In 1960, Richard Nixon was on the losing end of a new phenomenon. In a Presidential candidates debate with Sen. John Kennedy, Nixon managed to hold his own; listeners on radio called the debate a draw. Those who watched television, however, had a different opinion. Because of a combination of bad lighting, Nixon's nervous demeanor, too much makeup, and other factors, those who watched the debate found Kennedy's cool and smooth delivery, free from sweating and appearing either nervous, evasive, or uninformed much more appealing. While perhaps not the single reason Kennedy won that election, the debate made a far larger cultural impact, one not lost on the loser.
In both 1968 and 1972, Pres. Nixon hired public relations firms to run his campaigns. His chief of staff and chief domestic adviser were also from the world of advertising and public relations. Along with breaking in to the National Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate complex to bug their phones, Nixon understood heading in to the '72 campaign that he he might face Sen. Edmund Muskie, who consistently out-polled the President. Besides planting a letter that made Muskie self-destruct (he was reported to have cried, even though he actually didn't; he became the object of snide Washington ridicule and slipped away to nothing in the polls), Nixon also very carefully managed events from the fall of 1971 through the election to ensure he appeared as Presidential as possible. He forced an end to the Vietnam War; he signed a nuclear arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union. His biggest coup was a trip to China, including a meeting with Chairman Mao Tse-dung. Nixon won in a landslide, winning 49 states.
Ronald Reagan surrounded himself with people of a similar bent to Nixon. A close family friend and intimate adviser, Michael Deaver became infamous around Washington for constructing images and messages. His biggest failure was 1985's European trip commemorating the end of World War II. Included in the itinerary was a trip to Bitburg cemetery in Germany that had, among other graves, those of Waffen SS soldiers who had guarded the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. Precisely because, by this time in his Presidency, Reagan was well-known for being very much about flash and appearance while short on substantive understanding of policy, this misstep showed the limits of the politics of spectacle.
The George W. Bush Administration was staffed by people who had either served in lower level positions in previous Administrations, or learned from them. More than the Democrats, who have spent the decades since the 1968 lost election in pretty much constant turmoil, the Republican Party learned a valuable lesson from Nixon's disastrous television debate performance - appearance, show, and most of all spectacle, define political impressions far more than words. This reality was the guiding ethos of "Bush's Brain", Karl Rove. More than any other individual, Rove was the master architect not only of Bush's rise to the Presidency, but managed the President's schedule and appearances.
His high point was to be the President, who had trained as a fighter pilot in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, landing on the deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, followed by a speech. The speech included a shot of the President in front of a banner that read "Mission Accomplished". Pundits and commentators all agreed - it was Bush's finest hour, a significant, Presidential moment.
Except, it occurred at the beginning of another medium, one that would strip the facade from the politics of spectacle given birth in a Presidential debate 43 years before. With the rise of the internet, in particular citizen commentary on political and social events, images that would have arrived filtered through the lenses and words of those taken in by spectacles no longer existed in some pristine world, free of deconstruction. On the contrary, our public discourse, once again turning back to words and ideas and away from images void of substance, stripped this and countless other images of any meaning whatsoever. Indeed, for most liberals on the internet, "Mission Accomplished" became not only a symbol of Bush Administration hubris and folly; it also was a cruel joke, mocking the deaths of thousands of Americans in Iraq after that event.
Part of the reason Barack Obama has been, and most likely will continue to be, successful getting his agenda in place has been his grasp of this fundamental change. As television declines in importance; as the images conveyed by cameras to the American people are now filtered through the words of thousands of ordinary citizens; as these voices clamor not just for more better images, but images that are more reflective of their vision of America; these changes all make the old political habits - reading the national newspapers; watching the network news broadcasts; ensuring a "victory" on the daily news cycle - no longer applicable. Obama not only understands this changed reality; he knows that we are returning to a time when words, not images, dominate our politics, that ideas and substance trump a photo-op and sound bites.
Obama's victory, not just for the Presidency, but his ongoing string of policy victories signal the end of the politics of the imaged spectacle even more than George W. Bush in front of the a banner that lied when it read "Mission Accomplished".
Virtual Tin Cup
