The Economist:the
Who leads on issues? The Economist looks at the presidential candidates, and verifies a clear fact: the Democrats have allowed their contest to drag on way too long, and a McCain win is going to be very, very difficult to prevent. As long as they’re defending against each other, Obama and Clinton can spend little time getting real discursive policy positions across to the populace. As the cameos on “American Idol” displayed last week, McCain’s had the time to regroup, relax, and become personable (though that immigration comment has a certain flavor of threat about it).
The renderings of the three were interesting. Hillary’s was ‘average.’ What were those bizarre lit bags on the right? McCain’s was inspired, the close shot, the leaning forward into the camera. Decisiveness, confidence. No need for the badly designed AI picture frame. The camera pulled back on Obama, in order to get his hand motions; I feel this was a bad choice, because it made him look slight compared to the other two. It split the attention between his face and his hands, and I’ll bet many couldn’t tell you what he said as a result. It felt like he was chromakeyed into a stock ‘US’ background, glommed off some free stock photo site.
Comments:
It’s not the lack of substance, it is the short attention span of the audience.
between conventions and november will be so many ups and downs on either side, sooooo many polls and predictions, so many “bitter” crises, and they will all fade away and those who vote will press some button one novemeber tuesday, and those who count, will count, and then we will get yet another lesson about how it doesn’t make any difference at all who is elected, because there is only one party
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It’s not the length of the Democratic primary. It’s the lack of substance, as borne out by the reaction to Obama’s comment about religion as a salve to economic distress.