be power in mystery.
Article Links:Thomas, a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, has written eight books. His latest is Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Struggle to Save the World.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2125027-1,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2125019,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2125028-1,00.html
The first article is perhaps my favorite. I believe that Joe Klein is a certified badass when it comes to writing. Likewise, his opinions usually -- but not always -- match my own. That said, the primary observation I've made when reading Klein's words is in connection to the pisteis.
This is mainly because it seems to me that the GOP is ethos and pathos heavy when it comes to rhetoric. That isn't to say that the Democrats don't also court these two aspects, just that the GOP seems to favor them more. As a result, logos tends to suffer. Therefore, it would seem that the GOP -- according to Klein's assessment -- has been caught up in their own rhetoric. As a group, they are emotionally convinced by their own exaggerations.
The second article, written by Poniewozik, highlights the idea of kairos, or the aptness of a rhetorical response. I like that Poniewozik mentions how, "Campaign embarrassments are often unfair, in that an image or quote will hurt a candidate more if it reinforces an existing narrative." So you know he, as a reporter, realizes there is more than just the one perspective. But Poniewozik does well to highlight how truly inopportune (for Romney) the whole video clip is. It almost seems staged in its near-satirical style. I love the part where Poniewozik mentions he almost expects: "...someone to hoist a champagne flute, adjust his monocle and declare, 'A toast, gentlemen! To industry!'"
For the Obama campaign, and the media in general, this was as mature and apt a moment can get. The second article highlights an excellent example of kairos.
The third article, written by Evan Thomas, is interesting primarily because it implies the underlying importance of rhetoric. It would seem that the Eisenhower administration existed in a time where Bitzer's argument for spontaneously occurring exigence was true. Whereas now, Romney and Obama are contenders in a time where Vatz's argument -- that an exigent situation is crafted by the rhetor -- is more accurate. This is personified by where Thomas explains that the bully pulpit and public relations are particularly important to a President. Curiously, there have been analyses where Obama has bemoaned the lackluster power of the bully pulpit in modern times. Which means that either it has indeed lessened in potency, or -- as according to Vatz -- Obama is merely a poor rhetor who cannot properly craft an exigent situation.
When observing these three articles with regards to New Media, there are several facets that are worth looking into. The first is personified by Kress's position regarding semiotics. Each article features an image. Two of the three are essentially signs. The first a pie chart, the second a Ven Diagram. This then shows that while signs haven't taken over the job for language, they do complement the written word, and are generally fun to look at.
Manovich's argument, because it is specific to digital media, doesn't really fit that well with the three articles. Which, according to him, make them old media. While one could argue that TIME's uploading of their articles -- or remediation of their articles, in Bolter & Grusin's words -- to their website makes them digital media. I don't believe the articles themselves fit all that well in Manovich's list of requirements. The biggest issue I see is that of automation. That is to say, a modern computer probably will have trouble transforming the articles into different mediums without human assistance. Even translating the articles into a different language say, would be imprecise and clunky without the aid of human translator.
Finally, Bolter & Grusin's argument evoke the idea of immediacy when reading these articles. It mostly feels as though the writer is talking to me, complete with imaginary voice. When reading, one can argue, the medium becomes nearly transparent. Despite this, I am unsure whether these magazine articles would constitute New Media according to the Bolter & Grusin.
