Over the weekend, McCain came to Washington, claiming he was bringing together Congressmen to resolve the financial crisis and attacked Obama for staying on the campaign trial.
The morning of the Congressional vote on the debate, McCain and his surrogates claimed it was John McCain alone who had brought Democrats and Republicans together to resolve the financial crisis and continued vicious attacks on Obama. When, hours later, it was revealed that the bailout package pushed by the Bush-Cheney administration and supported by McCain, Obama and the Democratic and Republican party house leaders, failed because two-thirds of the Republicans, who McCain was supposed to be leading, voted against it, McCain had more than a little egg on his face as the stock market plunged in the biggest one-day drop in history.
Trying in the face of his buffoonish spectacle to keep the initiative, McCain said that this was not the time to engage in partisan behavior, but to pull the country together, and blamed the failure of the bailout bill on Obama and the Democrats -- surely a partisan claim! The Sarah Palin spectacle momentarily took focus off of McCain's erratic efforts to take advantage of the booming economic crisis and the unpopular trillion dollar plus bailout, when the Vice Presidential candidate debated the Democrats Joe Biden. The lead-up to the debate featured daily sound-bites of Sarah Palin's interview with CBS's Katie Couric in which she was unable to mention one specific newspaper or journal that she read, could not think of a Supreme Court decision she opposed beyond Roe vs. Wade, and generally could not complete a coherent sentence, let alone provide a clear answer. During the debate she proved herself to be a good script performer as she acted out the predigested sound-bites to each question, winked and talked folksy if she wanted to distract the audience, and generally played cutesy rather than actual debate the questions with Biden, who provided coherent answers to questions and criticism of John McCain which Palin ignored.
Palin's conservative base loved her down-home hockey-mom performance and so Palin was unleashed as the attack dog on the campaign trail, as a desperate McCain, with polls indicating that votes were going Obama's way in key states, decided to attack Obama's personal character as a last-ditch way to try to win votes. After the New York Times published an article on Obama and former Weather-underground member Bill Ayres, Palin started referring daily to “Obama's pallin' around with terrorists,” and John McCain began personally attacking Obama, raising the question “who is the real Barack Obama,” with the audience screaming “terrorist!”
Throughout the second week of October, Palin and McCain continued to make the Ayres connection in their campaign rallies, media interviews, and TV ads, personally attacking Obama, and the frenzied Republican mob would scream “Kill him!,” “Traitor!, “Bomb Obama!” When one confused woman in the mob told McCain that she “didn't trust Obama” because of things she'd been hearing about him, stammering “he's an Arab!,” it was clear that the Republicans lies and demagoguery had led their rabid rightwing base to believe that Obama was an Arab, a Muslim, a terrorist, and not an American. It was also clear that Palin and McCain had stirred up significant levels of mob fear, ignorance, and violence that was becoming extremely volatile and dangerous.
Investigative reporters indicated that Obama had only a casual relation with Ayres, whereas Palin and her husband were involved in an Alaskan secessionist party whose rightwing and anti-Semitic founder had a long history of outrageous anti-American ranting, racist ramblings, and ultra-right politics: Palin's husband had belonged to that party and just this year Sarah Palin addressed their party convention wishing them “good luck.” Another investigative report linked Palin to a number of extreme rightwing groups and individuals who had promoted her career (McCain, too, it was revealed, had been associated with an unsavory lot). But Palin's week of infamy came to a proper conclusion when the Alaskan Supreme Court ruled on October 10 that a report into the “Troopergate” scandal could be released and the report itself pointed out that Palin had “abused her authority as governor” and violated Alaska's ethics regulations. Thrown off her moralistic high horse, Palin nonetheless continued to be McCain's attack dog and raise controversy on the campaign trial?
It was clear that Republicans were playing a politics of association to feed their media spectacles, just as the Bush-Cheney administration had associated Iraq with 9/11, Al Qaeda, and “weapons of mass destruction,” connections that were obviously false, but the associations worked to sell the war to their base, gullible Democrats, and the media. Republicans had long sold their rightwing corporate class politics to voters by associating the Democrats with gay marriage, abortion, secularism, or other diversionary issue (see Frank 2004). Would the public and media wake up to the Republicans' politics of lying and manipulation or would they continue to get away with their decade of misrule and mendaciousness?
Economic news got worse by the day as the stock market continued to plunge and the global economy appeared to be collapsing, and in this atmosphere the McCain-Palin spectacle of distraction appeared increasingly appalling. With a backlash against Palin's rabble-rousing and Republican negative campaigning, McCain and Palin toned down their slightly their attacks on Obama, although their direct mailings and robocalls continued to associate Obama with Bill Ayers and terrorism and to raise doubts about his character. In the final presidential debate on October 15, McCain had a chance to bring up Obama's associations to his face, which he did in a generally aggressive debate in which Obama coolly and calmly answered the criticisms.
