Rather than pass judgment on the McCain attack vehicle, it is time to embrace it for all that it exemplifies. Instead of ruing and hand-ringing over the state of negative politics, there ought to be perspective about how in debt the greater epistemic community is to such tactics. Has there ever been a time in American culture that the satirical cartoon did not reign in the pantheon of communication? It is the simplification of a group's collective fears. It is what makes this system go. Each candidate's machine is an explicit off-shoot of the candidate's style and thought-process. As such, it is a fantastic barometer of the candidate's diplomatic aspirations. Obama, aloof and patently quizzical as to why the negative adds must persist, deals from the bottom of the deck himself. The often snide, off-handed comments about McCain's mental stability are no less measure of his personal tenor than McCain's bombastic howling. Obama's straight face as he delivers ad homeneim attacks couched in policy discussions simply mirror McCain's eye-rolling, jaw clenching perterbitude as he delivers his own.
Character-smearing political attacks denote less difference in policy than they do cultural assumptions, a useful meter of a potential president's default when maneuvering the inevitably tricky diplomatic situations endemic to the post.
Obama is an overly intellectual xenophile, that's bad. McCain is a crazy old conservative coot, that's bad.
I hope they fire at will from here on out.
2 comments:
I'm always thinking of a metaphor for this campaign. I think ultimately it is similar to a wildlife photographer on a shoot in the field. These guys get paid to work 4 weeks in Baja to snap money shots of grey whales. in the beginning they are sparse, chasing the perfect light and following the international marine mammal protection act which says you are not allowed to approach with 200 feet of a whale. The whale, however, may approach you. As time slips past the photographer gets a little more aggressive. He pushes in a little more. He realizes as time goes on that the money shots he imagined at first are actually not the real money shots. He gets more aggressive. Eventually he is using a 2mm wide angle and he is literally on top of the whale. He feels bad about it but just needs to add these to his cache so that he can in fact get a job doing a similar thing next year.
The only difference between this and the campaign is that no one gives a shit about whales anymore.
Jesus, the comments are so much better than the posts on this blog.
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