The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
- Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle

MR. VANDEHEI: I’m curious, is there anybody on the stage that does not agree -- believe in evolution?
(Senator Brownback, Mr. Huckabee, Representative Tancredo raise their hands.)
- 2008 GOP Presidential Debate

During the recent Democratic debate, Dennis Kucinich, commenting on the political process, said, "this isn't American Idol here."

Actually, it is very much like "American Idol."

As any fan of America's number one TV program knows, Simon Cowell often reminds the audience that "this is a singing competition." But, really, it is not. Idol is a competition determined by the number of votes a particular contestant receives each week, and those votes are based on much more than singing ability. Some people do well, even if they cannot sing. Some, because they have great legs. And some stay on week after week, because part of the audience wants to disrupt the system, with a "vote for the worst." (A precursor, perhaps, to a kind of smart-mobbing within our increasingly Internet-ed politics?)

These votes, consistently in excess of 30 million per week, are cast not on each "real" contestant, but on a mediated representation -- the image -- of each contestant. This, of course, seems obvious. TV is far from real, but scripted visuals and sound, edited together to create a coherent narrative. Reality TV has nothing to do with reality.

In a similar fashion, our politics today relies completely on a mediated representation -- the image -- of the candidates. We don't "know" the candidates -- we only "know" that they feel our pain, or that we want to have a beer with them. We learn about our politicians through tightly controlled media events, with pre-determined format rules: two minute answers and thirty second rebuttals.

It was, of course, not always this way. Contrast the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates:

At 2:30 PM, Saturday, 21 August 1858, in Washington Square, downtown Ottawa, Abraham Lincoln and Stephan A. Douglas met in the first of their seven debates. Douglas spoke for one hour, Lincoln then spoke for one hour and a half, and then Douglas spoke in a half hour rejoinder. A crowd estimated between 10,000 and 20,000 attended the debate.

Not that the discourse around those debates didn't also rely on the media, and mediated representations:

Interestingly, newspapers that supported Douglas edited his speeches to remove any errors made by the stenographers and to correct grammatical errors, while they left Lincoln's speeches in the rough form inwhich they had been transcribed. In the same way, Republican papers edited Lincoln's speeches, but left the Douglas texts as reported.

Even so, politics had not yet become a spectacle.

Fast-forward: 1960. The ground-rules of our politics are about to fundamentally change, with the introduction of a new media technology -- television:

What is most remembered and discussed is the telegenic "image" presented by Kennedy and the decidedly non-telegenic presence of Nixon. Nixon didn't wear make-up, was recovering from the flu and had lost weight, and suffered from a knee injury. He also wore a gray suit, which provided little contrast with the background set. Kennedy wore a dark suit, wore make-up (though he already looked tan), and was coached on how to sit (legs crossed) and what to do when he wasn't speaking (look at Nixon).

Image becomes paramount. The spectacle of politics, and the politics of the spectacle, replaces the real.

Fast-forward, again: 2007. During the Republican debate, one specific moment brought the current state of this spectacle to the fore, leaving Lincoln-Douglas to wither. In this moment, there was no debate. No sound, no discourse. Just one, reductive image:

MR. VANDEHEI: I’m curious, is there anybody on the stage that does not agree -- believe in evolution?

(Senator Brownback, Mr. Huckabee, Representative Tancredo raise their hands.)

And this is not just a Republican thing. The show of hands was also used in the first Democratic debate.

Has our democracy been dumbed down, as if it wasn't already dumb enough, to this? A show of hands?

Do we know anything about these candidates through this process? Do we know any more about them then we know, for example, the contestants on American Idol?

I argue, plainly, we do not. The compassionate conservative turned out to be neither. The political process is merely horse race. Or, not even. Merely the image of a horse race.

So, let's not pretend our political process is any different than American Idol. Yes, we must improve it. But let's call it what it is.

And until things get better, my vote's still going to Sanjaya.

I officially have the stupidest user name here. Some ideas for a new one...whataya think?

- Zeus? OK, way too pretentious.

