Cicero the Prescient. Cicero for...President?
Last week I was talking politics with some colleagues from work - telling them how I thought the 2008 Presidential Election would go down and how I thought it was a bad idea to rule out a win by second tier or late entrants. One reason I cited strongly was my belief that 2008 would be the first Presidential Youtube election. In short, there is a certain randomness added to this election because any gaffe said on the campaign trail or any policy shift from previous campaigns, can end up on Youtube. Today's Daily Telegraph makes the same point. Of course we all know this isn't the first time this has happened. George Allen has already been felled by it. One thing we can know for sure - he won't be the last.
While most of this Youtube development is incredibly positive and will help to keep politicians accountable, there is also a fairly strong negative. No one can be their best selves every minute of every day. In this election either John McCain or Hillary Clinton could lose the election simply for pulling their wedgied underwear out of their ass on the way from a car to a door. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Of course we could have a whole other discussion about what kind on idiot you must be to not vote for someone because of something like that... or for an ill timed high pitched crescendo scream. But I wouldn't want to say uncharitable things about the American electorate...
1 comment:
As promised...my response I was furiously working on:
A reaction coordinate diagram for a unimolecular nucleophillic substitution reaction!
On a serious...ish note:
Subject of this blog entry should read: CIP, being the lippy Canadian politico he is, loses his American readership with one post.
I, on the other hand, am a former animator/biochemistry student who doesn't like the Simpsons, can agree without fear of people not reading my blogs. ;)
I think it will be fascinating to see how a generation who worries about Anna Nichole Smith's death, how many babies which celebrity adopts and Brittany's girlie bits showing as she gets out of a car, will see this election. I acknowledge that these things should only affect teenagers that can't vote and weird unshaved men who live for Photoshopping celebrities heads on porn star bodies. However, there does seem to be a general fascination with this weird brand of celebrity that seems to have emerged in parallel with the general access to the internet. It will be interesting to see how this does play out.
As a Canadian who really has a bad taste for everything politics, I will care more about the 2008 American elections because I CAN watch Hillary Clinton get "pied" in a 2 min Youtube clip instead having to sacrifice my Sunday morning cartoons to be informed.
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