viz. - political campaigns

Texans Getting Campy

Laura Thain — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 19:33:56 +0000

Hey y'all, in case you haven't heard, we're electing a new Lt. Governor this year here in the great state of Texas. With four Texas Republicans competing for the position, a campaign is taking shape to see who can be the cowboy-iest candidate of 2014. With a fight like that, you might expect to see some campaign ads that border on self-parody. And what, my friends, do you get when sincerity fails? Well, of course, a whole lot of camp!

Incumbent David Dewhurst, who is (for real) a member of the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, released an unusual campaign ad this week. Before we view it, let’s take a look at a more serious cowboy call from contender and current Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples:

Ok, so we’ve got some typical campaign rhetoric going on here with a little bit of cowboy flair, but nothing too unusual. Staples' team shows that our Texan values are threatened by the specter of the Democrats and big government (specifically, the evil Obama and his friend the state of California). And it’s no surprise that the ad finds a way to say “Todd Staples” as many times as possible while showing him practically BURST across a true Texan field on a horse. He’s a cowboy in shining armor. Let’s take this as an example of non-campy cowboy. There’s nothing particularly failed about the sincerity of this campaign video—its effectiveness rests firmly in the success or failure of its polemics. This is a candidate who’s clearly courting Tea Party conservatives and ready to toe the Republican party line, taking no prisoners. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he’s considerably behind the other three candidates in a recent poll.)

But here’s what happens when the cowboy antics get a bit more theatrical: check out a favorite of mine (courtesy of Cate Coleman here in the DWRL), from current US Senator John Cornyn’s 2008 campaign:

The particular kind of camp we see here is determined by the audience:

Image Credit: Screenshots form Cornyn's campaign video

It is the campaign’s attempt to be serious and the utter failure of that seriousness that makes this over-the-top cowboy spectacle campy—and it’s the risk that many conservative appeals to “traditional” Texan-white-rancher-values take.

How, then, might a conservative campaign make the same kind of appeals to individualism and masculinity without resorting to the cowboy cliché? Take a look at Dewhurst’s recent campaign video as a response to that kind of rhetoric:

That’s right, folks. No cowboys. No news coverage. No dark and foreboding shots of Washington or California. Just a simple, sustained (nearly twenty full seconds) demonstration of bodily masculinity. Contrast our TX t-shirt wearing SuperBeard with the California hipster literally fondling a shake weight. Could it be that, unlike John Cornyn’s campaign, Dewhurst is intentionally using camp in his campaign rhetoric?

Image credit: Screenshot from Dewhurst's campaign video

It’s a strange move that I think attempts to accomplish a few goals simultaneously. First, in response to radical right complaints that Dewhurst isn’t “Republican” enough (perhaps because he has on occasion dared to try and cooperate with Texan Democrats in the State Senate), Dewhurst’s campaign produces a video so machismo that you almost can’t help but laugh. The camp seems self-conscious—which we might infer from the heavily stylized camera filter and a variety of other formal elements of the film itself—but it is serious in its implications, that is, that the Texan economy is absolutely tied to strong, hyper-masculine leadership. Bigger is better. Bearded is best.

I dare say the video also makes sincere attempts to appeal to younger voters, although this might represent the limits of the campy aesthetic. The crude, Instagram-like styling of the film (which, upon further scrutiny, is most interesting because it appeals to nostalgia for a time that young people in Texas never experienced outside of The Wonder Years and photo filters) has the most potential, despite its sincere intent, to fail.

Perhaps this lesser-watched Dewhurst video can tell us more about the campaign’s strange appeal to a hipster aesthetic. Watch it and see if you think Texas is ready to “walk down the aisle” with Lt. Governor Dewhurst all over again:

Does it remind you, too, of a Royal Tenenbaums style narration? What do you think of Dewhurst's campaign rhetoric?

What Andy Cohen Can Tell Us About Jim Lehrer

Laura Thain — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:00:14 +0000

Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

I’m weighing in late this week on last week’s first presidential debate. Jay has usefully analyzed several covers of The New Yorker and illuminated for us a particular venue’s take on the candidates, while Todd has collected “Big Bird” memes to demonstrate a variety of reactions to Romney’s attack on PBS. I’d like to pick up the popular culture trail where Todd has left off and discuss one meme in particular, posted by RealityTVGifs on October 4^th, the morning after the first debate. The gif depicts presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama superimposed on Real Housewives of New Jersey Jacqueline Laurita and Teresa Giudice, respectively, while Andy Cohen, Executive VP of Bravo, moderates. How can we read the comparisons this image invites—of the presidential debate to a Real Housewives reunion special? Though there is obviously the potential of productive discussion in the relationship between Romney/President Obama and Laurita/ Guidice, what if we examine the less obvious juxtaposition: how can Andy Cohen inform our reading of moderator Jim Lehrer?

