[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: October 20, 2008]
Obviously it's the economy (stupid). It ought equally to be obvious that it's television (stupid).
Or at least, it's how Barack Obama looks, and has looked, on television which leaves him poised, at time of writing, to win the glittering prize.
In a sense, informed commentary failed to trivialize its analysis of the televised Presidential debates enough. Sometimes the importance of the trivial can be underrated. Granted that the audience for the debates - and for all the other televised set pieces; interviews, speeches, rallies - didn't base its conclusory impressions on policy detail. It seemed beyond the comprehension of the mainstream media that the audience might not even base its verdict on the candidates' catchphrases, slogans, sharp comebacks, zingers...
The constant on-air question was: "What was the defining moment?" There was none. Very simply, Obama looked better. Much better. Every time. And Biden didn't look so bad either.
For years, grizzled veterans of the networks have recalled the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, in which the latter's sickly pallor, five o'clock shadow and refusal of make-up delivered the victory to his handsome, healthy-looking, tan opponent. The lessons were forgotten this year. Perhaps it seemed too awful to acknowledge that, even in 2008, the reaction of the debate audience remains largely pre- or post-verbal. What the candidates said didn't really matter.
But this obvious (stupid) point bears further examination. Because the trivial can be...well...complex.
The news cycle throughout this long campaign had been determined, until a few weeks ago, by the hot time of the new media: the new media being those elements of the media the response-speed of which is now determined by digital speed. This includes not only, most obviously, the so-called blogosphere, but also the electronic platforms developed by old media to compete with the blogosphere; and also, much less obviously, the 24/7 cable commentaries which now find themselves obliged to function at digital speed.
It is no coincidence that cable talking heads increasingly appear seated before laptops, or that cable anchors direct the audience's attention to the show's associated blogs for faster information than mere live television can provide.
The effect of this new informational landscape - this informational dromoscope - had been to shorten the news cycle for the current race to something like six hours. Stories breaking overnight are in the hands of digital commentators almost immediately, cable commentators within the hour, and are dead meat if they even make it to the evening network news, let alone the next day's newspapers.
The print media was repeatedly lapped. Nowhere, perhaps, was this more clear than in the flailing impotence of the weeklies, even the best of them. The New Yorker ran a deeply reported, movingly written feature by George Packer on whether the impoverished "middle class" of Ohio would embrace Obama's candidacy, some two weeks after it became apparent that Obama no longer needed Ohio's electoral votes. This week, with something of a defeated sigh, it ran an interminable profile of Chuck Hagel, a man whose political career - unless he's tapped for a Cabinet post - is effectively over. The New Yorker, for all the quality of its coverage, had been rendered irrelevant by the pace of events; daily print media struggled too.
The febrile pace of digital-cable coverage suited - in principle - the Atwater/Rove-derived wing of McCain's campaign strategy. Ideally, a swift succession of "stories" about the other candidate's "character" could blaze a trail across computer and television screens and vanish over the news horizon before being subjected to what might be regarded as the undue diligence of deep reporting.
The suggestion that Obama had been educated at a school teaching the precepts of Islamicist fundamentalism broke before the cycle reached maximum speed, and was refuted in some detail over the weeks that followed. Nobody would have time thereafter to be interested in anything but instant refutations of instant supposed scandals. But as it turned out, the McCain campaign was been unable to keep pace with the news media's appetite: the Bill Ayers allegations were re-heated leftovers from the primary campaign; Reverend Wright has actually receded into history; and the recent deployment of the "socialist" label just seems unimaginative. Whether the dirt is out there or not, the McCain campaign has proved incompetent at shovelling it fast enough.
And then - quite suddenly - the speed of the news cycle smashed and broke against an object moving at a quite different speed; simultaneously shattering the McCain media strategy. It turned out that the febrile time of the media was incommensurable with the ineluctable time of the economic catastrophe.
"Ineluctable" in the strict sense. The time of the economy is something we are all, from world leaders to plumbers, struggling to break free from. Nothing would have seemed more welcome, in the early days of October, than to fit the stock market's volatility or the credit freeze into a six hour news cycle: Paulsen and Bernanke's efforts, whatever their economic significance, sought above all to run the economic crisis at digital speed. We would cry ourselves to sleep, but after the opening bell rang the next morning, the market would suddenly be normal again. Decisive action would at least put reassuring lipstick on the runaway pig.
McCain's campaign geared itself to this expectation. Talking up the fundamental strength of the economy was exactly the right thing for a candidate running at digital speed to do: it was a hot slogan. Tragically for McCain, the crisis was running at its own cool speed, quite independent of the media coverage. This is tragic too for Baudrillard's theory of simulacra: this has been a sharp reminder that reality continues to exceed its representation in the media.
The irony is that the real, in this case, appears in the unlikely guise of the effects of entities - financial instruments - not easily defined or determined. The lesson: that it was much easier (for some) to agree with Baudrillard about the Gulf War or the Twin Towers - events that, in his sense, didn't "happen" - than about personal impoverishment.
It turns out that the map is not the territory after all; that not all time is yet digital time.
It was just this stand-off between the supposed time of the campaign - hot, digital time - and the time of the economic crisis - the cool, ineluctable time of the "real" - that led to McCain's defeat in the series of televised Presidential debates; a defeat which became more pronounced as the series continued, and which will be seen, in retrospect, as dispositive for the 2008 Election.
Marshall McLuhan taught us that television is a "cool" medium. He did not live long enough to see the potential divisions within television which are apparent now. As I said above, cable news-commentary television, tied as it is to viewer's e-mails, push-button votes, and its own simultaneous blogs, is a "hot" medium in a way McLuhan could not have foreseen. It functions in hot, digital time.
The carefully controlled televised debates, however, kicked it old school - as one might say. For all that they were wrapped and packaged in the speed of online and cable preview, commentary and response, they remained a capsule of cool. They were old school network events. Television McLuhan-style. And as much by happenstance as anything else, they exaggerated to the point of parody McCain's spasmodic attempts to run at the speed of the hot, digital information - Ayers, Joe the plumber, tax and spend - he was loaded to deliver. To deliver, that is, information which remained incommensurable with the ineluctability of economic collapse.
Similarly by happenstance, Obama turned out to be supremely comfortable in the cool time of McLuhan-style television . Commentators, wired up to give instant response and make the six-hour cycle, detected - reasonably enough - no clear proposals by either candidate to resolve the economic crisis. But the commentators remained manically focussed on content, or in this case its lack. The debates, as I've said, were not about content.
The relentlessly cool split-screen of the final debate mercilessly exposed the different speeds at which McCain and Obama were moving. The history lesson of Nixon sweating pallidly beside a cool and relaxed John Kennedy is the touchstone here.
McCain, white as ghost, ran like a hamster on a wheel.
Obama may not have had a hot response to disaster. But he conveyed an ability to adjust to its time and speed: to look it unwaveringly in the face. Obama - not even by design, I'm sure - seemed to be keeping pace with the real. And he looked great.
Or to put it in more prosaic terms - when we look back, years from now, we'll understand that McCain's unwitting mistake was to run a tabloid campaign in broadsheet times.