- BloggerGuy. Even stupider than what i have...

- Andrew Golis?!?! Damn, it's taken.

- ChuckECheese

Ugh. I am so bad at this stuff...

"Do you believe in evolution?"

Is that really a question in a Presidential debate?

Really?

Matt Y. offers up a link to Jonathan Chait's new piece in TNR. It starts off interestingly enough, offering a sort of genealogy of the netroots, comparing them (us?) to the conservative message machine. But he then veers off, with some puzzling observations like this description of "chickenhawks":

To be sure, people outside the military who favor a war ought to be conscious of the fact that they will not personally bear the risks of battle. In the hands of the netroots, however, it has become an all-purpose refutation...As a matter of logic, these insults are preposterous. Taken at face value, they suggest that it's illegitimate to support a war if you're not fighting in it. But nearly all liberal bloggers claim to support at least some wars--say, the fight in Afghanistan--and very few of them have ever served in the Armed Forces. ...So, by their own standards, most liberal bloggers are chickenhawks, too.

That seems to be a gross misunderstanding of what the term "chickenhawk" really means. It is not simply about supporting a war, but about cheerleading for a war. And it is applied to "hawks" -- simply supporting the retaliation against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11 does not make one a "hawk."

Another, more serious charge, is that the netroots are "dishonest":

Whether or not liberals ought to consider this a good thing depends on how wide their frame of reference is. At the narrow level, the netroots take part in a great deal of demagoguery, name-calling, and dishonesty. Seen through a wider lens, however, they bring into closer balance the ideological vectors of propaganda in our public life.

Unless I missed something in the article, my guess is the evidence of dishonesty is a reference to Chait's account of the Edwards/Bloggers fiasco:

The liberal online magazine Salon reported the firings, but the Edwards camp hunkered down and refused to release a public statement while it decided on a course of action, then denied the firings to Salon the following day. Liberal bloggers in close contact with the campaign remained resolutely cryptic about what they knew. "The bloggers closed ranks around the Edwards campaign, some even claiming that Salon had gotten the story wrong," Salon's Joan Walsh later reported. To Walsh and other journalists, the relevant metric is true versus untrue. To an activist, the relevant metric is politically helpful versus politically unhelpful.

So, because Salon said the firing was "true," despite that it's noted the Edwards campaign "denied the firings" -- and even came out with a statement supporting the bloggers -- the "activists" lied?

I think Chait gets both of these points very wrong, and that perhaps is reason enough to question more of this piece. It has a very strange tone, varying between admiration for what the netroots have built, and a distaste for their anti-DLC, anti-centrist tactics at the same time. Which is strange, because, when describing why the netroots oppose the "third way," he nails it:

The DLC's basic idea is to embrace the political center--a model that is incompatible with movement politics. Movements require unanimity against external critics. The DLC model not only permits divisions among Democrats; in a sense, it relies upon them. The premise of the DLC's strategy is that the left wing of the party is unacceptable to the majority of voters. The answer is to explicitly disavow that left wing--to create a Third Way between the left and right poles.

...This veneration of centrism created an atmosphere in which Democratic unity was impossible. Democrats who unequivocally opposed the Bush administration's agenda were not, by definition, "centrists." And so, during the early Bush years, Democrats eager to preserve their standing as moderates often found themselves acquiescing to a conservative agenda that, not long before, would have been considered far outside the mainstream.

One final point, which is pretty ironic. Check out the comments to the article, in which you'll find some of people letting us know how awful Kos is, and how awful the netroots are...

The main complaint, of course, is how the netroots is an echo chamber of conformity. Well, read through those comments, and please tell me how lots of people repeating how great TNR is and how awful Kos is represents anything different?

MJ's post today discusses this article, which states:

Penn has deep roots in the national security wing of the Democratic Party, along with other centrist Democrats...who saw the merits of invading Iraq before the war began.

Except for, you know, the "national security wing" proved they know nothing about national security...

Isn't that kind of like saying Dick Cheney comes from the "sharpshooting" wing of the Republican party?