It was pointed out to me just a day or two ago that when a US politician (of any persuasion) walks onto the stage to give a speech, they spot a few people that they know in the audience and point at them and smile at them and (if they happen to be John McCain) give them a double thumbs up sign. The truth is that they don’t know anyone in the audience, they just pretend they do, because their presentational consultants tell them that they have to do this. This is one of the not-so-obvious faux gestures by which US poltics is played.
“I am half-sick of shadows” said the Lady of Shallot, and, if she’d been watching the interminable cable network news, instead of gazing in her dumb mirror watching out for passing knights, she’d probably also have said “I’m completely sick of presidential politics.” Watching, two speaking heads (one Democrat, one Republican) argue the relative merits of McCain and Obama, for the gazillionth time – I suddenly realized that precisely no logs were being chopped. You might just as well have two sports fans argue over the merits of their teams in the mid-game break. Even if one team is getting slaughtered, its representative fan is going to wax lyrical about the virtues of their team and the inexcusable failings of the opposition.
Fox News, Faux News
The effect is amplified by the fact that the chosen talking heads have been chosen for their ability to convince you that “snake oil doesn’t come from a snake”. The game is even more amusing when played with a biased referee, as happens with great regularity on Fox News. Amusingly, Fox News is so anti-Democrat that when Republicans are not-doing-such-a-good-job-for-the-party, they get labeled as Democrats. Thus when the scandal involving Republican Congressman Mark Foley and House pages blew up, Fox News showed pictures of Foley with, Mark Foley (D-FL) written underneath.
Look at the adjacent picture, grabbed from the television screen, and see if you can spot anything unusual about it. Yes, it seems that as far as Fox News is concerned this is the first presidential election in the history of the United States where both major candidates are Democrats. I have no idea what Fox is trying to pull here, but having watched all varieties of Cable News in the US for many years now, I’ve yet to see another news network get a party affiliation wrong. Maybe McCain is being cast into Fox’s “outer circle of hell”, which is peopled entirely by politicians of the Democratic persuasion, or perhaps the network thinks that if a few people mistakenly come to believe that McCain is a Democrat, then maybe he’ll get more votes. It’s as mysterious as Area 51, so I guess we’ll never get to know the truth.
Notice, by the way, that the recent story about Obama’s aunt being an illegal resident in the US was broken by The Times of London. I was told a year ago, by a knowledgeable UK journalist, that if News International was going to break any pro-Republican rumors during the US campaign they’d come through The Times. So it goes. Not much of scandal though. I doubt it will flip a single vote.
Enter The Fat Lady
Despite all the fun we’ve been having, the clocks have been put back and voting is upon us. By Wednesday morning – unless, against all the odds, the race closes up – we’ll know for sure that Barack Obama is to be the 44th President of the USA. Once that happens there will be about 48 hours of constant speculation as to what it actually means before the news junkies of the world, me included, decide that it’s now time for a cold turkey sandwich before Thanksgiving.
The page visits on the dot coms; Reddit, HuffingtonPost, Politco, BelowTheBeltway and Drudge will collapse. Ad revenues for CNN, FOX News and MSNBC will tank and I’ll stop writing about US politics.
