Politics As Unusual
by Daren Foster

ALSO ON SITE

POLITICS AS UNUSUAL
By Daren Foster

**Media tales fail to take flight.**

When this column is posted, we will be perched on the eve of an historic election in the U.S. Of course, most recent elections have been deemed historic. What election doesn’t want to be seen as historic? To suggest otherwise would be an admission that, well, the election isn’t really necessary, so why bother which, for about half the voting population, has become the simple fact of the matter. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

But for a few obvious and key reasons, election 2008 is, if not historic, at least radically different. An African-American presidential candidate bested a female candidate in a tight primary race. There is the second female VP candidate on a major ticket and the first for the Republicans. Toss in a couple of old white guys to underscore the sea change at hand and to give the race a familiar feel for those reeling from the cultural upheaval.

While prognostication is for bookies and sportscasters, it does appear that there will be a changing of the guard. The real question is just how big (or little) of a change we will see. While memories of ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ continue to haunt forecasters and pollsters 60 years after the fact, that one remains an anomaly in recent presidential elections. For every too-close-to-call outcome, there have been twice as many that have been done deals even before the electorate went into the voting booths. More often than not, victors have been anointed and are measuring for White House drapes weeks in advance of election day.

If such a trend continues this year, it will be interesting to note how actual events -- on the ground realities -- successfully trumped any media generated narrative that has so shaped the last couple elections. 2004 saw the effete, flip-flopping, possibly traitorous war hero, John Kerry, succumb to an incumbent wartime president presiding over a disastrously managed war and questions of unconstitutional shenanigans hanging in the air. Said president was first elected 4 years earlier based on his likeability and how people would rather sit down and have a beer with him than his lying, smarty-pants opponent who boasted about inventing the internet although no one in the press could actually quote him as claiming such. It was in the newspapers and on TV, so it must be true!

It won’t be for a lack of trying on the media’s part that their tales didn’t take hold this year. Certainly their leftover animosity toward Hillary Clinton helped derail her candidacy. Her cackles, cleavage and all round shrewish demeanour made the press boys want to cross their legs out of fear of castration. Remember Fred Thompson as the second coming of Ronald Reagan? (He’s so presidential. He played one in the movies!) Yeah, me neither.

As recent as late summer, it wasn’t apparent that the media wouldn’t be determining the outcome of this election. John McCain was the high flying Republican maverick with the magical abilities to disassociate himself from the Republican party while a bitter primary campaign had the Democrats threatening to splinter into warring camps and their candidate was a strange outsider with a Muslim middle name with who normal Americans could make no connection. On Labour Day, the official start of the campaign’s home stretch, it was a horse race. Just how the media likes it.

And then real life intervened. Financial behemoths crumbled. Stock markets crashed, taking people’s life savings with them. Homes were foreclosed upon, deserting tracts of neighbourhoods. Images of the Great Depression were invoked. People were scared and angry, looking around for those responsible for the mess. Suddenly, the Maverick didn’t look so.. mavericky. He couldn’t shake the perception that everything he stood for, everything he had spent his long career in Congress promoting represented the very beating heart of the problem. Nothing his handlers and media enablers could do would put the Maverick’s pieces together again.

With everyone caught flat-footed and unsure how to proceed, Barack Obama stepped into the void and presented himself as the much needed new face on the horizon. He exhibited the gravitas and seriousness of tone that had been in question just days earlier by his opponents, the media and large percentage of the population. Now he was in possession of the magic potion, seamlessly transforming himself into presidential material and assuming full control of his perceived image. A trick no Democratic candidate had been able to do since Bill Clinton.

This new found power was on full display during this past week’s Obama infomercial. Any aspiring filmmaker should watch and re-watch its masterful emotional manipulation, skilfully weaving the candidate’s message and own personal story with those of struggling but hopeful American families. It was full integration into the mainstream and even someone like me who cold-heartedly despises these campaign personal testimonials, as they usually veer off into Joe the Plumber inanities, couldn’t stop from being swept up in the unabashedly cheap sentimentality of it all.

The candidate’s appearance later that night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart only confirmed his ascendancy as he easily joked and chatted with the show’s host who, while inclined to like the candidate, had been until recently firmly in love with the maverick independency of John McCain. With less than a week to go before the election, Obama was now dictating how the narrative was playing out while the story’s previous authors, the media, were sidelined as mere onlookers.

