Ezra Klein halfheartedly shoots down *** Matthew Yglesias’s assertion that there is something very wrong with the contemporary American body politic, because it seems that only celebrity politicians, rather than capable wonks, can get any attention these days—as if politics were, you know, a popularity contest or something.

My faith in humanity was restored when I delved into the commens section and found the posters there even more critical than Klein was of Yglesias’s silly reasoning—or grasping at straws, more like.

And then the commenters got to talking about how candidates have to sell themselves:

> Romney is top-tier because just looks and sounds like a President

To me there’s way too much car-salesman in there. I don’t see stately and Presidential so much as I do slick. I like his voice though.

Posted by: Fred | Feb 20, 2007 6:05:30 PM

If I was running for President, I’d rather look like a car salesman than a double-chinned bore. You do have a good point though. Charisma is in the eye of the beholder.

Posted by: Korha | Feb 20, 2007 6:18:43 PM

 

Charisma is in the eye of the beholder.

So true. The problem is that people buy used cars with alarming frequency.

Romney never struck me as a used car salesman, though. He came across as more the guy who exudes an aura of, “People trust me because I’m tall and have thick hair,” which, for me, means I automatically do not trust him. The rest of the world feels differently, however, which is how people like Romney and most members of corporate boards got as far as they have.

Posted by: Constantine | Feb 20, 2007 7:58:46 PM

 

>>people buy used cars with alarming frequency

That struck me as a brilliant observation, particularly in light of an old article (in The American Prospect, from 1991) written by the sociologist Michael Schudson that I just happened to read today, “Delectable Materialism,” in which Schudson examines ever-fashionable critiques of American consumer culture. Because at base Yglesias is critiquing the selling of politicians—in other words, the consumer model of selling (and buying) politicians.

On the subject of selling us stuff through advertising, Schudson writes about one supposedly nefarious scheme that was thought up by GM:

[T]he old complaint [is] that modern industry is dictated by “planned obsolescence” or Sloanism, the annual model change that Alfred P. Sloan introduced at General Motors to coax people to buy a new car even when they have a serviceable old one. Here changes in products are not only useless but manipulative, aimed only at pointless product differentiation to which people will attribute unfounded meaning.

The only trouble is, as Schudson points out, that people didn’t have to be coaxed into buying new cars:

In the case of the automobile industry, consumers were not, in fact, happily holding onto their cars for years until Sloan found a way to introduce wasteful fashion to utilitarian transport vehicles. Years before Sloan dreamt of the annual model change, the used car market was huge and by 1927 its volume outstripped new car sales. People were obviously “buying up” as they could afford to, reproducing in the automobile an objective correlative of already existing systems of class and status distinction. They were resisting the implications of Henry Ford’s one model, one price policy.

So that’s why we buy politicians’ sales pitches! Because we all—well, most of us—start out with used cars and with used-car pitches. (We’re looking for value for our money and we want to believe!) It is only when we can afford to “buy up”—in cars and in politicians—that we get more discriminating. Hmmm.

—————-

***here’s why it should be shot down wholeheartedly: read Gail Collins’s very amusing book Scorpion Tongues for a quick romp through the hair-raisingly and viciously gossipy history of American politics up until—more or less—the 1930s, when Americans became fixated on a different breed of celebrity (movie stars), with whom politicians had to begin to compete in order to stay relevant. Thus the relentless manufacture of “images” for politicians (first critiqued in The Candidate).

The Candidate

And, lo and behold, here we are today in the era of the totally “focus-grouped” politician.

But wait, because there’s a counter-argument (pro-focus-grouped politician, that is) to be found in Jeffrey Toobin’s Too Close to Call, an indictment of the Supreme Court’s unjust decision in the 2000 election, a graphic description of the Republican machine’s successful post-election campaign (led ruthlessly and brilliantlly by James Baker), and a devastating critique of the terrible mistakes made by Al Gore in his campaign—chief among them his refusal to ask for or take advice from anyone. No focus groups for him (or, as with the “earth tones” fiasco, the wrong advisers). He kept his own counsel and ran his own campaign. And he ran his post-election campaign, too. I guess I don’t have to tell you what happened.

How is Newsweek magazine like the coverage of the Olympics? Let me count the ways. It’s all about America, America, America. All the time. Nobody else matters. Ever. And then they wonder why everyone hates us. (Hint: because we don’t care whether or not anyone else exists. Yes, we’re that self-involved.)

Eat the Press is on Newsweek’s case, though, and good for them. Here are the four covers:

Here is Newsweek’s lame, lame, lame explanation of why Tony Blair isn’t good enough to grace the cover of the American edition of the magazine:

Newsweek spokeswoman Jan Angilella pointed out that Newsweek addresses issues of domestic and international importance, and noted that here, the difference was split: “Tony Blair is an international figure and he’s an international story. Hence we put him on the cover of all of our overseas issues.”

Oh, I see now. International issues are only of interest to international readers. Because America ends at the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific and on the borders with Canada and Mexico. We are not interested in anyone or anything “out there.” Right.

