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Fri, 5 Sep 2008
Honestly, Abe
Among all the political celebrities milling around the Xcel Center this week, perhaps none has gotten more attention from delegates--or more camera-pan air time from the news networks--than Abraham Lincoln.
Well, "Abraham Lincoln," to be precise about it.
The full-suited, stovepipe-hat-wearing, strikingly tall Mother of All Media Bait who's been striding around the RNC events this week is, in fact, Lance V. Mack, a professional Lincoln impersonator. (One could mention the irony of someone pretending to be, you know, Honest Abe; but details.) Mack, who previously taught German at the University of Michigan (he also speaks Japanese, as evidenced by the short conversation he carried on with a Japanese journalist who'd come up to have his picture taken with "the president"), has been impersonating the sixteenth president since 1990, when his wife off-handedly mentioned his resemblance to Lincoln. Since then, the impersonation has evolved from a hobby to a full-time job. (Mack charges $500 for school visits and $1,000 for other honoraria, in addition to travel, lodging, and board.)
Mack, who currently lives in Marion, Iowa, is here in St. Paul not for the RNC, per se, but for Civicfest, a city celebration whose timing, you know, conveniently coincided with the convention coming to town. "They invited me to come over to the convention," Mack Lincoln told me, "and I'm very honored to be here. After all, I was the first real Republican president."
"Sarah Palin is your new..."
"...Rudy Giuliani in a Dress."
You know you're on the other side of the looking glass when a Daily Kos diary post and this site inspire the latest in... user-generated headlines?
Well, not quite. It's more like a Sarah Palin madlib, which visitors to the site SarahPalinIsYourNewSegway.com can fill in and submit. And hey, trigger fingers are rewarded; refresh the page for suggestions like "Sarah Palin is your new Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football" or "Sarah Palin is your new toy with lead paint." Here's hoping the addicting little change-a-phrase won't begin a predictable descent into weary overuse. (h/t: techPresident.)
Posted by at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments(1)"Why aren't you clapping? Are you Democrats?"
Earlier this evening, I met Brian Lambert, a Minneapolis-based media critic who's been blogging the RNC from The Liffey, an Irish Pub adjacent to the Xcel Center. I just checked out the results of his work, The View from the Liffey—a smart and salty insiders' perspective on the bubblicious pageantry that is the St. Paul convention—and thought this vignette was nicely indicative of the general attitude toward the press that's been on display at the Xcel Center over the past few days:
"What's the matter with you guys? Why aren't you clapping? Are you Democrats?"Posted by at 02:32 AM | Permalink | Comment on this post
My ears were still ringing with the chant of, "Drill, baby drill!" and Sarah Palin was waving to a delirious crowd, so it took a second before I realized the right and honorable gentleman from California behind us—a guest, not a delegate—was talking to me.
My Palin-watching companion, a highly-remunerated icon of Twin Cities newspapers, told the guy, "We're reporters. We're working. It isn't cool to applaud what you cover." The guy looked around like someone who just caught two satanists in the act of defiling the temple and needed a rope and three more able-bodied Christians to tie us to a stake.
Ground Noise
You know a reporter’s presence in the convention hall is cardinal when proximity to an unprecedented distraction (from—take your pick—delegate, journalist or protester) only serves to sharpen his or her observations about the main affair. Alas, Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin—trying to focus on McCain while protesters rabble-roused nearby—didn’t make the cut tonight:
One gets a different sense in the middle of an event — in this case an aisle away from two Code Pink rude-niks being hauled from the hall as the crowd burst into “USA!” The electric excitement being in the center of the event can be either instructive or distracting. In this case what struck me was the solidity of McCain. He is a stocky man — he conveys weight and stability. His language is basic and he marched the audience through first principles of conservatism and basic policy objectives.In short, this was a speech well suited to the man delivering it.
Yes, it was definitely the “sharp pink dresses” that triggered the visual comparison of McCain to a didactic farm animal.
Posted by at 01:28 AM | Permalink | Comment on this postI Want My MTV
Back in February, the MTV news team spoke with Sarah Palin about her thoughts about the Republican primary contest way back on Super Tuesday.
Here's what she said about Ron Paul: “He's cool. He’s a good guy. He’s so independent. He’s independent of the party machine. I’m like, ‘Right on, so am I.’ ”
And, Palin on Mitt Romney: "He said all the right things about resource development in Alaska.”
And, on the election: “I didn’t have an opportunity to speak to all the candidates, but again, it’s not my job to speak to all the candidates and tell Americans who to vote for. That’s Americans’ jobs, to figure out what candidates are standing for. That’s the voters’ jobs.”
What a difference a few months makes.
Posted by at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comment on this postThat September 11, 2001 Video
As I mentioned, I watched tonight on PBS, which, when showing the pre-produced rah-rah bio videos was diligent about flagging them with the words “Republican Party Video.”
Well, tonight, as the RNC rolled a terrorism montage, the NewsHour inserted the standard font and took it down, as they usually do, partway through the video. But only for a second, as the film quickly turned to footage of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center towers, and then of one of the towers collapsing. As that segment began, PBS quickly put the disclaimer up again, and held it until the Republicans moved on to gentler images. To my eyes, it looked like they were doing their best to emphasize that, “No, really, this isn’t PBS’s video.”
