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Originally Posted by Ex-CEO
I hardly see how anyone could vote for any of these people without feeling guilty or foolish, and equally difficult to understand how anybody could support any of the two major party's candidates with fervor.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bambino
In a country with over 350 million people, is this the best we can come up with? Fucking amazing.
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Yeah, it's worth pondering how and why we arrived at this point... here's a pretty good analysis.
The fucking media have ruined politics. No one in his/her right mind would want to run for high public office these days. Even if you've been a Boy Scout all your life, they will find a way to destroy you.
These Five Are the Best We Can Do?
Presidential politics are so degrading, thanks to the press and the Internet, that superior people stay out.
By Joseph Epstein
April 5, 2016 7:36 p.m. ET
Midway through historian G.P. Baker’s biography of the Roman general and master politician Sulla (139-78 B.C.), I came across the following two sentences: “There are some systems which naturally take control out of the hands of good men. There are even some which necessarily put it in the hands of bad ones.” Baker’s observation took my mind away from Rome and back, where it was not eager to go, to the current presidential campaign.
How did it come about that we have five such unimpressive contenders for the presidency of the United States? Is there something in our system of electing candidates that makes inevitable the rise of the mediocre and even the exaltation of the vulgar?
Difficult to find anyone who talks about the presidential primaries with any enthusiasm. Even yellow-dog Democrats and academic feminists can’t get much worked up for Hillary Clinton. The young are apparently taken with the socialist fantast Bernie Sanders—but then, being young, they don’t realize he is nothing more than a digitally remastered 1930s replay.
On the Republican side, John Kasich talks endlessly about his own accomplishments—he balanced the national budget, he worked splendidly with those across the aisle when in Congress, in Ohio he has done everything but wipe out ISIS—in a manner that, though he seems unaware of it, is off-putting even to voters who want to like him. Ted Cruz is the very model of the contrast gainer: He looks good, that is, only in contrast to Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump’s vulgarity is nonpareil—and by his vulgarity I don’t mean his profanity merely, but the vulgar quality of his speech, his thought, his very sentiments. So low have things fallen owing to Donald Trump that lifelong Republicans have told me that, in a Trump-versus-Clinton election, they are likely to hold their nose and vote for Mrs. Clinton.
This, though, doesn’t mean that politics before Donald Trump were all that elevated. For many years now most Americans, I suspect, have not voted enthusiastically for the candidates the system provided. Unless locked into one of the two parties, voters have used the lesser-evil standard in presidential elections. Only in the current campaign one needs the political equivalent of a Geiger counter to discover where that lesser evil lies.
Superior people are no longer attracted to politics. They stay away because so much connected with contemporary political life is degrading. Mitch Daniels, a thoughtful man and a successful Republican governor of Indiana, steered clear of presidential politics because, as he openly acknowledged, he had no wish to put his family through the humiliation that accompanies running for the office.
The media and Internet are the major instruments of contemporary political degradation. The media were once more restrained, operating under a largely self-imposed control. During the Kennedy administration, journalists agreed not to photograph the president smoking or playing golf; as for his high jinks above stairs in the White House, that was never up for public discussion. In earlier years, no reporters brought up the lady friends of Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower, and focusing on FDR’s physical incapacity during wartime was unthinkable.
Things changed under the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. His position on the Vietnam War went contrary to that of most members of the media, who decided that opening the president to attack was not only feasible but honorable. The media’s adversarial role intensified under Richard Nixon. After Watergate, “investigative journalism” became one of the heroic professions. What investigative journalists chiefly investigated was malfeasance and above all scandal.
The advent of the Internet made this all the worse. The Internet is without an ethical standard. On it anyone can say anything—and usually does. Donald Trump has added to the demeaning quality of the proceedings by using the Internet—those endless insulting tweets—and attracting press and television with his steady stream of attacks on the personal lives of his opponents.
The only people willing to put up with the scourging that running for office now entails are those of vast and usually empty ambition. Viewing the candidates of both parties during the debates, one felt that nearly every one of the participants was in business for him- or herself.
One saw Marco Rubio and thought, in another time a successful siding salesman. One saw Carly Fiorina and thought, in the old days a scolding grammar-school principal. One saw Martin O’Malley and thought, who let this guy off the used-car lot? One sees Hillary Clinton and thinks how exhausting it must be for her, day after day, to argue on behalf of all those things—justice, equality, fairness to women—that in their personal life she and her husband flouted.
How did we get here? In ways not yet successfully explained but that seem indubitable, the Internet and in its trail the news media have come to cater to, if they have not helped create, the lowering of the national attention span and the taste for complication.
Today it is difficult to engage the interest of much of the public in anything above the level of scandal. Serious political discourse has long been one casualty of this; civility is now another. The consequences of these losses are likely to be on exhibition, in HD, in a Trump-Clinton election contest, which figures to be America’s first PG-13 race for the presidency. My advice is don’t let the kids watch it.
Mr. Epstein’s books include “Masters of the Games: Essays and Stories on Sport” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
