Ronald Reagan had terrific stage presence, and was good at
glad-handing, so long as nothing of substance had to be said, beyond what he --
an actor reciting lines written for him by others -- could read off his ever-present index cards. In his first term, Nixon sent him on
goodwill trips to cultivate our favorite
right-wing rulers: Marcos, Chiang,
Yew and Franco. Later, in preparation for his own future Presidential bid, he went on a whirlwind
junket across Europe and Asia; as
former Washington Post political reporter Lou Cannon put it, “This enabled
Reagan to deal with questions about his inexperience in world affairs by rattling off a list of all the
foreign leaders he had met (usually omitting Franco).”
So long as all the public learned was from the White House press
release, rather than seeing the
often dismaying performances from up close, this scenario worked just
swell. Cannon describes a 1982 state dinner in Brasília:
Reagan raised his wine glass in a
toast to [the] Brazilian President … and “the people of Bolivia”, a gaffe which
he attempted to correct, and instead compounded, by saying “That’s where I’m
going next.” Reagan’s next
stop was actually Colombia, and his
faulty toast became big news in that country as well. The double blooper so
dismayed the White House press office
that it altered the public transcript and quoted Reagan as toasting
“the people of Bogotá”.
On Air Force One returning from the five-day trip …
Reagan said … “I went down to find out from them and their views. And you’d be surprised, yes, because,
you know, they’re all individual countries.”
-- Lou Cannon, President
Reagan: the Role of a Lifetime
(1991), p. 462
Each with its own individual and precious and special, but
easily confusable name.
I mention the incident, not to rake up cold coals, but
because of the striking parallelism with Romney, and the continuing success of
the Reagan-derived “President-as-Ken-Doll” strategy. Again:
[Reagan] was briefed before each
meeting by the appropriate experts, and he dutifully read the requisite
policy points from his cards, floundering only when he departed from the
prepared script. During a meeting
with Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandhi, the Indian delegates were pleased
when Reagan lauded the “green revolution” that had vastly improved their
nation’s agricultural yields. But the Indians were also bothered
that Reagan did not seem to realize that the Indian government had played an
important role in this agricultural revolution, which he depicted as strictly a
triumph of capitalism.
Later, during a conference session
on food production, Reagan was expounding on the accomplishments of
free-enterprise farming in the United States, when Tanzanian President Julius
Nyerere interrupted and said, “Let me tell you something. U.S. agriculture is the most heavily
subsidized in the world.”
-- Lou Cannon, President
Reagan: the Role of a Lifetime
(1991), p. 469
That sound familiar?
Obama’s line, “You didn’t build that”, pithy and easily mocked, contains
more wisdom in its four words than
many a press release or campaign speech;
in this it resembles Clinton’s wise and (except by legal professionals)
widely misunderstood “It depends what the meaning of is is.” The booboisie
(to resurrect Mencken’s term, still applicable) do not feel obliged to even
attempt to comprehend the things they snicker at.
So it’s not just Romney. Buoyed by the success of The Great (when pre-scripted)
Communicator, the Republican Party, and its easily-dazzled voters, has come to
welcome leaders devoid of expertise or intellectual curiosity. It worked before, it’ll work again, so
long as you don’t flub in front of the cameras. (Of couse, this has become more difficult to do in the age
of the iPhone, since cameras may lurk even in invitation-only conclaves of
fatcats, in the dens of Boca Raton.)
Ironically, the Potemkin-village approach to the marketing and
micro-managing of candidates was
given a substantial boost by the case of an earlier Republican politician who,
by contrast with the crop today, was unusually knowledgeable: Richard Nixon. But he wasn’t at all likeable (stiff in
a Romney way, but additionally unsavory), so he had to be packaged: consult the classic of Joe McGinniss, The
Selling of the President.
So again -- Why even write? No facts, no reasonings will convince the Birthers and Voodoo-Economists and their
kin. Ours is the Society of the Spectacle, best symbolized by that empty and amiable actor.
And yet, a kind of bright side: We have a system in which the evil of schemers is tempered by the stupidity of jurors and voters. The result (to continue in the agrarian context above) is such costly tomfoolery as the farm programs; but we avoid, say, the famine and genocide of Lenin’s and Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. And while there have been plenty of boneheaded jury decisions, at least we are spared the likes of the Moscow show trials. The voters are not rocket scientists (or, more relevantly: statisticians and epistemologists), but -- apart from the tinfoil-hat crowd -- they mostly have basic common sense, and respect for that wisely crafted document, the Constitution.
[Historical footnote on the theme of the perilous schemes of
cabals and autocrats being
frustrated by the amiable indolence of their servants and subjects]
In 1894, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s choice of Reichskanzler, Prince
Hohenlohe, had a
… reputation for stubbornness and
evasiveness, which had led a member of his staff in Paris to say, “It is quite
impossible to make him do anything of which he disapproves. He flutters away like a little
bird when you try to catch him.” These qualities served to baulk some of
the Emperor’s more dangerous designs.
-- Gordon Craig, Germany
1866-1945 (1978), p. 262
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