The 2008 Election and the Media
Discussions about politics and the media are nothing new, but the 2008 Presidential Election is remarkable for having featured, in its sheer scope and intensity, the awesome power of the new media. From the campaigns to their supporters, from partisans to unaffiliated voters, something like a systematic integration of politics with daily life has been attempted, and in some part achieved, as the election plays itself out along the full spectrum of twenty-first-century technology. Like Governor Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy, everything is now in play, from traditional news sources like newspapers and television to cellphones, social networking sites, blogs, even video games. It is perhaps the first fully postmodern election, with its interlocking media narratives resembling the giddier moments of critical theory—Debord’s society of the spectacle, say, or Baudrillard’s endlessly repeating simulacra—in their depictions of human society awash in a plethora of competing signs and images. Where the election has outdone even these fantasies—indeed, where it’s been most paradigm-breaking and historical—has been in the amount of bottom-up, user-generated content that’s been part of the chaos, from lengthy action and advocacy diaries on political blogs to entire genres of satiric videos on YouTube: an explosion of politically-themed writings and folk art that rivals any among America’s golden ages of political art, the Revolution, the Civil War, and the two World Wars. The following will be a brief reaction, both favorable and non-, both amazed and aghast, at some of the strange and wonderful things—from the candidates themselves to some pretty crazy videos on the Internet—I’ve seen during the 2008 election.
The very speed of events in this election is itself a marvel. We’ve had the twenty-four-hour news cycle for at least fifteen years, but rarely before have political events crowded so thick and fast into the months, weeks, and days. Indeed, the news has been so frenetic that the vividness and immediacy of each moment, each image, each gaffe and attack, has vaporized each meme of the moment before in the white-hot forge of the perpetual campaign. The last time I wrote for the Advocate, the news of John McCain’s multiple homes had just broken—this happened on August 21, a little over two months ago, but this is as far off from the present moment in campaign time as the mythic events of prehistory are from the modern day. Just in the last week, a flood of bad news has hit the foundering McCain campaign, from increasing reports of knives-out infighting among his handlers and staff to the bizarre story of Ashley Todd, who secured her own tawdry bit of Campaign 2008 lore, and a sad, Gibbonian footnote in the history books as well, with her made-up story of being beaten by a six-foot-four black male (that boogeyman in Karl Rove’s and other American racists’ closets), who allegedly carved a backwards letter “B” on her face as a grisly token of Barack Obama’s name. (She confessed on October 24 to having lied, the bloody B an act of self-mutilation that was more scratch than wound, yet red enough to brand Todd with infamy in the deathless digital archive of the Internet.) Even the most standout moments of the campaign—Obama’s speech at Denver’s Mile High Stadium, a jubilant end to a meticulously choreographed convention; or Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Saint Paul, the Alaskan governor riding high on a wave of nativist anger and America-first bigotry; or the continual revelation of the Presidential debates, which played out as studies in affect and attitude, Obama’s limpid focus and delivery contrasting sharply with McCain’s catalog of verbal and physical tics (“My friends,” his eyerolling and grimacing)—have been lost in the onrush of new narratives, new media for consumption.
As both a candidate and as a media figure, Obama has benefited hugely from the new media dynamics at play in American politics. These dynamics are crystallized in many of the things the Obama campaign has done so repeatedly and dazzlingly well during the election. The utilization of political websites and other Internet resources for political networking, advocacy, and fundraising; the creation of a vast campaign organization relying hugely on volunteerism and new technologies; an intuitive grasp, even, of the look of new media, as with the campaign’s sleek, hypermodern website, which borrows heavily on the Apple Computer aesthetic (rounded icons in smoothly blended colors, a confection of links and nested widgets): all demonstrate a saturation of all media, everywhere, with Obama’s electrifying brand. Obama’s own telegenic charisma, his trademark skinniness and jug ears and wide smile, are candy to television and YouTube: think of all of the spots, all of the campaign ads and photographs that feature Obama’s face, as so many force multipliers that drive home both the message and the man, his policy and persona, in one seemingly seamless continuum. This is not to be hagiographic, and it’s saying nothing about the actual content and history of Obama’s policy statements and voting record: I’m merely saying that Obama is an exceptionally able politician, well at home as both a user (as the head of his tech-savvy campaign) and as a subject (as a superstar) of the new media.
Obama’s media nemesis isn’t, of course, John McCain, his titular opponent in the 2008 Election, but Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican Vice-Presidential nominee and, like Obama, already a figure of American historical folklore. Palin dropped like a bomb into the Republican convention, thrilling the assembled delegates and the Republicans’ hard-right Christian Evangelical base with her quasi-mythic persona, at once intimately familiar and enticingly exotic: a fiery warrior queen from the frozen North and a tenacious hockey mom and mother of five (the youngest, Trig, an infant with Down Syndrome, which delighted anti-choice “infanticide” partisans) who expressed herself in vapid platitudes that were right at home among broad swaths of angry, confused voters. Palin, I think, is best seen as a hack, not in the sense of a “hack politician”—although she fulfills this role with gusto, You betcha! and she’s hackneyed to boot—but in the sense of a computer or tech hack: an unexpected trick of engineering or play that scrambles a program’s or tool’s wonted, designed-for specifications, opening up new, potentially useful and interesting, applications. Bizarre (if not treasonous) from the perspective of governance, McCain’s choice of Palin makes perfect sense as a fiendishly inspired reverse engineering of Obama’s media success, a desperate attempt—in the operational vacuum formed by McCain’s lack of either a consistent message or a well-organized, smoothly running campaign—to halt Obama’s groundswell of support at the end of the summer. That, like many hacks, Palin’s disadvantages have, in the scarce two or so months she’s graced the national stage, far outweighed her dubious advantages, has for many only increased her media appeal: in the campaign’s last week, vowing to “go rogue” and ignore the advice of McCain staffers, Palin reads to me like one of the doomed Nazi wives in Hitler’s Berlin bunker—Magda Goebbels, say, who poisoned her children rather than have them survive the death of the twisted dream that was the Third Reich—who still vowed to fight on against the victorious Russians and Americans, and who hoped, in those last, fiery moments of apocalyptic zeal, for the ragged, starving brigades of schoolchildren and nonagenarians to save them from the rampaging hordes of Yanks and Slavs. In the course of singularly ruining her first political incarnation (following Churchill’s dictum that in politics, unlike in war, one may die many times), Palin has done something far better and finer: she has entered the hallowed mists of American parodic mythology, among the company of other now-lovable freaks, burnouts, and demagogues such as Aaron Burr, Terry Eagleton, George Wallace, and George Allen. Valhalla was meant to burn at the end anyway, and this goes for even gimcrack and pasteboard Valhallas like Governor Palin’s.
