stars in their eyes

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.