First, some context for the source of the image: the GIF was taken from the RHONJ reunion special, Season 4 Part 1 of 3. In RHONJ, as in all of the RH franchises, each season ends with a reunion, filmed after the season itself airs, in which the stars of the show comment on the previous season and respond to viewer questions. Andy Cohen, the executive face of Bravo and a producer of all of the RH iterations, hosts each reunion. Typically, Cohen takes a moderating role—that is, that he is guides the participants from sequence to sequence in one of two styles—either by asking the housewives questions directly (through which we might read Cohen as an agent for the television audience) or by selecting pre-submitted viewer questions (through which we might read the audience acting as their own agent). In a particularly fraught reunion special (or at least, one which is presented as such), Cohen often finds himself breaking up unproductive ad-hominem attacks, even ones that result in physical violence.

When asked about the altercation on his nighttime talk show Watch What Happens Live, Cohen remarked “[Teresa’s] stronger than she looks.”

Cohen seems mostly interested in preserving conversational momentum, so while he usually tolerates (and in many cases, instigates) these personal attacks, he gives them a short leash; once the possibilities of confrontation exhaust themselves, Cohen reclaims authority over the pacing and content of the narrative being produced and makes a concentrated effort to shift the focus onto a more productive subject. The parallels between Cohen’s role as “drama moderator” and Jim Lehrer’s as debate moderator are clear here: they both act as agents of a television audience whose responsibility is to facilitate a dialogue that efficiently reveals information.

And, increasingly, we can see the overlap between presidential candidates and celebrity in these debates as news outlets evaluate performance based not just on the ways in which candidates address issues but on their “personality.” But personality has two prongs here in relation to a discussion on presidential celebrity: personality as the performance of charisma and personality as the performance of intimacy. Certainly, historians trace this trend to the Kennedy/Nixon debates of 1960, but it seems to me that charisma, rather than intimacy, is the overarching criteria of such discussions. The key factor in discriminating between the cult of presidential personality and the cult of presidential celebrity, I think, is that the latter requires conflation of the public and the private—a construction that depends upon constant cultural labor in order to maintain an illusion of intimacy surrounding the political figure. We can see the relation between charisma and intimacy rather neatly performed in the clip below from the Nixon/Kennedy debates, as Nixon responds to the moderator’s question about political experience much more specifically and with arguably greater rhetorical skill than Kennedy, but lauds the virtues of non-disclosure and closed-door politics (“The president has always maintained, and very properly so, that he is entitled to get what advice he wants from his cabinet…without disclosing that to anybody!”), while Kennedy adopts a strategy of broad, direct speech by reorienting the premise of the question: “The question really is, which candidate and which party can meet the problems that the United States is going to face in the ‘60s?”.

It is in the labor of cultivating intimacy that the role of the moderator in public discourse becomes crucial. The moderator becomes an agent of the audience who has the ability to manipulate rhetorical distance to reveal or conceal information about those he is moderating. Yet he does all of this in plain sight, presenting himself as a neutral, transparent entity, not an agent himself. So go ahead and pay attention to that man behind the curtain, because he’s really one of “us”!

The comparison of Lehrer to Cohen brings to attention our assumptions about a moderator’s neutrality, in part because in the hypermediated world of The Real Housewives, our attention is constantly drawn to medium. The housewives not only engage in metadiscourse about the show itself but also discuss their treatment and participation in tabloid culture and online blogs. In addition, Cohen’s role hardly remains passive. Take, for instance, the clip below:

Real Housewives of NY "Shut Up" Montage at Reunion from Shannon Hatch on Vimeo.

As Cohen claims, the behavior of the housewives (in this case, of New York) was so egregious and that they “broke [him],” that is, that they forced him to break character or face. Why? Because, as Cohen in his frustration articulates, it is his responsibility to maintain the conversation’s productivity, which relies utterly on constantly maintaining intimacy between audience and housewife. “Shut up and let me ask about it,” “We’re going to get to it,” “Let me keep going,” “Moving on,” and his constant plea to “Let her speak” all emphasize that conventional structure—the “ask and answer” confessional—is absolutely necessary to accomplish this intimacy, while his remarks about having lunch and “getting on with it” seem to emphasize the severity of its disruption. So of course, once Cohen regains control of the reins, without skipping a beat, he looks straight into the eyes of socialite Sonja Morgan and, in utter earnestness, asks, “Sonja, tell me about Guam.”

(Cohen’s “breaking point” has become its own gif, often implemented in topical tumblrs as a means of regaining control of a conversation from an aggressive adversary:)

Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

Lehrer entered this round of presidential debates as a reluctant moderator, agreeing only to return to the hot seat after being promised that the format of the debate would differ from those of 2008. (He again, this year, claims it will be his last.) A long time contributor and advocate of public broadcasting, Lehrer on the surface couldn’t be more different than Cohen; he has long defended his exploratory, rather than pointed or aggressive, moderating style as the hallmark of enlightened debate. ““If somebody wants to be entertained,” said Lehrer after the 2000 presidential debates, “they ought to go to the circus.”