But enough with analysis: here’s a short, in-no-particular-order “top five” list of strange and amazing bits of media from the campaign. Links are provided where appropriate:
1. “Wassup 2008” from 60 Frames, which recasts the members of a famous (and famously irritating) Budweiser commercial from 2000 as fellow suffers in George Bush’s America. The chorus of screaming near the end is sublimely cathartic, a much-needed purgation of the last eight years of war, economic collapse, environmental disaster, and existential dread: it might be too soon to start knowingly quoting, apropos of McCain’s campaign, old chestnuts like “Birnam Wood to Dunisnane,” but when barely-remembered actors from an eight-year old ad, for God’s sake, team up to deliver a hilariously poetic exorcism of your President’s and party’s legacies, and deliver in the process a two-minute film that’s worth entire shelves of Syriana and Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Ellah, I’d say you’re fucked. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq8Uc5BFogE)
2. McCain’s “Lime Green Monster” speech of June 3, a cinematographically ill-conceived response to Obama’s winning of the Democratic primaries, in which McCain was put against a sickly green backdrop that in the words of blogger Atrios made McCain look “like the cottage cheese in a lime jello salad.” The green backdrop was mercilessly appropriated by an army of YouTube directors, who added backgrounds like the Hindenberg explosion or an atomic blast to McCain’s listless, uninspired speech. (Original speech at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7RuX4pQPLY; search for “McCain green screen” on YouTube for the hundreds of parody videos.)
3. Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin. Sure, you’ve seen it a million times already. Fey’s dead-on take is great, as well as a nice example of the confluence of old and new media: the big-money mass culture hack of Palin’s Obama hack, saved by YouTube for viewers who can’t bother with the crapfest that’s the televised program.
4. The Rachel Maddow Show, whose host, Rachel Maddow, is the smartest, funniest, coolest, and newest of the Bush-era television anchors-cum-partisan entertainers. While her show perhaps needs to fine tune a bit—Maddow’s a bit more radio than TV, and the show lacks the funnier bits of, say, Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, which often plays as a meta TV show about TV—Maddow is easily the most informative and engaging network talking head in years.
5. “A More Perfect Union,” Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia on March 18, occasioned by the firestorm of fake controversy generated by videos of Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, saying some quite vitriolic things about the American Dream. Obama’s speech was a classic pivot, taking a huge liability and turning it into an occasion for a meditation on race and history, in rhetoric as finely crafted and deliberative as Lincoln’s or Martin Luther King’s or Bobby Kennedy’s. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrp-v2tHaDo)
6. “Vlad and Friend Boris Presents ‘Song for Sarah’ for Mrs. Palin,” a knock-off of both Borat and Flight of the Conchords that still manages to turn Palin’s nonsensical image of Vladimir Putin rearing his head in Alaskan airspace into a tenderly smutty joke, delivered in mock earnestness by two faux-Russian troubadours who gaze longingly across the frozen Bering Strait for a glimpse of their beautiful neighbor Sarah. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9V_aOCga0)
7. Racist McCain-Palin supporters on YouTube: I’m loath to give these more attention than they’ve gotten, but for sheer WTF? anthropological interest, and as a testament to the hatefulness and irrationality of some few on the far right, these must be seen, like the following clips from Strongsville, Ohio, recorded on October 8. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIgv992NZs0; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJghQMq49dw&feature=related)
8. “Barack OBollywood,” an inspired visual mashup of images of Obama with cheesy-funky low-res graphics effects and a hypnotically grating Bollywood beat. Less a testament to Obama’s global roots and appeal, or his supposedly postracial politics, than an excuse for tripped-out silliness. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA-451XMsuY)
9. The poll-tracking website www.FiveThirtyEight.com, brainchild of genius statistician Nate Silver: like Chuck Todd’s electoral math wizardry during the primaries on MSNBC, Silver’s deep analysis of polling data provides necessary hard facts among the swirling blather of the punditry. How the site will manage the post-election transition remains to be seen, but this has been the best of the blogs this year.
10. “La Pequeña Sarah Palin,” perhaps the final verdict on the Palin candidacy. I won’t ruin the surprise, but those with finer sensibilities, or who are easily offended (particularly by cross-dressing little people), might avoid this. La Pequeña is perfectly sublime, a leering gargoyle on our digital cathedral. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV8uEzGuvfc)
Don’t forget to vote!
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