faster

The Politico notes that the political campaigns are all revved up:

The presidential campaigns in both parties have begun reacting ferociously to real or perceived attacks from rivals, goaded by a tight campaign calendar that leaves no room for error, and a determination to show they’re tougher than John F. Kerry was in 2004.

All of the candidates have sought to exploit any whiff of negativity from their opponents by pivoting off the charges with counterattacks designed to gain sympathy or political advantage within their own party.

This is yet more evidence, for those who need it, for the validity of the Feiler Faster Thesis, in which Mickey Kaus was making an observation about momentum in politics. He suggested that with the speeding up of everything in our everyday life,

there are now simply more opportunities for turns of fortune and that voters are able, for the most part, to keep up. …

 ”The FFT, remember, doesn’t say that information moves with breathtaking speed these days. (Everyone knows that!) The FFT says that people are comfortable processing that information with what seems like breathtaking speed.” [e.a.]

Campaigns are responding rapidly to attacks because they are trying to turn every moment in the spotlight—even (perhaps especially) moments of crisis—into an opportunity. They have learned the hard way that unless you answer every attack, you leave yourself open to the possibility that your opponent’s displeasing narrative about you, or his attack on your image, will stick to you.

Rapid response is about upping the ante, about fighting bad PR with better PR in the hope that you will accrue an image of yourself appealing enough for voters to cast their ballot for you. What’s amazing about it is that politicians do this even though most voters aren’t even paying attention. They just cannot afford to stand still as the river of news*** rushes by them.

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*** Doc Searls recently elaborated this concept. I’m still trying to process it. Totally fascinating stuff:

Here’s the problem with most news: it isn’t. It’s olds. It happened hours ago, or last night, or yesterday, or last month, or before whenever the deadline was in the news organization’s current “news cycle”. It’s not now. …

News is a river, not a lake. It is active, not static. It’s what’s happening, not what happened. Or not only what happened.

But what happened — news as olds — is how we’ve understood news for as long as we’ve had newspapers. The happening kind of news came along with radio, and then television. Then we called it “live”. Still, even on the nightly news, what’s live is talking heads and reports from the field. The rest is finished stuff.

There’s a difference here, a distinction to be made: one as stark and important as the distinction between now and then, or life and death. It’s a distinction between what’s live and what’s not.

This distinction is what will have us soon talking about the life of newspapers, rather than the death of them.

Because it’s not enough to be “online” or to have a “presence” on the Web.

To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.

It needs to flow rivers of news, or newsrivers.