Eat the Press reminds us why it is a bad idea to choose to be so isolated from the rest of the world.

However, when every edition of Newsweek ’round the world is different from the one at home, it’s worth at least wondering why. It may not be be a desexualized celebrity photographer supplanting a scary growing jihad in Afghanistan, but still, it sets the U.S. apart from the rest of the world and draws a distinction between U.S. readers and their growing counterparts.

I’ll say.

And what’s all this about the Olympics? Well, once upon a time, before the era of “Up Close and Personal” gauzy biopics of American athletes and their triumphant overcoming of unbelievable obstacles just to be able to afford ice skates or whatever, coverage of the Olympics was what you think sports coverage ought to be: in other words, if they were showing, say, the long jump, they would cover the entire event, from start to finish, sequentially. Even if no American was in the race.

Olympics coverage was not an orgy of jingoism. Can you imagine that? No, I didn’t think so. Because we are all participating in an orgy of the same kind of jingoism every day that we fail to inform ourselves about our place in the world of nations.

Tony Blair utters the famous “b” word:

“I have always been a supporter of the state of Israel and I will always remain so,” Blair said.

“But for the sake of Israel, as well as all we want to achieve in the Middle East, we need a proper, well-functioning independent and viable state of Palestine.”

The word is “and,” Tony, not “but.”

You have always been a supporter of Israel and we need a Palestinian state. What kind of state are you willing to offer, and at what price?

As for the crocodile reference, well you have to go back to October 2001 and Ariel Sharon to get it (or to Winston Churchill before that ***):

We are currently in the midst of a complex and difficult diplomatic campaign, I call on the Western democracies, and primarily the leaderof the Free World - the United States:

Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a ‘convienient temporary solution’.

Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense - this is unacceptable to us.

Israel will not be Czechoslovakia.

Israel will fight terrorism.

There is no ‘good terrorism’ and ‘bad terrorism’, just as there is no’good murder’ and ‘bad murder’. Terrorism, as we witnessed this weekin Alei Sinai, is worse than murder.

We have been fighting terrorism for over 100 years. Unfortunately,there are no swift and immediate solutions. But if, united we confront this terrorism, we will be able to overcome it and bring peace.

And we shall overcome.

Well, maybe. But not in Sharon’s lifetime. Or mine, I’m afraid.

———-

*** Churchill said:

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last

Wah! Even Mickey Kaus thinks Hillary is making a mistake by not apologizing. I don’t, as I’ve written elsewhere. [I've unbolded Kaus's emphases and bolded my own]:

P.S.: It’s not too early to say that Hillary’s performance in the opening weeks has been impressively unimpressive. It’s pretty clear in retrospect, that the war with Iraq, however it comes out, was a bad gamble. A mistake, in other words. But now that we’ve made the mistaken gamble, it also seems clear–to Mohammed at least–that the surge might do some good. The correct position, by these lights, was War No, Surge Yes.

Those lights are wrong. Hillary is being asked to say that her vote was a mistake at the time (not in retrospect). She believes her vote wasn’t a mistake at the time. Thus, she won’t apologize.

She may, however, find a workaround. Her opponents count her out at their own peril. For one thing, they forget that in the general election, candidates who are now so free and easy to say their Iraq vote was a mistake will be accused of trashing the troops, of being unfit for office because they were falling all over themselves to be the first to say that 3,000 Americans died in Iraq for a “mistake.”

Kaus continues:

It would be selfishly callous, in a stereotypically American way, for us to invade Iraq, make a mess, and then not be willing to pay any extra price to help fix the mess we’ve made. (Murtha’s demand that the troops be given “a year at home”–and the heck with what happens to Iraqis like Mohammed–only emphasizes this self-interested perspective.)

Kaus makes my point for me, if only he would take into consideration the entire ‘08 picture: that the ardent anti-war Dems are “selfishly callous.” Well, they’re beyond selfishly callous and “self-interested.” They’re the proud Not in Our Name party.

Last April, I wrote the post below. In the meantime, Bush has prosecuted a catastrophically inept war, which has morphed into something no one counted on against a global jihad movement that no one on the planet knows how to fight effectively. Yet. 

My feelings about the anti-war “case” and its most sanctimonious opponents haven’t changed one bit, however:

anti-war narcissists and their enablers

Published April 11th, 2006 in political culture

The other day, Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a passionately anti-war correspondent, a steaming load of self-serving horseshit, that I have tried to put it behind me, to forget that I ever read, to ignore.  

But I can’t. Because it reeks. When a self-loving, self-idealizing, self-righteous, moralizing cretin like this gets a pass from someone as smart as Sullivan, it’s more than irritating.

First, Sullivan’s correspondent claims that he knew from the get-go that the war was a mistake:

I opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. It smelled. It smelled to high heaven. This was no action in response to 9/11. This was something else. Some grand design for restructuring the Middle East, for “draining the swamp”. A war of revenge against Unfinished business. Oil.

