Some mistake? (Great Analysis of Arnie phenome from the UK)

[Emillereid]

He has no political experience, no policies and a cupboard full of skeletons. So what does the rise of the Terminator tell us about the state of American politics? And should we be worried? Mark Lawson reports

Thursday October 9, 2003
The Guardian

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It is important, though, to keep alive in our minds the unlikeliness of this event. Twentieth-century American democracy created something called a "machine politician": a candidate who owed office to long party service and the backroom machinations of the precinct bosses.

Now 21st-century American democracy has given us a candidate, Governor Schwarzenegger, who is in one sense the opposite of a machine politician - he has lost almost no shoe leather along the traditional routes of the future leader - but who, conversely, is the first major American politician not only to look and sound like a machine but to have spent much of his adult life playing one on celluloid.
<snip>



But the key to the election of Governor Arnie is a phenomenon which might be called narrative politics. American electoral campaigns have tended to be driven by the theory of "retail politics": the candidate made as many speeches, shook the maximum number of hands, accrued the largest air-mile account as possible. Races were won by imprinting a face and a few simple policies through ceaseless repetition.


<snip>

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Even apart from his own compelling back story - body-building to nation-building - there was also the B-plot that his marriage to Maria Shriver (niece of JFK and Bobby) also made the race a strange and wonderful pay-off to one of America's greatest political storylines: the Kennedys. The advantage of narrative politics is that weaknesses are reclassified as strengths. A politician who knows nothing about politics? What a premise. A leader who can barely speak an American sentence aloud? Such a gripping yarn. A candidate whose answer to the bankruptcy of California is to propose tax cuts? We sure want to stay and see how this turns out....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1059021,00.html

Between the image and reality
Between the celluloid and the man
Between the hype and the circumstance
Falls the shadow

... and the end to our democracy.

[StClone]

1. Qualms about an Interesting Article

It is important, though, to keep alive in our minds the unlikeliness of this event.

A trend to increasingly outrageous political happenings--Minnesota's Ventura, Wellstone, Election 2000--is there a trend?) As in fashion, someone is designing it.

[scarletwoman]

2. The author has it dead wrong -- Arnold IS a "machine politician"!

He's well-plugged into the CORPORATE plutocrat machine, and this is the REALITY of our political system now. Our institutions of government are wholly-owned corporate subsidiaries.

They've bought it, they run it, and they'll install whomever they please. It pleased them to install Arnold, a flashy front man for their machine.

sw

[OneBlueSky]

3. maybe so, but that's not what got him elected . . .

this article makes a good point about narrative politics . . . build a good story around the candidate, one that resonates with the voters, and your chances improve dramatically . . . remember Clinton's "The Man from Hope?" . . . ask yourself who among the current crop of Democrats could structure a compelling narrative about himself and why he's running? . . . among the first tier, Kerry and Clark seem to fit the bill most comfortably (Vietnam hero who renounces the war and builds a career championing progressive causes, and a decorated military leader who sees the light about what's happening to the country and decides to do something about it) . . . this is where Dean may fall short (i.e. as someone raised on the north shore of Long Island who backed into the governorship of a small state when the incumbent croaked) . . . the point is that these narrative campaigns win votes, and the Dems should really focus some energy on constructing the story of their eventual candidate . . .