Congratulations President Barack Obama

I've never seen journalism fail as badly as it did in this election.

It really does illustrate the change that many media watchers have been talking about, as newspapers, magazines and broadcast news morph from being news organizations into being political opinion providers. There's less interest in objective non-partisan description of events, and more in providing political analyses that will please more narrowly-defined base viewers/subscribers. Old-style journalists are laid-off and celebrity commentators are brought in.

The popular migration onto the internet is probably driving a lot of it. All of the traditional media are fragmentng into more and more specialized (and ideological) niches. The day is coming, perhaps not too far in the future, when the phrase "national media" won't mean a whole lot any more.

It's worrying that as everyone starts to get their news and opinion from outlets that are custom-tailored to feed their own biases and presuppositions, there's going to be less and less to keep Americans on the same cultural page. We might end up still being physically adjacent to our neighbors, but all of us living in radically different intellectual universes.

It will be the final victory of "multi-culturalism", I guess.

 

I did not say that race was THE ONE AND ONLY factor, I simply said that it was a factor. I did think that your age analogy was interesting. From that point, I would suppose that major corporations should hire young people, maybe fresh out of college, to CEO positions.

Hmmm, I wonder why companies hire seasoned, experienced veterans to make the big decisions...

 

probably because stockholders enjoy paying out multi-million dollar golden parachutes to terminated CEOs who totally screwed up the company

 

Yeah, you're right...

I am sure that hiring inexperienced people with little to no knowledge of the world would produce better results...

 

I doubt that it would produce worse results, but that's okay.

 

Whoops! My mistake... I meant President George W. Bush (43). 41 was his father George H.W. Bush and I cannot remember whether he wanted to escape Washington or merely the bad economy at the time. Interestingly, after both President G.H.W. Bush and President G.W. Bush the economy was in stambles. I doubt it was deliberate in either case. One thing is for certain - President B.H. Obama has a tougher road ahead than President W.J. Clinton to guide the economy back to prosperous times for all.

 

I was wondering which Pres. Bush you really meant.

Of course. Or, in the immortal words of wutzizname, "It's the economy, stupid!"

I have no doubt in my mind in either case.

Possibly.

 

Isn't that self-contadictory? Aren't we being told to focus on Barack Obama's racial ancestry in the name of not focusing on his racial ancestry?

I much prefer what happened with Condoleeza Rice. She was a black Secretary of State, representing America to the world, but nobody in the media paid any attention to her race (or to her sex). That's probably because she wasn't a Democrat and wasn't politically left, so she didn't fit comfortably into the race-class-gender screenplay.

So as a result, Dr. Rice was treated as if she was one of the white guys, a well-known academic figure holding down the country's top foreign-policy post, who just happened to be black and female. The media and celebrity reaction to that was a collective shrug: So what? Who cares? And both significantly and ironically, that's precisely as it should have been in my opinion.

The United States isn't at the place that you cheer us for being when we turn Barack Obama into some larger-than-life secular messiah before he even takes office, simply because he's a black liberal in power. (As if he was a dancing bear or something.)

We will arrive at the place that we should be on the day when we finally don't do any of that, when all Americans, whatever their race or sex, hold office as a matter of course, without the media raising public excitement at the spectacle.

 

I don't think that is exactly true. There was a period of time where there were many questions as to whether she would run for the presidency. At those times her gender and race were highlighted but when she stated adamantly and consistently that she was against such a run the media spotlight faded. As with many other subjects, the American public (and the obedient media) are only interested in you if you're a winner, a contender or a colorful loser. Rice gave up the spotlight by refusing to play the media game. I never especially liked her politics but I think she might be a reasonably normal human being (as compared to most politicos).

 

Isn't that just a bunch of hypocritical bull? Will we even have a conversation about race ans presidential politics if a white male were actually elected president in 2012 or 2016? Or will we simply take things for granted that it's back to business as usual when the DWM's take over again?