Election by Gong Show

[ecdab]

Barack Obama has come on stage and spoken from the heart, addressed the concerns of a nation, and inspired hope for a better future. But that isn't what the MSM wants to cover. They want sensationalism. They want to see the spectacle of Presidential hopefuls prancing around making fart noises with their armpits and cover the responses of their rivals to the fart noises. They dwell on the inane and frame stories in order to get candidates to do the chicken dance for them. They take the ridiculous and throw it out hour after hour until the American people finally grab their collective mallets and strike the gong to end a campaign based upon which candidate did better in an armpit farting contest.

Obama has resisted the allure of making fart noises with his armpits and doing the chicken dance to score political points in the MSM moderated Gong Show spectacular we call an election. I give him great credit for that, because cheap theatrics are so often reported as a measure of strength in the MSM. I give him credit for trying like heck to run a different kind of campaign (though imperfectly, granted) in the face of the same tired smears that get pulled out every election cycle to hit opponent after opponent with.

Barack doesn't want to be on the Gong Show. This isn't a childish game to him. He's trying to talk to us like adults; he's trying to recast the national conversation into something meaningful - most other politicians are just trying their hardest to win the Gong Show.

[K Gardner]

1. LOL ! I love this analogy :-)

[ecdab]

4. The parallels are striking.

When I look at what the media has been focusing on for over a month, I think the comparison to the Gong Show may be a generous one.

[grantcart]

2. funny and to the point. You forgot to add that after the election is over they will

dust off their old tired essays on how trivial and irrelevent the Presidential campaigns have become.

[ecdab]

3. We can be sure of that.

[thevoiceofreason]

5. K&R

[cornermouse]

6. Obama got plenty of attention

and with the recent exception of Wright and "bitter" it was almost all positive to this point. That's why he's one of the last two left in the race. Basically, this has been a two person race from the very beginning. Kucinich, Richardson, Biden, and Edwards were all shoved off to the side, first by the media and then, due to the invisibility factor caused by lack of media coverage, by the people. It's not an accident that the most liberal candidates were ignored and are no longer in the race.

You think he's been discriminated against by the media now? If he gets the nomination, wait till the GOP gives the media the negative information they've no doubt accumulated on him for the evening news headlines. We know very little about him other than what he says. And if we try to point out the obvious discrepancies in what he says we are attacked like we did something wrong? Fact is, you're going to hear much worse on the evening news than anything you've seen on DU.