Buffet, Gates, Newman: we need you for more than your money

Glenn Greenwald discusses what he saw on TV this week while traveling and seeing more of it than usual:

There was virtually no discussion, at least on any of the news shows to which I was exposed, of the obviously consequential revelations of the President's direct involvement in the creation of America's torture regime. Instead, the vast bulk of attention was paid to depicting Barack Obama as an effete, elitist, deceptive enemy of the Regular Guy -- exactly the way that every national Democratic politician in recent memory has inevitably been depicted (including Hillary Clinton, particularly when the media and the Right thought last year that she would be the nominee).

Our elections are dominated by the same tired personality script, trotted out over and over and over. Democrats and liberals -- no matter how poor their upbringing, no matter how self-made they are, no matter how egalitarian their policies -- are the freakish, out-of-touch elitists who despise the values of the Regular Americans. Right-wing leaders -- no matter how extravagantly rich they are by virtue of other people's money, no matter how insulated their lives are, no matter how indifferent their policies are to the vast rich/poor gap -- are the normal, salt-of-the-earth Regular Folk. These petty, cliched storylines drown out every meaningful consideration and dictate our election outcomes, and they are deployed automatically.

It doesn't matter what the candidates actually say or do. The establishment press just waits for the right episode and then reflexively and eagerly fills in the gaps in the shallow script -- the script with which they are intimately familiar and which serves as their only framework for talking about and understanding political disputes.

Isn’t there a way using Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Paul Newman and other Democrats with strong public images to remind Americans that John Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were all wealthy; that they did a heck of a lot more for ordinary Americans than any Republican ever has; that unfortunately, the way campaigns must be conducted these days a candidate for the Presidency almost has to be wealthy to be able to run; that the Republicans are all wealthy, too, and usually more wealthy than their Democratic opponents, and that their solutions to everything is to cut taxes mostly for the wealthy; but that some wealthy people become Democrats because they believe the whole society benefits, including business, when participation by the middle class and even the poorest in the economy is at its strongest, when jobs are plentiful and wages are good – and therefore, to remind Americans not to fall for the Republican trick of identifying Democrats as some kind of elitists who have no connection with ordinary Americans, while also painting multi-millionaire Republicans, like George Bush and John McCain, as some kind of down-home folks you could share a beer with. It’s a game that’s gone on way too long. Advertising in substantial chunks of time, for, yes, substantial chunks of money that is really chump change to Buffet and Gates, is the only way to get it out there in sufficient presence to gain enough traction to paralyze the big media from continuing to buy into this anti-American game. And yes, it is “anti-American” if it’s against most Americans, which it is.

Some opinion polls seem to suggest that excessive advertising in Pennsylvania by Obama's campaign may be turning off voters. That's what happened in part to Tammy Duckworth in that 2006 Illinois race for a House of Representatives seat, as it became obvious her campaign and the Democratic House Campaign Committee had more money than it knew how to spend productively. There is a massive educational campaign that ought to be mounted now to inoculate the Democratic candidate from the horse-crap we all know the Republicans are going to throw against the wall. Let's re-direct some of that money there, instead of beating people over the heads with the same message day after day after day. As usual, though, Democratic campaign consultants don't know what the hell they are doing when it comes to media matters.