Alexandra Pelosi has carved a niche for herself in the world of media criticism by reporting on political reporting - from the inside of the bubble of the bubbles known as presidential campaigns. Her newest book - soon to be followed by a new documentary from what I understand - is about the 2004 campaign, in which he admits to voting for a candidate who dropped out early.
You can't help but like Alexandra - she's the kind of person who can't help but 'fess up to all her insecurity and neuroses, and so you end up cheering her through her own account. She's friendly to George W., even as she asked him questions that clearly annoyed him.
She characterizes the campaign as a media circus, which is apt, but it obfuscates an important point in her narrative, which is that the audience moves with the show - they might as well have rented a giant sound studio for the campaign as far as the location matters, at least after Iowa and New Hampshire.
It would be too much to say it's a creative tension, but it is a tension: the campaigns doing their best to make everything predictable and on-message, and the media doing their best to catch every little slip, and either feeling contempt for the other. If it were a marriage, it wouldn't last any longer than a, well, year or so.
I suppose the question is whether the voters make more informed choices as a result.
I suspect that a lot of voters consume the soundbytes because there's nothing else to eat. They're perfectly willing to accept that a senator from Massachusetts or Arizona, or a governor from Texas or Vermont, might make excellent presidents even if they look funny, have annoying personal habits, or change their minds every once in a while. It was interesting to hear how the pundits dissected the debates as if they were boxing matches rather than examining the content of what was said.
It is probably way too much to hope for, but what if, in the next election, both candidates rounded up sponsors and went to the networks to produce a 10-episode documentary series in which each episode would be dedicated to an issue of importance to the election. Rules of the game would be set ahead of time, and each side would be invited to submit a prioritized list of 10 issues. Leave it to Hollywood to produce and make entertaining, and we might have some talk about substance.
Sent wirelessly from my Blackberry.
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