But the major theme of the debate, which seemed to have become the main focus of the endgame of McCain's campaign, was how Obama's answer to Joe the Plumber proved that he was going to raise taxes on small business. In an Obama campaign event the previous weekend, the man who McCain referred to as Joe the Plumber told Obama that he had been a plumber for fifteen years and was trying to buy the business he worked for -- and since it cost over $250,000, he would be forced to pay higher taxes since Obama's tax reform proposal would increase taxes on those making over $250,000 and lower those making less. It turned out the dude's real name was Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, that he was not a licensed plumber, that his income the previous year was around $40,000, and that he owed over $1,000 in back unpaid taxes. These paltry facts did not stop McCain and Palin who continued to raise Joe the Plumber in every campaign stop and were obviously making it the major theme of their campaign, trying to generate an opposition between Obama the tax-and-spend liberal who would raise your taxes contrasted to McCain and Palin who took the side of Joe the Plumber, Ted the Carpenter, and a daily array of allegedly working class people who opposed Obama, leaving out only Rosie the Riveter.
The McCain-Palin “Joe the Plumber” tour narrative, however, was interrupted daily by a scandal or juicy news story that tends to dominate news cycles in the era of media spectacle. It was revealed that the Republicans had spent over $150,000 on the Palin family wardrobe and that Palin's stylist was paid twice as much in early October as McCain's major campaign consultants; in her first policy address on the need for spending on special needs children, Palin denigrated research spent on studying fruit flies, which is a basic tool of genetic research and has helped produce understanding of autism, among many other things; Palin's campaigning was interrupted the same day by the need for her and her husband Scott to do another deposition in the so-called Troopergate scandal; and Palin's negative rating continued to rise, as did numbers that claimed she was a drag on the campaign.
The same week went bad for the McCain campaign as well: a young woman who worked for the McCain campaign argued that a big black man had raped her and carved a “B” for Barack on her face which led to a bevy of rightwing attacks on the Obama people when the McCain campaign released the information -- which the police quickly questioned and by the next day the young woman admitted she made it up, a rather scandalous incident of race-baiting that the McCain campaign encouraged and did not disavow or apologize for. And to top the week of October 20 off, Joe McCain called a 9/11 number to report a traffic jam he was stuck in, and when the operator retorted that it was not proper to use the number for this purpose, Joe the Brother said, “F*** you,” and hung up!
As the two campaigns entered their last week of campaigning before the November 4 election, Obama made speeches with his “closing arguments” hoping to “seal the deal.” During September, Obama raised an unprecedented $150 million, much of it from small Internet and personal donations, and also was getting soaring poll numbers, showing him pulling ahead nationally and in the significant battleground states. As he entered the last week of the campaign, Obama presented the spectacle of a young, energetic, articulate candidate who had run what many considered an almost flawless campaign and attempted during the election's final days to project images of hope, change, and bringing the country together to address its growing problems and divisions -- exactly the message that Obama started off his campaign with.
The McCain-Palin camp seemed to close with the same basic argument with which most Republican candidates end their campaign: the Democrats want to raise taxes and spread around the wealth, an accusation increasingly hyped by the rightwing base and McCain and Palin themselves that Obama was really a “socialist.” McCain continued to raise questions about Obama's experience and the risk that the country would undergo with an untried president, while Obama retorted that the real risk was continuing with more of the last eight years of catastrophic economic policies and a failed foreign policy.
There was also signs of disarray and defeat in the Republican camp. McCain insiders were presenting Palin as a “Diva” who had gone “rogue,” failing to reproduce the campaign lines that they wanted, suggesting she was out for herself and positioning herself for a 2012 presidential race. Meanwhile Palin complained about the McCain campaign giving her the $150,000 worth of clothes that had become a media obsession, insisting she got her clothes from thrift shops.
As the presidential campaign entered its final days, it was clear that contemporary US presidential campaigns were organized around the production of daily media spectacles that embodied narrative themes of the campaign. In a hard fought Democratic Party primary, the Obama Spectacle of youth, change, hope, and a new multicultural America narrowly bested the spectacle of Hillary the Fighter, potentially the first woman president, as Obama was potentially the first president of color. This spectacle gripped the nation and the global media, and set up intense interest in the spectacle of young Obama going up against war hero and veteran Senator John McCain in the general election.
