Digby's Hullabaloo

PoMo-tional Opportunities

There is evidence everywhere that, at heart, George Bush’s re-election strategy will focus on touting his aggressive use of the American military abroad (and the government’s investigative powers at home) in the war on terror—while simultaneously (by presidential inference and surrogate attack) accusing Democratic opponents of being too wimpy by nature to handle the bad guys.

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White House insiders I’ve talked to in recent days say, in sum, the following: that they plan to sell the president to the country based on what they see as his strength of character, his leaderly resolve and his sense of moral clarity—a man’s man, in other words.

That’s the main reason why I’m for Clark. Bush’s so-called strength is an image that’s been created out of whole cloth, with the willing acquiescence of a confused and shallow media. We should throw down the gauntlet and challenge this absurd perception. But, we have to do it right.

As much as I hate to deal with matters of life and death in this way, I’m afraid that we have no choice. The post-modern presidency isn’t really the problem. They’re simply taking advantage of the post-modern media.

This interesting book by Pippa Norris; The Virtuous Circle, Political Communications in Post Industrial Societies (pdf) discusses the current situation:

Focus groups and opinion polls can be seen as an effective way that parties can stay in touch with public opinion, and one which is more representative of the general electorate than reliance upon the opinions of local party activists.

Alternatively, the evolution of modern and post -modern campaigns can be seen as threatening the democratic process, widening the gap between citizens and their representatives. If parties and candidates adopt whatever message seems most likely to resonate with focus groups, if pollsters, consultants and advertisers rather than politicians come to determine the content of campaigns, and if ‘spin’ outweighs ‘substance’, then the serious business of government may be replaced by the superficial manipulation of images. ”Packaging politics”, Bob Franklin argues, “impoverishes political debate by oversimplifying and trivializing political communications.”

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Some fear that the shift in campaign techniques may have a direct impact on civic engagement; if voters have become passive spectators of symbolic events staged in television studios rather than active participants in local party meetings and community campaigns. As discussed earlier, the most common concern is that post-modern campaigns turn off voters due the decline of face-to-face communications and the rise of practices such as negative news highly adversarial to government, horse-race journalism, and trivialization of campaign discourse.

The Dean and Clark phenomena are exceptionally good news, then. Instead of being passive spectators, the people have used one of the new technologies to facilitate the face-to-face communications that many believe are indispensable to counteract the increasingly deadening impact of the post-modern campaign.

But, if anyone believes that this is going to supplant the powerful mainstream news media by 2004 they are living in dreamland. For the coming election (and perhaps for the foreseeable future) political campaigns will have to be run, at least in part, as product marketing — “packaging politics” as it’s referred to above. As long as huge sums of money are at stake in elections, as long as human beings are more engaged in their day to day lives than in the abstract and complex issues of national governance and as long as television remains the public’s primary entertainment and information medium, we are going to have to recognize that symbols, archetypes, images, soundbites, brands and metaphors are the means to sell the message.

And, I think we need to relax a little bit about it. Post modern communication isn’t immoral and it isn’t stupid. It’s just fast, fleeting and simple. The problem is that policy, politics and governing aren’t.

I don’t think there’s any turning back. We must accept this new reality and learn to work with it, while we try to balance it out with sincere grassroots democratic efforts like the Dean Meet-ups and the draft Clark campaigns. If we fail to do both we will lose, and the simple reason is that the other side is doing it already.

The hard core of the Republican party are, by and large, very amenable to appeals to authority. The dominance of talk radio and fundamentalist pulpits and it’s insularity from the chaotic give and take of real debate give the dittoheads the illusion of winning without ever having to fight.

But, the GOP’s dirty little secret is that they know that the majority of Americans are not by nature authoritarians — they are individualists and communitarians. This goes back to the puritans and pioneers who settled this country. And it is why they have used the post modern media to portray the Republican Party caring about such formerly local concerns as education and why they spend so much time promoting their brand-name-in-a-suit as a particular archetype — a manly, maverick warrior. The Party is branding itself as the New England Town Meeting meets the Western ideal and the Southern Cavalier.

They are remarkably successful at this largely because the post modern media is set up to deal with images, sensation and speed and the Republicans are willing and able to give them what they need. Not surprisingly they have also figured out that in this fast and fleeting post modern media world, dishonesty and rank manipulation are more possible than they’ve been since Hearst practically ran US foreign policy.

Unfortunately, it is happening at the very time when a radical ideology has overtaken the GOP that literally threatens American democracy and national security. This is the kind of dangerous confluence of events from which unanticipated, cataclysmic political changes are made.

We simply must become more sophisticated in our thinking about these issues. We have to realize that it is not enough to have the best ideas, the best policies or even the best candidate. We have to come to terms with the fact that in this high speed post modern world, we must begin to sell our politics in a post modern way.

In a world where a sub-sentient, fratboy can be successfully marketed as a strong, decisive leader to a significant number of independents and Democrats, I think it’s obvious that the Republicans are on to something.

Unless Clark turns out to be a complete bumbling idiot on the trail (which would be very surprising) I believe he is the best positioned, by way of image, biography and association (“packaging”) to expose the Bush “mystique” as nothing more than a chimera and at the same time begin to revitalize the outdated image of the Democratic party.

I’d like nothing more than to reject this simplistic formulation and have the candidates run solely on the issues. But, the brutal politics of the last ten years have convinced me that we must learn to compete in the post modern media. I’m not interested in tilting at windmills while the power crazed modern Republicans turn the country into a functional one party state.