Expect orchestration, and so much more
There are going to be a lot of setpieces over the next four years, so we might as well start getting used to them. The president-elect’s press conference was just such a show, as the array of CEO’s, former Treasury Secretaries and politically symbolic attendees illustrated. Senator Obama’s planned remarks were cautious, and even seemed to imply his potentially backing off from some tax increases. The event was held while the market was open and was designed not to rattle the market.
The Q&A portion of the event was highly scripted and obviously so. ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, CNN, Reuters, the NYT and the local Chicago papers got to ask a question. Opposition press did not. The rather labored dog metaphor (“our preference would be to get a shelter dog. But obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts, like me”) was swallowed whole by the adoring media as a genuine ad-lib. The one genuine ad-lib was a flop that the Senator had to later apologize for, a rather impolite comment about Nancy Reagan. So perhaps in the future all impromptu remarks and jokes will be scripted.
Possibly some future moments of levity may be brought to us by the Obama administration’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. According to Bloomberg, Senator Obama “once joked at a charity dinner that when Rahm Emanuel severed his middle finger, it almost rendered him mute.” A pretty funny comment, but the serious point is not to be missed.
These fellows aren’t fooling around; they know how to craft an image and enforce discipline. Already some in the elite media are getting uncomfortable with the self-conscious image making that has been the hallmark of Senator Obama’s campaign. But what will they do, since they know just what happens to those in the media that oppose the administration?
November 9th, 2008 at 3:00 am
IMHO it’s too soon to draw conclusions. For its first two years, the Bush administration looked like it would be successful. It wasn’t until Top Gun George landed on the aircraft carrier that I had the reluctant thought that something might be very wrong. Time will tell.
Since I don’t know the course that real history will take, I might as well speculate about alternate history too.
I could not overlook the “experienced” McCain’s loose-cannon reactions to the financial crisis[1], so the Corner’s Andy McCarthy comments on the post-election Palin bashing gave me a bleak satisfaction:
Well said.
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[1] After starting out as the underdog in a strongly Democratic year, McCain had actually taken a slight lead when the crisis revealed his apparent executive deficiencies.
November 9th, 2008 at 4:34 am
The US military, and especially the higher ranks, were pathetically not ready for post Baghdad.
However, Bush had their back. He took every hit for them, and bought them time. And unlike Johnson, he didn’t let Harvard geeks and glorified corporate accountants interfere.
Like Lincoln, he stayed steady until he found his Grant, and the military worked out what needed to be done, what needed to be done before doing, and then it did it.
For all the caterwauling the left and the media have done, the transformation, and victory, which will be studied for a hundred years, is flushed down the leftist memory hole.
But I remember, and so do a million active and reserve servicemen. No, they didn’t get spit upon. That would imply attention, effort, meaning. No, they are just dismissed, as if what happened and who did it, never existed.
November 9th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
These “set piece” activities remind me of the old computers using “Batch Processing”. These set pieces will lose value shortly after inauguration when events activity speeds up and they need to switch to “continuous processing”.
If they try to maintain their set piece tactic in a fast moving environment, confidence will fall.
Those people standing like props really are props. Once things get moving, the props of a set piece had better stay in tune or they would be replaced. That action should be a news story. Everyone will want to get the opinions of the props.
Now if the set pieces withered to nothing, that would also be a news story.