After the primaries, Obama continued to prove himself the master of the spectacle in a trip around the world where he attracted large adoring crowds and met with an array of world leaders, as well as at the Democratic party convention in Denver where he gave a soaring speech in the Denver football stadium to one of the largest live audiences and TV audiences in election history. Going into the general election, McCain appeared severely challenged since he was not known for his speeches or orchestration of media spectacles. Yet, as it turned out, McCain's campaign has produced some of the most audacious, if problematical, spectacles in US presidential history. From the moment McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate through the Republican convention where she made a well-received speech that enormously energized the Republican base, Palin became overnight one of the most astounding media spectacles in US political history. As noted above, McCain himself spent several weeks stunting and throwing out daily surprise positions on the global economic crisis trying to create a spectacle of McCain the Great Leader, although many found his performance erratic and unsettling. In the weeks leading up to the November 4 election, the McCain-Palin campaign, steadily dropping in the polls, became increasingly aggressive against Obama in daily campaign spectacles and appearances in the media, often whipping their crowds into a frenzy in which Obama is decried as a “terrorist,” “traitor,” and, most recently, “socialist.”
Barack Obama has continued to draw large and adoring crowds during his fall campaigning, but has tried to present an image of himself as cool, calm, competent, and presidential on the campaign trail and during media interviews and the presidential debates. Unlike the McCain-Palin campaign, he has avoided dramatic daily shifts and attention grabbing stunts to try to present an image of a mature and intelligent leader who is able to rationally deal with crises and respond to attacks in a measured and cool manner.
Deconstructing the Spectacle
I have argued that presidential campaigns have been constructed as media spectacles, in particular since the rise of cable television, with its 24/7 news cycles and partisan networks like Fox News, which can be seen as a campaign adjunct of the Republican party, and, this year, MSNBC which has several shows that are blatantly partisan for Obama. A PEW journalism report released about two weeks before the election and studying positive and negative representations of the two dominant party's presidential and vice-presidential candidates has revealed that McCain has received strongly negative coverage with more than half of the stories about him casting the Republican in a negative light, while fewer than one-third of the stories about Obama were negative, while about one-third were positive and one-third were neutral. About two in five of the stories about Palin were negative, whereas about one-third were positive and the rest neutral; Joe Biden was the invisible man of the group, receiving only 6% of the coverage with more negatives than Palin and almost as many as McCain.
Commentators noted that this did not necessarily denote media bias, as conservative incessantly claim, but rather reflect that many stories are devoted to polls so the leading candidate, in this case Obama, receives more positive representations from these stories. Analysts also noted that McCain's negative stories were largely concerning his response to the dire financial crisis for which Republican policies and market fundamentalism were strongly blamed.
As we confront the final two weeks of the campaign, it will be interesting to see if any major media spectacles will change the course of the election, or whether a long campaign orchestrated by competing media spectacles and presidential narratives have already shaped people's opinions and determined their voter behavior.
Finally, to be a literate reader of US presidential campaigns, one needs to see how the opposing parties constructive narratives, media spectacle, and spin to try to produce a positive image of their candidate to sell to the American public. In presidential campaigns, there are daily photo opportunities and media events, themes and points of the day that candidates want to highlight, and narratives about the candidates that will win support for the public.
Obama's narrative from the beginning was bound up with the Obama spectacle, a new kind of politician representing change and bringing together people of different colors and ethnicities, ages, parts of the nation, and political views. He has effectively used media spectacle and Internet spectacle to promote his candidacy and generally been consistent in his major themes and story-lines, although the Republicans tried to subvert his story with allegations of close connections with radicals like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayres.
As Robert Draper noted in an article on “The Making (and Remaking) of McCain” (October 26, 2008), the McCain campaign has run five sequential narratives, all bolstered, I would add, with media spectacle: 1) The Heroic Fighter vs. the Quitter (think Iraq); 2) Country-First Deal Maker vs. Nonpartisan Pretender; 3) Leader vs. Celebrity (see my discussion above of McCain ads linking Obama with Paris Hilton and Hilton's rebuttal); Team of Mavericks (i.e. John and Sarah) vs. Old-Style Washington (i.e. Senators Obama and Biden); 5) Narrative 5: John McCain vs. John McCain (i.e. the honorable McCain who said he did not want to engage in gutter-snipe politics vs. the current campaign with the nasty attacks on Obama). The article seems to leave out McCain's newest narrative which pits Joe the Plumber who the Republicans will help opposed to tax-and-spend liberals, the usual Republican line when they run out of ideas and attack strategies.
An informed and intelligent public thus needs to learn to deconstruct the spectacle to see what are the real issues behind the election, what interests and ideology do the candidates represent, and what sort of spin, narrative, and media spectacles are they using to sell their candidates. This article limited itself to describing the media spectacle dimension of the campaign so far. I do not want to claim that this is the key to or essence of presidential campaigns also depend on traditional organizing, campaign literature, debate, and getting out the vote, the so-called “ground game.” But I would argue that media spectacle is becoming an increasingly salient feature of presidential and other elections in the USA today.
