Tethered Swimming

John McCain has a creepy auto-smile thing that he does when he’s uncertain of the reaction to something he’s said. I’ve seen him do it while being interviewed and during speeches. It’s like a nervous tick but with a whiff of fear about it, like he thinks it will ward off the bad juju of people not liking him. He didn’t used to do it, but perhaps his political transformation into a spear carrier for the right combined with his newfound proximity to the throne is throwing him off his game. I don’t know.

Many people have noticed it; in fact, the above image of him was taken from a YouTube video titled “The McCain Smile“. It’s a two-minute montage of auto-smiles during his infamous June 3rd “green screen” speech. (As you can see, my Photoshop skills consist of little more than the ability to cut, paste and resize though at least I managed to get both images equally pixilated). I posted it because whenever I see McCain give the auto-smile it always makes me think of Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman. The auto-smile, and it’s Nicholson like creepiness, have been on my mind for a while and since The Dark Knight came out this weekend I thought it was a good excuse to post the picture. There isn’t much intellectual coherence to that reasoning, but it’s certainly no worse than, say, the chatter machine turning itself up to 11 over a cartoon.

The ludicrous amount of attention paid to the cover of the July 21st issue of The New Yorker was entirely pointless and will be quickly forgotten. I have no opinion on the cover except to say that I eagerly anticipate the response. The commentary over the last cartoon was so noisy that it’s almost inevitable that a subsequent cover cartoon will poke fun at the reaction. There was never much that could be intelligently said about that cover; it rates a brief chuckle and little more. But the beast must be fed.

The political commentary machine in this country is vastly larger than it needs to be and, what’s worse, it has no offseason. I’m not just talking about on-line enthusiasts writing blog posts and getting into flame wars. Big, for-profit media outlets are in on the game and while they can make molehills appear to be mountains (with mind numbing frequency) in reality the molehills remain molehills. Take a look at the cable news ratings for last Monday, the height of the kerfuffle:

P2+ Prime Time
FNC - 2,027,000 viewers
CNN - 935,000 viewers
MSNBC- 648,000 viewers
CNBC - 229,000 viewers
HLN - 428,000 viewers

(Incidentally, P2+ means viewers over the age of two. Presumably, four year olds are interested in politics.)

If you add up all those numbers you get 4,267,000 people. (This assumes that each one of them is a different person, which is unlikely. The real number of people is smaller.) To give that some scale, on Election Day in 2006 there were 135.9 million registered voters in this country. 4.3 million people is a whopping 3.2 percent of registered voters from two years ago. This is, obviously, not the world’s most scientific comparison (it doesn’t include web traffic or radio listeners, for example); but it helps put the whole political chatter machine in context. In the real world the number of people who get exercised over the politico plotline du jour is tiny.

Is the July cover art of a liberal East coast magazine going to have any kind of meaningful effect on a nationwide election in November? Of course not, and nothing I saw made any serious claim that it would or could. But isn’t the point of election coverage, and even election analysis, to discuss and try to understand things which could change the eventual winner? Well yes it is, otherwise it would just masturbatory entertainment.

You can expand the context a little by saying that while this particular cartoon may not have any effect the general perception that Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist could change the outcome of the election. Therefore blabbering on about this cartoon is, in some tiny way, worthwhile. That’s a fair answer as far as it goes, but if you do that you’ve also got to ask if the cover meaningfully encourages or discourages those smears. Can you imagine a person for whom a July cover of The New Yorker is the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Is there anyone - anyone - out there whose vote this could change?

Let’s try to conjure such a person:

1) He’d have to be predisposed to believe such things . . .

2) Encounter them seriously through this cartoon . . .

3) Decide, at least in part, not to vote for Obama because of it AND . . .

4) Not change his mind sometime in the next four months as he is constantly bombarded with other campaign messages.

That’s a twisted set of rules, but I defy anyone to show me a clearer path to an honest justification for the untold number of dollars and man-hours frittered away last week. The simple reality is this: there is very little in the way of real political news at the moment. Talking about things that aren’t important doesn’t make them news.

Polls and fundraising totals are mildly important, but only if they show truly surprising information. When the running mates are announced, that’s news. But how many vice-presidential speculation pieces can one person care about? When the conventions happen, that’s (kinda) news. But since both events are tightly scripted only a badly flubbed speech or horrifying gaffe can really affect the outcome. Even Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe will almost certainly be meaningless. The foreign trip for a nominee is pretty well established tradition and you’d need to be scrounging pretty hard for an essay topic in some daft political science class before you start arguing that one of those trips was pivotal to the outcome of an election.

The daily ups and downs of the campaigns are real news, but only in October and November (and maybe September). They certainly aren’t news in July.

Brief (slightly related) Batman note: In the run-up to Dark Knight this week I watched Batman again; it has held up extremely well. Ledger’s Joker is certainly more modern than Nicholson’s but both of them are wonderfully evil. They’re just from different periods. I’ve heard and seen people comparing Nicholson’s Joker to Heath Ledger’s Joker. It’s much too early to do so, give it ten years then we’ll talk. I am a tremendous fan of both performances.