Democracy's A Wonderful Thing... We Ought to Try It Sometime
Partisan politics have become like professional sports. People don't believe in a party anymore, they root for it to win. They don't have party affiliations nowadays, they have their favorite. It doesn't matter whether they listen to the sports or politics on talk radio, it's all just hot air. When your beloved pro football or basketball team trades a favorite player, or half the team gets snared in a prostitution sting, you shrug your shoulders and go on cheering. When they've finished in the cellar five seasons in a row because they play like crap, you go on hoping. It's your team, after all. Same with politics. It seems to me people are increasingly disconnected from the relationship between whom they vote for and which group of politicians is really working for or even caring about the quality of their lives. Think about it, candidates for office now have playbooks, strategies for victory, and weekly standings in the polls, same as sports. When there's a political debate, it doesn't matter how much sense the candidates made, instead they score points for poise, looks, and delivery. Listen to the discussions about the '08 presidential campaign. The pundits don't talk about who would be best for the country, they talk about who has the best chance to win. I have an idea. Let's pick ten complete nobodys with zippo experience, turn them over to handlers, and run them for office. We film the whole thing and make a reality show out of it. "So You Want to Be In Congress." The winner gets ten million dollars, and he doesn't even have to sell himself to "special interests."
posted by John M Crowther @ 7:35 AM
9 Comments:
Every few years another political genius comes along who claims to have his finger on the pulse of the American public: Roger Ailes, Dick Morris, and now Karl Rove. Rove’s magic formula was to appeal primarily to what he conceived of as the real base of the Republican Party ---the South and the Christian conservatives. That seemed to work for awhile, but as the last election showed, the less-than-happy Independent voter (those Democrats who had become Republicans for Reagan in the Northeast) were shifting back their allegiance. We now have what is called the new Centrist campaign whose purpose will be to appeal to the middle and the hell with the extremes. That will work, of course, that is until it doesn’t.
The screenwriter William Goldman famous said of Hollywood “Nobody knows anything.” Should we not be saying the same thing about Politics?
The frst step in effective marketing is identifying the target audience, but its the second step that's the really lethal one, creating strategies for selling them the food that's going to destroy their health.
When I came to the USA in '81, a Democrat was a democrat and a Republican was a republican, people seemed to vote along party lines and the politicians did not appear to be very smart about the issues. Now I can not tell the difference between the two parties, voters still vote along party lines and the politicians seem to know ever less than they did in '81. Unfortunately, I think this is a world wide problem called he/she with the most money, best smile and nastiest negative ads about oppenent wins.
Great cartoon, John C.
A number of years ago an astute English journalist wrote that whereas England has two primary political parties --Labour and Conservative— America has only one, the Conservative Party divided into two branches which choose to call themselves Democratic and Republican. Every few years, he wrote, each branch assumes a bit more power over the other but the course of conservative governance remains the same.
Ah, this explains how the two parties began but now it seems hard to tell the difference between them. Will the Centrist movement become a third party here in the USA? Would they be able to get the necessary funding? Does it really matter if a Democrat or a Republican is the President? Isn't it more important who controls both houses?
Whew, this is all getting way to serious for me, almost as if politics matters. I always say, if the dog is sick I call the vet, if the car doesn't run I take it to the mechanic, if the toilet doesn't flush I call the plumber. I never ever have a reason to call the president or governor (you know, the action movie guy), or even my congressman (whoever the hell he or she is).
My apologies. To get us back to a less serious mood, as John's 10:15 PM comment seems to suggest, I'm reminded of something Gore Vidal once said: "'Politics' is made up of two words. 'Poli,' which is Greek for 'many,' and 'tics,' which are bloodsucking insects."
No apologies necessary, prof. Au contraire. And Vidal is a good reference when we're talking about "follytics."
Phew! John’s cartoons although decidedly humorous in intention often have a serious overtone; at least they do to this viewer. If I can answer Lee briefly about a future Centrist party, I don’t think we’ll ever see one in these disunited states for a simple reason: so far American politics has always been about gathering a coalition of strange bedfellows to create a majority. In Lyndon Johnson’s time, for example, civil rights legislation came about because LBJ, with a great deal of arm-twisting and pork-barreling, somehow convinced the reactionary southern block of his Democratic party to join forces with what was left of the liberal Roosevelt New Dealers in the midwest and east. Without this symbiosis, the center of each party standing alone has never been able to engage enough voters to elect its own candidate; on the other hand, as the last election clearly demonstrated, a truly independent center can easily sway a close election and eentually effect legislation. That may very well be the case in the years to come.
And now back to a lighter note ...
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