And while he might paint himself as reluctant, the media has blasted him as “the worst moderator in the history of moderation.” But, as our examination of Cohen’s moderation tactics show, Lehrer’s goal was not hypermediacy but immediacy. His support for an open debate format and his almost willingness to be talked over all serve as evidence for Lehrer’s desire to appear as a transparent mechanism in the debate proceedings. Ultimately, it seems for Lehrer, his job is done best when it is noticed least; a successful debate should appear as an intelligent conversation between the two candidates. In fact, in response to criticism of his performance, Lehrer asked, “"I was thinking, `Weren't you paying attention to what was happening before your very eyes?” (In other words, why disrupt the intimacy between the debaters and the audience by bringing attention to the moderator?) And, more significantly, Lehrer favored the new debate format, saying “I thought the format accomplished its purpose, which was to facilitate direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance. Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow and I had no problems with doing so. My only real personal frustration was discovering that ninety minutes was not enough time in that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention.”

Ultimately, Lehrer’s tactics aided Romney’s victory, which political commentators across a variety of news media outlets have attributed to the strong, in-charge demeanor he was able to portray during the 90-minute debate. But the question on many analyst’s minds now is articulated nicely by Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: “Mitt Romney’s challenge, with less than five weeks until Election Day, is to convince voters that the steady, decisive, in-command competitor who showed up for the first presidential debate is the real Mitt Romney.” I’ll be interested to see how the dynamic changes in next week’s debate, and how much moderator Candy Crowley and the town-hall format will have an effect on that change.

Let’s Stay Together, America: Obama’s Viral Campaigns

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:25:28 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

While ostensibly Tuesday’s State of the Union address was President Obama’s most important speech of the week, his performance at an Apollo Theater fundraiser last Thursday stole the spotlight. The reason for this, of course, was because he sang a few bars from Al Green’s classic song “Let’s Stay Together.”

While Obama’s presidency thus far has not avoided criticism, his singing seems to have garnered him praise from far and wide. Many individuals—from one linker at BuzzFeed who commented on “Barack’s sick falsetto!” to Reverend Green himself, who thought that Obama “nailed it”—enjoyed seeing their very serious President sound a softer note. A search on Twitter for “Obama Al Green” pulls up a number of results, including tweets like these:

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Indeed, if tweets like LeVar Burton’s can be taken as general, Obama’s tune seduced an audience beyond the screaming supporters at the fundraiser. The choice of song, which Obama chalked up to Rev. Green being in the audience, might have been intention—a parallel can easily be drawn between the song’s narrative and Obama’s situation. Like the singer of “Let’s Stay Together,” Obama is attempting to retain the affections of a lover ready to leave. If Obama’s popularity decreased over the last few years, he’d like his union with America to last “whether / Times are good or bad, happy or sad.” What might be different between now and 2008—among many things—is that here Obama actually is making his own viral video instead of being the subject of them. Back in 2008 on this blog Jillian Sayre noted the numerous songs and videos posted online about Obama and concluded that “Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.”

The Atlantic writer Ta-Naheisi Coates comes to a similar conclusion in his post on Obama’s relationship with the black community. And while some elements of this moment—like the Apollo Theater, the reference to the Sandman, and the choice of Al Green—might strike African-American voters in a particular way, Coates notes that the desire to turn Obama into a symbol is shared by all:

One way to think about this is remember that black people are people, and that all people turn human beings into symbols, whatever the person's actions. It's worth thinking about why we -- as humans -- do this. What need are we fulfilling? What ache are we ministering to? What is this need -- among us all -- to represent for our team?

Obama’s musical moment is an intentional appeal, but we the people are the audience who makes it viral. (In fact, audiences read texts looking for Obama, as when Gawker suggested Obama was in the Tag Team's 1993 video for "Whoomp (There It Is)") What is it about this President Obama that makes us want to vote for him, or put him in musical viral videos? Is this his equivalent of the prior President’s Bushisms? One difference between Bush and Obama, however, is that Bush never inspired anything like the Obama Girl or caused anyone to Tweet anything like: "Watched Obama sing Al Green. I'm pregnant now." Obama, more so than any other modern President (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton) is subject to objectification (like when paparazzi photographed him shirtless in Hawaii). I'm not sure if this is a result of his participatory rhetoric, which encourages identification, or whether the public is turning Obama into yet another symbol of something we need. This, at least, seems far more benign than Republicans turning him into a communist Muslim.

Campaign rhetoric of yore

kathrynjeanhamilton — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:09:20 +0000

During this campaign season it's enlightening to recall a little history.

This was one of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt's 1900 presidential campaign posters for a race they won handily. (McKinley was assassinated in 1901, so it was T.R. who followed through.) Note the parallels to today's political situation. The McKinley ticket is running on its record, which includes industrializing the nation, establishing financial stability, and freeing Cuba from Spanish rule. (You'll note that no reference is made to the Philippines, a less swift, clean, in-and-out kind of imperial project.) The before and after images create a straightforward visual argument about the progress that has been made under Republican rule, and McKinley and Roosevelt's brave-looking visages straddle the center of the poster. Ethos is established via their record, here visually depicted as an undeniable march toward better days. The argument? Vote for us, and we'll keep going forward together.

The issues in the 2008 campaign aren't much different: we're talking job creation, economic prosperity, financial soundness, and the success of our overseas ventures (undertaken, as the poster insists, "for humanity's sake"). But today the Republicans can't fall back on their record to convince voters that they're the safe bet.