Oil. Revenge. Imperialism. Check. But it gets better:

I could have supported intervention in Iraq. Saddam was a monster. But not Bush’s intervention. If his Dad, and Powell, had put together a true global coalition, with a real commitment to pay the high price in money, manpower and years necessary to free Iraq, secure the peace and rebuild the country, yes, I could have supported it. But I knew GWB and his team would never accomplish those ends, because those ends were not his ends. His ends, and his means, speak for themselves. [emphasis mine]

George Packer has rightly referred to such anti-war critics as pacifists–they never met a war they could endorse, unless it was a hypothetical war.

The thing that sticks in my craw, however, is the degree of self-love inherent in statements like this from Sullivan’s correspondent:

had we prosecuted the action in Afganistan competently, and to the end, by securing the peace and rebuilding the country, we might have come out of the war on terror with our heads held high and with the world’s respect and even admiration….

The war in Iraq has been our tragedy…

We are still in the midst of the horror, unable to look away from the mirror….

Like the “Not in Our Name” crowd, this letter writer weeps for himself and for his country and about his shame. You see, the war is all about him.

Here’s a clue: the war in Iraq is not about how it reflects on us. It’s about defeating jihadism away from our shores. In that respect, the worse it reflects on us, the better it may be for our national security.

---

I’m sure I’ll hear all about it if I’m proved wrong and David Geffen is proved right—today, Maureen Dowd quotes him as follows:

“Whoever is the nominee is going to win, so the stakes are very high,” says Mr. Geffen …,

 

I’m pretty sure I’m right, though. One of my starkest memories is going back to my office here in New York City on September 13, 2001, to find an e-mail from a Hollywood guy I was working with at the time. After receiving a polite inquiry to see how I was doing and if everyone was all right (I was grateful to be able to answer in the affirmative), I asked about him.

“I’m fine,” he wrote. “Yeah that was brutal. But you know, shit happens.”

Right. I forgot. Shit like 9/11 … happens.

Now: someone tell me that David Geffen knows what he’s talking about, or that anyone should listen to him. (I’m not saying don’t take his money—take him for all he’s worth!. Just don’t listen to him.)

I feel like bragging today, because I’ve been way ahead of the pack on two stories that are finally getting play.

One of them is of consequence. The other is of little consequence (in the grand scheme of things), but it’s got tons of entertainment value. So, without further ado:

of consequence: In today’s New York Times, Helen Cooper explains (sorta; see below ***) how, thanks to the Saudis, Hamas has become the fulcrum in the Shia-Sunni split and the spoiler in the ongoing ”peace” negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis. On February 10, I wrote (much less delicately) that Haniyeh, the so-called prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, is the biggest whore in the region.

For now, it seems to me that the biggest winner is Ismail Haniyeh, who is also the biggest whore.

Why? Because just a couple of months ago he was visiting with Ahmadinejad (as I noted here). You do recall talk of the Sunni-Shia split, right? So it was indeed puzzling that Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, a devout Sunni Muslim, would cozy up to the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran. But it’s puzzling only to those who don’t understand that Hamas is basically just like the Mafia and that it just managed to extort $1billion from the nervous Saudis (who are Sunnis and Iran’s arch-enemy, for those of you falling asleep in front of your monitors) and to thumb its collective nose—and possibly worse—at the politically weakened and battered forces of the Enlightened West.

Cooper has an entirely different spin on this story—she looks at this from the p.o.v. of it being another “failure” of the Bush administration. Which it surely is, because Rice is both incompetent and unprincipled. But the point of this story isn’t to wring our hands about how impotent Bush is, etc., etc. The point of the story is that Hamas is for sale—Hamas is dirty and corrupt, just like Fatah, although it claims to have clean hands and to be holier-than-everyone-else. The Palestinian Authority is a thugocracy. This is a wedge. Let us exploit it.

of no consequence but of great entertainment value: This was a no-brainer, but on January 26, I wrote “Now, this is gonna hurt” when I first found out about the dueling allegiances (Obama or Hillary?) among Democrats in Hollywood. (I also wrote, back in April of last year, about the Clintons’ seeming lack of popularity on the Left Coast.)

The story exploded with Maureen Dowd’s column ($$) this morning, quoting an incredibly bitchy David Geffen sticking it to the Clintons.

“Obama is inspirational, and he’s not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family. Americans are dying every day in Iraq. And I’m tired of hearing James Carville on television.” 

The aftershocks are coming in waves. Hillary’s camp went ballistic. Obama’s camp replied in kind. Read about it here and here.

———

***  Cooper writes:

Put simply, in the past year, Iran has been wooing Hamas, which is Sunni. The Saudis did not like that. So they fought to get Hamas back. [ Throwing down $1 billion is not much of a fight. But it's only the first of many payments to come, I'll wager.  --ed.]

“The Saudis did a switcheroo,” said Martin Indyk, the United States ambassador to Israel in the Clinton administration. “The U.S. views the Middle East as a battle between the moderates against the Iranian-led extremists. But our regional allies see this as a divide between Sunnis and Shiites, and Sunni extremists like Hamas may be extremists, but they are Sunnis first.”