"I just know how this world
works." - George W Bush
For all the talk of
history being made in Florida (not again!), the first of
three debates between US presidential contenders George
W Bush and John Kerry may go down in history as "The
Attack of the Split Screen".
Some people may be
naive enough to believe that a 90-minute reality show, a
rhetorical Gladiator meets Miss Universe (Don't
move! Don't sweat! Don't stray away from script!), live
from Florida, with Fox News controlling the video
cameras, is remotely similar to participatory democracy.
But as the rules of the game go, this is what is
actually deciding the destiny of US democracy - and US
projection of power over the rest of the world.
The original script as designed by the narrow,
ideological right-wing cult that is the Bush
administration machine should have been a Hail Mary to
Bush's supposed abilities of commander-in-chief in times
of war. Bush consigliere James Baker even bent
Democratic operative Vernon Jordan into accepting a
32-page "memorandum of understanding" worthy of the
Surrealist Manifesto: no controversy, no confrontation,
no real debating, just manufacturing of consent (sample:
"The candidates may not ask each other direct questions,
but may ask rhetorical questions").
According to
another rule, "There will be no TV cutaways to any
candidate who is not responding to a question while
another candidate is answering a question." In true
Monty Python fashion ("Nobody expects the Spanish
Inquisition!"), nobody was expecting the split screen.
But doing without it would have made very boring TV. So
Fox News, generating the images and cutaway shots,
perhaps inadvertently delivered to the world The
Smirking Robot: the president of the United States
lip-smacking, smirking, blinking, eye-rolling,
performing anguished jazz solos of facial contortions,
and looking genuinely angry. His voice was petulant. He
barely remembered his own record. He said absolutely
nothing new. And he could barely disguise his rage: How
could anyone even dream of questioning and holding him
to account for his foreign-policy choices - in the "war
on terra" and in Iraq? After all, "I just know how this
world works."
Spinning to
death Whatever the merits of the "debate", the
perception of a winner is shaped by the larger-than-life
spinning machine. And the ghosts in the corporate
machine, many of them reluctantly, are almost unanimous:
even with the absence of any knockout punches, Kerry won
- in style and in substance. Most instant polls confirm
it. Fox itself had to admit that Kerry looked like a
commander-in-chief (one possible reason for why he never
looked at the camera is because he was genuinely amused
looking at the smirking president).
Bush told
Americans what political adviser Karl Rove and his
minions think Americans want to hear. So the usual
catalogue of inaccuracies, blunders and endless
repetition - recited by a real tough guy - was on show:
"The Taliban are no longer in power"; "of course we're
after Saddam Hussein, I mean bin Laden"; "our coalition
is strong"; "we're making progress"; "it's hard work";
"you cannot change positions in this war on terra"; "the
enemy attacked us" (referring to Saddam Hussein);
"trying to be popular in a global sense makes no sense".
And of course the key mantra of the night: Kerry's
"missed mexages" (sic).
Kerry, for many looking
surprisingly presidential, was cool, calm, collected and
- even more surprising - concise. He was visibly
thinking, not only criticizing Bush's blunders but
detailing how to be "smarter on how to wage the war on
terror", telling the real story on North Korea and
making the crucial flat statement, on the record, that
really distinguishes his policy from the Bush
neo-conservatives: "We have no long-term designs on
Iraq."
The Iraqi resistance decided to
commemorate the debate with some real-life input, making
it one of the bloodiest and most horrific days since the
invasion with the death of 35 children by a car bomb.
Apart from non-stop "free Iraq" rambling, Bush simply
had no ammunition to contradict reality. Even the
Special Operations Consulting Security Management Group,
a private firm, has compiled more than 2,300 attacks in
Iraq for the past 30 days, stressing that most of the
country is in chaos - contrary to the version spun by
Bush and dancing-bear-prime
minister-without-a-parliament Iyad Allawi. US Secretary
of State Colin Powell was forced to admit that the
insurgency is booming. Now even the Green Zone - the
supposedly impregnable American Mesopotamian fortress -
is attacked on a daily basis. Kerry quoted the National
Intelligence Council (NIC), in mid-September, saying
that the resistance could lead Iraq to a "civil war on
the short term" and on the absolute best scenario the
country could reach something of a "difficult stability"
in 18 months.
Pollster James Zogby says Kerry
"is a candidate who gets about 45-47% of the vote just
by showing up". His performance in the first debate puts
him back in the race with a vengeance. Kerry is always
comfortable when he's the underdog. But what happened in
Florida lowers the expectations for Bush tremendously -
and the smirking president is at his best when
expectations are very low.
Little did Fox News,
or the other networks that used it, know the split
screen is the metaphor of this election. The Bush you
see on-screen - the "likable" tough guy - is not the
Bush you see off-screen - a very different figure - as
much as the Bush "war on terra" has nothing to do with
the tragic realities on the ground. But there's the rub:
do Americans prefer to deal with a man who "knows how
the world works" because God told him so, or do they
want a thinking man? Do they want to live in reality, or
seek refuge in a reality show?
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