Monday, April 24, 2006
Who's behind the decline of politics?
When politicians are coached to be all things to all people, it often doesn't work out...
Joe Klein, at Time.com, writes about the decline of politics, and the consultants that have caused it:
"Gore won Michigan and Pennsylvania, but he lost an election he should have won, and he lost it on intangibles. He lost it because he seemed stiff, phony and uncomfortable in public. The stiffness was, in effect, a campaign strategy: just about every last word he uttered—even the things he said in the debates with George W. Bush—had been market-tested in advance. I asked Devine if he'd ever considered the possibility that Gore might have been a warmer, more credible and inspiring candidate if he'd talked about the things he really wanted to talk about, like the environment. 'That's an interesting thought,' Devine said."
"But politicians are, for the most part, lousy performers.Their advisers are pretty awful at what they do too. In the absence of inspiration, they have fixed upon the crudest, most negative and robotic forms of communication."
