If I've learned one thing during the 2008 presidential primary season, it's this: journalists love comparing elections to other stuff.
On South Carolina's primary night, for example, "Hardball" host Chris Matthews compared the Democratic primary to "Lawrence of Arabia," the 1962 movie starring Peter O'Toole. (If you're curious, Obama was a modern-day Lawrence, crossing the Nefu desert to strike the town of Aqaba (Clinton) from behind.) A few days later, another film bubbled up in Gail Collins' New York Times column: "After a while," she wrote of Rudy Giuliani's Florida campaign, "it began to take on the eerie quality of 'The Shining'... the candidate sitting in a basement somewhere, writing 'All work and no play makes Rudy a dull boy' on the walls."
In these pages, my peers were busy assembling analogies of their own. Tom Trudeau '09 and Jacob Schuman '08 compared the candidates to sports teams and American Gladiators, respectively. Jealous of all this trope mastery, I decided to dip my feet in the election-analogy pool.
The only problem: I have nothing to analogize about. I don't watch many movies and I don't really care about sports - the last time I watched an NBA game, the Hornets were from Charlotte, and I think Michael Jordan was a baseball player. Desperate for comparisons, I had an idea. What if I outsourced my primary-race analogies? What would happen if I went to Wikipedia, clicked on "Random Article," and tried to weave the 2008 primary into whatever popped up, no matter how unrelated? That way, the object of comparison would be determined for me, and I could just connect the logical dots. I went to Wikipedia and hit the button.
"Fuel element failure: a rupture in a nuclear reactor's fuel cladding that allows the nuclear fuel or fission products in the form of dissolved radioisotopes or hot particles to enter the reactor coolant or storage water."
Hmm. I had hoped for an entry that would make for easy analogies, like "Greco-Persian War," or "Contests involving Mormons, geriatric war heroes and men who say the word 'hope' a lot."
But a promise is a promise. Okay, so a fuel element failure is when powerful radioactive materials, usually uranium dioxide, leak out of their enclosed casings and contaminate the rest of the reactor core. I'm not sure, but I think this is a bad thing. Maybe it's like Bill Clinton's failed stumping in South Carolina, when his verbal filter sprung a "leak," and the anti-Obama rhetoric he spouted "contaminated" his wife's relatively anodyne campaign. It's lame, but don't say you'd be surprised to see it on "FOX and Friends."
"This Time Around: a song written and performed by the American pop/rock band Hanson."
Oh boy. Hanson. The lyrics to "This Time Around" - an obscure single on Hanson's 2000 album that appears to have been composed with a rhyming dictionary and a copy of "The Perks of Being A Wallflower" - begin with what seems like John McCain's depressed inner monologue, circa six months ago. ("It's getting colder in this ditch where I lie / I'm feeling older and I'm wondering why.")
"Mirush (Blodsband): a Norwegian movie from 2007 directed by Marius Holst. It tells the story og (sic) the Albanian boy Mirush who travels to Norway is (sic) search of his father."
Finally, a film analogy I can use. Once I parsed the questionable English, "Mirush" (or, should I say, "Mittrushney?") was a sparkling allegory for Mitt Romney's relentless pursuit of the legacy of his father, former Michigan governor George Romney. And Michigan is sort of like Norway, right? Both are cold, anyway.
Okay, I'll stop there. I did the Wikipedia experiment in jest, but it proves a point: American campaign journalism is a crock. Or at least a certain kind of campaign journalism. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for climbing aboard the Straight Talk Express and asking tough questions of the candidates. I don't mind Florida's primary night getting five hours of airtime and the breathless pre-game drama of a Tyson prizefight. But if they wanted to, CNN could fill that time with research on the major campaign donors and their connections to the candidates. You know, stuff that matters. Instead, we get Lawrence of Arabia. These meaningless political analogies serve no purpose aside from placating a swath of TV viewers. And that's at its best. At its worst, the pressure to construct a narrative around the race can actually devalue grassroots activism. Why go beating on doors in Attleboro to canvass for Obama when Ted Kennedy could make a careless comment on MSNBC tomorrow and erase ten thousand votes when the narrative becomes "Barack turns negative?"
The problem with a fixation on "narrative" and "story" is that the coverage of the primary race has actually overwhelmed the race itself. We don't need to know what McCain stands for, really, as long as Lou Dobbs tells us that he is a modern-day Sisyphus. The CNN/ABC/NBC/FOX meta-narrative has become the thing with real power.
Today, millions of Americans will pile into polling places to pull levers and poke at touch-screens. Wolf Blitzer will compare that simple, unadorned act to cellular mitosis, or the Eagles reunion tour, or the Triwizard Tournament in the fourth Harry Potter. And democracy will groan.
Kevin Roose '09.5 is looking for a hot particle with a reactor core.
