Read this. Fantastic piece of analysis from Vanity Fair. Good take-home reading. And great political intel on great political intel. (SO: JW)
For my media ecologist friends, you’ll greatly appreciate these paragraphs.
In the Marshall McLuhan prescription, the demands of the medium—for ever more information about actions or events or thoughts nearly simultaneous with their occurrence—change the message and, likely, politics too.
For two generations—since Watergate, let us say—politics has been about opposing Washington. The true modern American ideology was to believe that the federal government, if not evil, was grossly ineffective and pathetically out of touch. Practicing politics, or writing about it, was a job not for the best and brightest but for the narrow-minded and obtuse. Even Washington reporters, once the zenith of the trade, became stodgy relics. Washington was not even the center of power—finance, media, and technology had much more immediate effects on people’s lives than government did. A whole language grew up to characterize the oddness, and the emotional limitations, of the Beltway-centric: “wonks” or, their own, self-loathing favorite, “political junkies” or, that most merciless characterization of Washington, “Hollywood for the ugly.” Even cable television, with its left and right divide, was not interested in politics per se, or in Washington, but in the clash of opposing sides. Nobody, except the wonks, was interested, except to deride it, in the civics-class culture of insider relationships, horse-trading, and compromise that most obsesses political professionals.
But, all of a sudden, the politician as player, politics as the art of the astute, Washington as the true Hollywood of billion-dollar deals and iconic careers, are back. This is because of Barack Obama (not just a star, but the first senator—i.e., Washington insider—to be elected president since J.F.K.), and because the economic crisis has centered so much wealth in Washington—and because of Politico.
There is much predictive value in understanding the dynamics and variables involved here…media-mind shift of Internet; generational shift to those raised in immediate media ecology; massive societal shift to Washington politics leading the centralization of American commerce, if not social life.
For those with eyes to see emerging possibilities and ways to leverage them–which means setting aside seeing only paths to certain desired outcomes–there is much to see here.