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Which may be the most positive possible outcome of this election. As storytellers, the media prefers the easy, simple black and white angle. Complexity is anathema. They’re like early John Ford. The Cowboy. The Indian. The Homesteader. The Maverick. The Decider. The Snob. The Liar. The Waffler. A later Ford film like The Searchers baffles them. Is John Wayne The Good Guy or The Bad Guy? I don’t get it. Like the desperately despised outgoing administration it was once so in awe of, the media doesn’t do nuance.

But as we’ve witnessed over the last few years, simplicity eventually comes up short in answering the more difficult, complicated questions and demands that invariably arise. George W. Bush sold himself as a cowboy, a gut-instinctor, who reacted to things intuitively without putting much thought into it. Turns out that approach doesn’t make for good policy when dealing with real world situations. Even in the make-believe world of the movies, such a stock caricature ultimately fails to deliver a convincing outcome. Odd, since that’s where it came from in the first place.

Watching Oliver Stone’s W., I was struck by a surreal sense of double vision. Here’s an empty vessel filled out by a manufactured personality now being deconstructed back down to.. an empty-vessel? What kind of lead character is that? Many viewers have expressed surprise at the kind treatment Stone delivered of W. but I came away thinking I’d much rather be perceived as some power hungry, blood thirsty despot than a whiny reformed drunk with serious daddy issues. The whole movie operated on that level. One-dimensional characters espousing one-dimensional attitudes to three-dimensional situations. No matter how much I may dislike the real life versions of the film’s characters, I cannot subscribe such simplistic attitudes to them. Could Donald Rumsfeld really have been that grandfatherly dotty? Is Condoleezza Rice really that much of a fawning space cadet? Did Colin Powell really betray all that he believed simply because he was the Good Soldier? It just isn’t possible that anyone could be as Snidely Whiplash evil as Richard Dreyfuss’s Dick Cheney. OK, maybe that one was dead-on right.

The movie should’ve been a much better fit. Like his subject, filmmaker Stone doesn’t really do nuance. But maybe he set an impossible task by trying to inflate real life attributes into those who have championed themselves as caricatures. It’s like trying to fit a body around a Halloween costume (so close to being a topical analogy!) rather than the other way around. Both in the movies and real life, the appeal of such simplicity ultimately wears thin in the face of complicated reality. It seems the American people are poised to accept that fact and are ready to forge ahead to begin cleaning up the mess created by those who see the world in artificially concocted, easy to follow terms.

READ MORE COLUMNS BY DAREN FOSTER

October 27 2008 - EYES HAVE IT 2 - Joe the Plumber 4 President!

October 20 2008 - EYES HAVE IT - You say pollster. I say huckster.

October 13 2008 - MUSLIM COMEDY REVIEW - Ahmed's now your wacky next door neighbour!

October 6 2008 - BVLGARI VVLGARIS - Celebrity overseas whoring.

September 29 2008 - COMEDY TODAY

September 22 2008 - FALLEN SEASON EXPECTATIONS

September 15 2008 - CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

September 8 2008 - KILL THE BATMAN - Seriously. Put him out of his misery.

September 1 2008 - MY SUMMER VACATION

August 25 2008 - PHONING IT IN

August 18 2008 - GUNGA GULUNGA

August 11 2008 - EMMY DAZE - Where is The Wire

August 4 2008 - ME TALK GOOD

July 28 2008 - TAKE THE CANNOLI

July 21 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 2

July 14 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 1

July 7 2008 - THE INDIGESTIBLE HULK

June 30 2008 - KING GEORGE

June 23 2008 - PLAYING ONE ON TV

June 16 2008 - NEW MONDAY MORNING COLUMN - LIFE IS TOO SHORT - Finally, I saw the last episode of The Wire.

June 4 2008 - FLIP THIS CHANNEL - Buying first house leads to having many things on the mind.

May 29 2008 - BE AFRAID VERY AFRAID - The Canadian military is no longer some namby-pamby, truce-brokering, do-gooding, adventure-seeking, peacekeeping bunch of pacifiers

May 22 2008 - STONE COLD BORING ANGEL - All about The Stone Angel

May 15 2008 - HARD TO SWALLOW CANDY - Madonna is back!

May 8 2008 - THE DUMBEST GUYS IN THE ROOM

May 1 2008 - AN ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT

April 24 2008 - Just TWEEN you and me

April 17 2008 - A Day at the Movies

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