Frank Rich on the Debates
Frank Rich on the Debates
Frank Rich on the Debates#0
Posted: 10/7/04 at 9:51am
Brilliant as always. He makes the case that the Kerry/Bush debate may very well defeat Bush the way the 1960 debate defeated Nixon.
It's too long to post here (see link), but here's a graf that corrects some false assertions made in another thead about Nixon's lack of make-up in in the 1960 debate.
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As [Chris] Matthews recounts the historical antecedent in his 1996 book, "Kennedy and Nixon," the debate director, Don Hewitt, offered the haggard Nixon makeup to help bridge the video gap with his tan and fit opponent, the junior Democratic senator from Massachusetts. Not only did Nixon decline but this decision was seconded by his campaign media adviser, Ted Rogers. The world remembers the rest. The only cosmetic aid that Nixon used - an over-the-counter product called Lazy Shave to mask his stubble - melted in sweat, casting an incumbent vice president in a lesser light than his lesser known challenger....
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And in these two grafs, Mr. Rich describes the flawed thinking on the part of conservatives, including our beloved Republican compatriots on this board, several of whom seem too intelligent to fall for hogwash as obvious as Fox News or Swift Boat lies.
Rich continues:
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...But those who live by Fox News can die by Fox News. If you limit your diet to Fox and its talk-radio and blogging satellites, you may think that the only pressing non-Laci Peterson, non-Kobe, non-hurricane stories are "Rathergate" and the antics of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Your diet of bad news from Iraq is restricted, and Abu Ghraib becomes an over-the-top frat hazing. You are certain that John Kerry can't score in the debates because everyone knows he's an overtanned, overmanicured metrosexual. You reside in such an isolated echo chamber that you aren't aware that even the third-rated network news broadcast, that anchored by the boogeyman Dan Rather, draws 50 percent more viewers on a bad night than "The O'Reilly Factor" does on a great one (the Bush interview).
Eventually you become a prisoner of your own fiction and lose touch with reality. You start making the mistakes Mr. Baker made - and more. The whole Bush-Cheney operation is less sure-footed about media manipulation than it once was. You could see this the week before the debate, when the president rolled out Mr. Allawi for a series of staged Washington appearances that were even less effective than his predecessor Ahmad Chalabi's State of the Union photo op with Laura Bush. No one at the White House seemed to realize that if you want to keep a puppet from being ridiculed as a puppet you don't put him on camera to deliver sound bites (some 16, by the calculation of Dana Milbank of The Washington Post) that are paraphrases of the president's much replayed golden oldies. The whole long charade played out like a lost reel of "Duck Soup."
Why Did James Baker Turn Bush Into Nixon?
Joined: 12/31/69
re: Frank Rich on the Debates#1
Posted: 10/7/04 at 10:39am
I stand corrected on the make-up issue of the 1960 debate. I had gotten my info from a liberal History professor, so blame him.
I belive the point I had expressed in the other thread was that televised debates are about image, not message and that people at the time who listend to it (radio was still big in those days) rather than watch, had a differing opinon of who won the debate, primarily due to Nixon looking like crap. But let's face it, Kennedy was better looking on his worst day than Nixon on his best.
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