The Renaissance of Television in Poliics?

Television has never been unimportant in politics - beginning with Nixon's "Checkers" speech in the 1952 campaign and progressing into JFK's victory over Nixon in the first televised Presidential debates in 1960.

But, more recently, lots of people including me have talking about how Barack Obama in 2008 and Republicans in 2010 won by mastering social media - or, what I call "new new media".  Paul Saffo even coined a new term - "cybergenic" - to describe Obama in 2008, an evolution of JFK and Reagan being telegenic.

Has television come back?  Newt Gingrich clearly smashed Romney in South Carolina because of two brilliant performances in television debates in the past week.   With two more debates coming up in Florida this week, the question of the impact of television debates could be crucially important.

David Gergen just said on CNN that he thought Gingrich's victory indeed shows that television is playing the decisive role in this year's primary - so far.

I'm not surprised.   Even though I've written extensively about the role of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in today's politics, I'd never discount the role of television.   Older media don't just disappear when new media arise.  The written word is still important today, as is radio.

Television never really went away.  The Internet is still crucially important.  But for the right candidate, television can be even more important, precisely because of its old mass media magic - it's unique capacity to speak to millions of people at the same time.

Gingrich clearly is such a candidate.   His particular talent is looking great on television attacking television.

But Obama is powerful on television, too.  That's part of his being cybergenic.

Stay tuned for an exciting election.

Who Cares What Reporters Don't Know about the Bush Doctrine - What Counts is What Palin Doesn't Know

Reporters and commentators - for example, David Gergen on CNN last night - are falling all over themselves in an attempt to be fair about Sarah Palin's blank response to Charlie Gibson's question about the Bush Doctrine. Not just Sarah Palin has no knowledge of the Bush doctrine - so too do many reporters not know what it is.

And what relevance does the lack of knowledge of reporters or any Americans who are not candidates for Vice President have to Sarah Palin's ignorance on this important foreign policy issue? A Republican Vice Presidential candidate no less, who, if elected, will be serving under a Republican President even more gung-ho than Bush. Her ignorance of this doctrine - the view that the U.S. is entitled to take preemptive actions and start wars in response to perceived threats, just as we did in Iraq - seems pretty crucial at this juncture of our history.

Socrates and Plato criticized democracy on this very point: that an ignorant opinion in the mouth of a popular person can have more weight than an accurate view presented by an unpopular person.

Sarah Palin is popular among many Americans these days, no doubt. But does the fact that x number of Washington reporters do not know what the Bush doctrine is mean that we want this absence of knowledge in someone just a heartbeat away from a 72-year old President?

Wake up, David Gergen and political commentators - what's at stake here has nothing to do with your lack of knowledge.

Obama Appeals to the Good Sense of Americans in 21st Democratic Debate Tonight

David Gergen on CNN thought both candidates were "pandering," Howard Fineman on MSNBC thought the debate was stale, and Patrick Buchanan, also on MSNBC, thought Barack Obama did not have a very good night ... but I thought it was the ABC-TV questioners who didn't have a very good night, and the candidates made this 21st Democratic debate the best so far. Hillary Clinton was her customarily clear debating self. But Barack Obama made some important progress in his continuing campaign to practice a new kind of politics in this election - one which respects the intelligence and rationality of the American.

Obama was hit with bevy of volleys about not wearing a flag pin, his friendship with Weatherman radical William Ayers, his relationship with Rev. Wright, etc.

And Obama pointed out that this is not what the election is about - and not what Americans are interested in hearing. These discussions do nothing to fix what is wrong with America.

There were some important questions mixed in with this trivia - about taxes, Iraq, soaring gas prices, and the like. Clinton and Obama both answered them well.

But as long as the media insist on harping on why a candidate does not wear a flag pin, the American people will have to work that much harder to get at the issues that count. (Hillary was hit by this harping too, when she was asked about her misreporting of her Bosnia experience.)

Obama has been staking his whole campaign on the Jeffersonian assumption that people are up to this task - on the view of John Milton, who thought that when truth and falsity, triviality and profundity, fight it out on in the arena of public opinion, truth and profundity will win.

It hasn't in the last two general elections, and the media aren't making it easy now, but I'm betting that even if truth doesn't prevail in the Pennsylvania primary next week, it will still make a good showing. And, whatever happens in Pennsylvania, it will prevail in August and, most importantly, in November.