Column: "Campaign '08: Never More Embarrassing?"
I’ve been thinking about the 1800 presidential election a lot lately. Partly because a book on the subject has been lingering in my consciousness, but mostly because its example has served as a rebuttal whenever someone says this year’s election could become the most contentious in American history. People who say things like that ought first be able to name twenty presidents, and probably even their opponents, before waxing philosophic on the tone of modern elections.
For whatever is wrong with our electoral system, it pales by a dozen shades to what lingered in the air during our country’s infancy, when even the presence of truly great men wasn’t enough to keep things reasonable. Mere historical ignorance cannot account for the belief things “have never been worse” – you have to willfully suspend knowledge of campaigns past. For example: Writing for National Review Online, Kathleen Parker lamented the pre-taped appearances of Senators Clinton, McCain, and Obama on the professional wrestling program Raw and wrote, in all seriousness, “Talkin’ tough never looked sillier – nor a presidential race more embarrassing.” 1
By this reasoning, delivering a few dopey lines on a wrestling show is more intellectually offensive than running on a promise to turn the United States into a military eunuch and hurl it into Canadian style socialism faster than the other candidates. A presidential race never looked more embarrassing? For Parker to write those words straight-faced, she had to conveniently forget that Bill Clinton actually answered the question about his underwear, that Michael Dukakis drove that tank, that Jesse Jackson uttered the phrase “Hymietown,” that John Kerry asked an Ohio shop keep “Can I get me a huntin’ license here?” and that Ron Paul … well, ran for president.
Electoral history is littered with hundreds, and possibly thousands, of examples of this magnitude and much worse, if only you bother to find them, which Parker didn’t, because doing so would have flown in the face of her thesis that professional wrestling is simply beneath people running for high office. (Perhaps not the world’s noblest profession, but no one has ever been able to explain to me how watching professional wrestling is any less of an intellectual drop than watching NASCAR, Survivor, a Miley Cyrus concert, or Countdown with Keith Olbermann.)
Modern candidates must either conform to the times in which they live, or stagger backward to the days of conducting entire campaigns from their front porches. Nearly five million people watched Raw that night including, as the New York Times points out, 1.45 million males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four.2 You poke fun at yourself on a wrestling show because it humanizes you to the viewers, and perhaps open doors to some voters who otherwise might not have thought about you. An Obama spokesman echoes this sentiment in the same Times piece: “[T]his campaign has been about reaching out to new voters and getting them involved in politics, so it’s important to reach as broad an audience as possible.”
This may be irrelevant to Kathleen Parker who, while admitting the wrestling stuff was harmless fun, turns to wonder why fun should have any place. “Clinton’s [most controversial Pennsylvania primary ad] posed the correct question: Whom are voters going to trust to be commander in chief? In this too-long campaign, in which Hill-Rod, Cookie and Slugger seek to out-cute each other for the connoisseurs of human mauling machines, the answer is increasingly less clear.” Fine, but would you suppose that ambiguity exists because the senators each spent fifteen minutes cutting wrestling promos, or because they’re so much alike it’s virtually impossible to tell whether there are any real differences between them?
For whatever is wrong with our electoral system, it pales by a dozen shades to what lingered in the air during our country’s infancy, when even the presence of truly great men wasn’t enough to keep things reasonable. Mere historical ignorance cannot account for the belief things “have never been worse” – you have to willfully suspend knowledge of campaigns past. For example: Writing for National Review Online, Kathleen Parker lamented the pre-taped appearances of Senators Clinton, McCain, and Obama on the professional wrestling program Raw and wrote, in all seriousness, “Talkin’ tough never looked sillier – nor a presidential race more embarrassing.” 1
By this reasoning, delivering a few dopey lines on a wrestling show is more intellectually offensive than running on a promise to turn the United States into a military eunuch and hurl it into Canadian style socialism faster than the other candidates. A presidential race never looked more embarrassing? For Parker to write those words straight-faced, she had to conveniently forget that Bill Clinton actually answered the question about his underwear, that Michael Dukakis drove that tank, that Jesse Jackson uttered the phrase “Hymietown,” that John Kerry asked an Ohio shop keep “Can I get me a huntin’ license here?” and that Ron Paul … well, ran for president.
Electoral history is littered with hundreds, and possibly thousands, of examples of this magnitude and much worse, if only you bother to find them, which Parker didn’t, because doing so would have flown in the face of her thesis that professional wrestling is simply beneath people running for high office. (Perhaps not the world’s noblest profession, but no one has ever been able to explain to me how watching professional wrestling is any less of an intellectual drop than watching NASCAR, Survivor, a Miley Cyrus concert, or Countdown with Keith Olbermann.)
Modern candidates must either conform to the times in which they live, or stagger backward to the days of conducting entire campaigns from their front porches. Nearly five million people watched Raw that night including, as the New York Times points out, 1.45 million males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four.2 You poke fun at yourself on a wrestling show because it humanizes you to the viewers, and perhaps open doors to some voters who otherwise might not have thought about you. An Obama spokesman echoes this sentiment in the same Times piece: “[T]his campaign has been about reaching out to new voters and getting them involved in politics, so it’s important to reach as broad an audience as possible.”
This may be irrelevant to Kathleen Parker who, while admitting the wrestling stuff was harmless fun, turns to wonder why fun should have any place. “Clinton’s [most controversial Pennsylvania primary ad] posed the correct question: Whom are voters going to trust to be commander in chief? In this too-long campaign, in which Hill-Rod, Cookie and Slugger seek to out-cute each other for the connoisseurs of human mauling machines, the answer is increasingly less clear.” Fine, but would you suppose that ambiguity exists because the senators each spent fifteen minutes cutting wrestling promos, or because they’re so much alike it’s virtually impossible to tell whether there are any real differences between them?
1 “Meet Hill-Rod” by Kathleen Parker, last accessed 28 April 2008.
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ZDRlMDBjYjJlYjZjNTFiZjE4YzM5YWNmOTk0ZjE5NjE=
2 “Better Days, and Even Candidates, Are Coming to W.W.E.” by R.M. Schneiderman, last accessed 28 April 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/media/28wwe.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=media&pagewanted=print
posted by Brian S. Wise | 3:47 PM
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