“Please pack your knives and go.”
- Judge’s line used to throw contestants off “Top Chef” Bravo’s reality cooking contest show.
My wife is both a political junkie and an astute observer of contemporary culture. She often says a presidential campaign is the best reality show on TV. Like a reality TV show, a Presidential campaign takes alot of raw material and manipulates it to create a new narrative that often has little relationship to the truth.
Throughout the show someone gets voted off. Herman Cain was voted off the island, Gov. Rick Perry found out the hard way that “One day you’re in, the next day you’re out,” and Michelle Bachmann was told “You have been eliminated from the Amazing Race.”
The difference between a politician and a reality TV producer is the producer knows the audience understands it is watching a contrived narrative, where politicians think their audience believes the story they are showing is real.
The “Reality TV” mode of politics is as much a legacy of former President George W. Bush as is the war in Iraq, the squandered surplus, and the economic collapse of the 2007-2008. In 2004 a close aid to President Bush (believed to be Karl Rove) bragged that they [the Bush Administration] created their own reality for those of us in a fact based world to respond to. (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html)
Today’s Republican presidential candidates have fully embraced that strategy.
President Ronald Reagan is their hero. Yet he raised taxes at least 11 times in seven years, presided over a huge increase in the Federal Government, and granted amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. (http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/02/05/142288/reagan-centennial/?mobile=nc). If Reagan ran on Reagan’s platform and accomplishments, he wouldn’t get the 2012 Republican nomination.
You expect revisionism in history, but you don’t expect revisionism in current events. The amount of Republican revisionism makes it appear that their candidates are as out of touch with the real world as “Survivor” contestants stranded on an island.
Like love on the “Bachelor” their story warms the hearts of their viewers, until it falls apart in the real world.
The Republicans claim President Obama’s economic policy is a failure, despite the fact the Dow and the NADQ closed at their highest levels since the recession. Unemployment is headed down as the economy has grown over the last 22 months, and manufacturing is one of the fastest growing segments of the economy.
They deride Obama’s foreign policy as weak and apologetic. But, Obama hunted down Osama Bin Laden and most of the leadership in Al Queda. We are out of the wars in Iraq and wrapping up Afghanistan. The President handled Libya and the Arab spring with the same deftness that the first President Bush handled the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet empire.
Every reality show needs a network and loyal followers. Shows also support a cottage industry of reality shows about reality shows on other networks.
Fox News is the network of choice to broadcast the Republican Reality show. Democrats watch MSNBC, to catch up on all the fake situations, fights and alliances that occurred on this week’s episode of the “Real Housewives” series that the Republican Presidential primary season has become.
The Nevada Republican caucus is even more loosely run than the Iowa Republican caucus, where the Chairman of the Iowa Republican Party first “certified” Romney and then Santorum as the winner before resigning after admitting that 8 counties hadn’t turned in any results and it was impossible to tell who actually won.
But none of this stopped the networks from giving the Nevada Republican caucus wall to wall coverage. You have to wonder how networks will keep this intensity up for the Maine Republican caucus, which started on 2/4/12 and runs for a full week to award all of 24 delegates.
As a result of this type of coverage, whether it is on Fox News or MSNBC or any variety of talk radio shows, voters begin to look at politics as one more entertainment option, where politicians are seen more as actors than leaders.
Consequently anyone who makes a serious attempt to govern finds it is more important to make a policy proposal more entertaining than substantive. After all, flash will always get better press than a slow and steady discussion of the long term effects of a new policy.
This is one reason why Obama’s discussion of the good his health care reform would do was drowned out by Palin and Bachmann’s clamoring about Death Panels. Watching the Tea Party’s paranoid screams at their congressional delegations made for better entertainment and ratings than the sober policy panels discussions on C-SPAN.
In the current election, candidates are treated more as contestants on a dating show than as people with serious ideas. By turning the election into a “Rose Ceremony” where every Tuesday night we tune in to see who the “Bachelor” voters keep after this week’s fantasy date in paradise, the country is denied the opportunity for a serious discussion of the huge problems we face.