As I remember it from my time working there, the NewsHour had a strict policy about showing archival tape from that day. Using the still standing but smoking towers was OK, and video of the site after the collapse, or of the Pentagon wreckage, was ok. But the planes crashing—the instant when hundreds of people died—or the towers collapsing—which of course killed many, many more—weren’t allowed on air.
Of course, it’s not hard to bring those pictures up in your mind, find them on the internet, or see them in other films. But it was a matter of taste—similar to many newspapers' policies against printing graphic images of violence.
The Republicans didn’t feel any such prohibition. Rather, they put these images of death to a soundtrack to make a primetime national security pitch. (Andrew Kohut pointed out on PBS that McCain wins a 15% gap when voters are asked which candidate’s national security bone fides they prefer—by far his largest single-issue advantage.)
The video drew this sharp parody of a newswire obit from The Boston Globe’s Sasha Issenberg:
ST. PAUL -- One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.The informal prohibition, which had been occasionally threatened by political ads in recent years, was pronounced dead at approximately 7:40 CST, when a video aired before delegates at the Republican National Convention included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the World Trade Center, the towers' subsequent collapse, and smoke emerging from the Pentagon.
The September 11 precedent was one of the few surviving campaign-season taboos. It is survived by direct comparisons of one's opponents to Hitler.
And after MSNBC passed the video on to its viewers, Keith Olbermann, by this shotgun transcript, said what no one else was willing to just before cutting to commercial:
I'm sorry. It's necessary to say this and I wanted to separate myself from the others on the air about this. If at this late date any television network had of its own accord shown that much videotape and that much graphic videotape of 9/11 -- and I speak as somebody who lost a few friends there -- it, we would be rightly eviscerated at all quarters programs by the Republican party itself for exploiting the memories of the dead and perhaps even for trying to evoke that pain again. If you reacted to that videotape the way I did, I apologize. It is a subject of great pain for many of us still and was probably not appropriate to be shown. We'll continue in a moment.Posted by at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments(1)
Thu, 4 Sep 2008
What's On Your Head?
What the folks at PBS gain in quality of coverage, they lose in stylish headgear. Poor Judy Woodruff has been roaming the DNC and RNC convention floors in DJ-style headphones with a huge foamy microphone in front of her face, and (I think) a small antenna perched in her hair.
Meanwhile, the CNN folks wore much sleeker, more modern broadcast apparatus. It's good to be the network of the King.
The Green Screen Team
Don't say there weren’t plenty of ambient points tonight for the convention scribes to get harried about tomorrow:
-The song blaring over the speakers as the McCains and Palins waved from the stage at the end of the night wasn’t the “Maverick” theme song, but Heart’s “Barracuda,” a rather conspicuously timed ode to Palin’s nickname during her basketball-playing days.
-The backdrop screen went from a repeat puke green (excited bloggers on that here, here and here) to a firework display (accompanied by what sounded rather jarringly over my speakers like popcorn audio effects).
-McCain didn't wear a flag pin. (Gasp.)
-Did the RNC’s choice of balloons as festive air-filler stem from last week’s streamer debacle?
Palin Passes on PBS
The PBS camera crew getting footage on the floor as McCain and Palin worked the crowd following McCain's nomination speech did their best to get the so far interview-shy Sarah Palin to say a few words, holding out the microphone and making their intentions clear.
Not a chance. She didn't even make eye-contact with the camera.
Posted by at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comment on this postThe Coloring Wars
This New Republic entry by Amanda Fortini spends a good amount of time on how starkly (and says the author, refreshingly) the Palin family’s muted clothing choices contrast with those of the McCain clan:
If your life is colorful, your clothing need not be… the Palins looked like any American family, clad in nondescript clothing in beige and black and various shades of Banana Republic grey… Palin, understated and neutral in dress if not in mien, brought with her a palpable atmosphere of folksy authenticity.
Now on the flip:
The McCain clan, however, all of them a bit on the older side, resorted to the standard sartorial contrivances. Cindy McCain, still aggressively tanned and dyed and frosted, did look softer than usual; she had finally unleashed her hair, and someone has recently given her a fringe of bangs. The attire of all the McCains fell in the usual political spectrum: peppermint pink (mother), Kelly green (Cindy), flaming orange tie (the candidate himself).
Maybe Fortini was reading Josef Albers’s art school primer, Interaction of Color, while watching the visual interplay onstage in the Xcel Center last night. In particular, Chapter III, titled “Why color paper—instead of pigment and paint,” sounds familiar:
…color paper also protects us from the undesired and unnecessary addition of so-called texture (such as brush marks and strokes, incalculable changes from wet to dry, or heavy and loose covering, hard and soft boundaries, etc.) which too often only hides poor color conception or application, or, worse, an insensitive color handling.
Amazing. Has paint ever sounded more unappealing? It’s like Albers is watching the TV screen disapprovingly as Fortini writes, “To slap a bright hue on an aging candidate is like cutting the mold off the edges of a loaf of bread.”
So, in a political season of metaphors, the takeaway lesson, courtesy of the color theorist (and aided by Fortini): Sarah Palin, inherently titillating, is colored paper, whereas Cindy McCain is, um… pigment on cardboard?
