Men Without Chests: Conviction Over Elegance

"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise."
- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

I don’t know if Americans are getting less intelligent academically, and I’m not sure how you would gauge that anyway. It’s easy to point to things like reality TV and Kevin Federline, but I think those examples are just reflecting the high amount of exposure the media gives to less intelligent people. We like seeing them do really dumb things because it makes us feel smarter, which is a justified feeling most of the time. And some of it is actually entertaining. As I was watching some of the political debates, I wondered if Americans are getting more intelligent politically in a very particular way, and my curiosity has to do with a cinematic analogy.

When anyone goes to a movie these days, they have extremely high standards for special effects, CGI and other tricks to make the images look as real as possible. Special effects from the 80’s and even ten years ago look dated now, and the average movie-goer sees them as quaint. When I watch some of these political debates, I notice right away that some of the candidates are attempting to use an outdated strategy that Bill Clinton mastered: appearing as if you said something without really saying anything of substance. People seem to be really tired of that political strategy. They don’t want the illusion of a leader, they want a real leader with conviction, and that might be easier to spot than it used to be.

This is one example that I think illustrates the point (go about 3:30 into it if you want to skip Chris Dodd and Obama):





Hillary started out as a somewhat strong candidate, probably because of her name alone. The more she talks, the less people like her (insert woman joke here). Another example is when Jon Stewart interviewed Chris Matthews from Hardball about his infuriatingly backwards book, Life's a Campaign. (He should leave out unnecessary title contractions in his campaign.) Here's a clip from the day after that addresses the interview:







Stewart lit into Matthews for constructing his whole life to be basically artificial, i.e. a campaign. It was one of the most popular videos on YouTube before they took it down and it's one of the most popular on the Daily Show site.



There are other examples of the public getting wise to "politalk" that include loud boos after canned responses from Romney, Giuliani and others. I'm not sure how this intolerance of scripted answers will translate in the voting booths next year, but I hope this is an actual trend and not merely my personal wishful thinking.

(Completely off-topic - I wonder how many reindeer jokes Giuliani gets this time of year.)