A coworker brought up Sarah Palin’s interview on Katie Couric today at work, asking us if we saw it or what we thought. I asked when it was on, she guessed last night since the Times covered it this morning. I nodded and thought to myself, oh I’ll just read that then. No need to watch the interview because, and here’s the kicker, I realized that we have reached that point in American politics where it honestly doesn’t matter what actually happened. It only matters how it is viewed the next day. It really does matter more what the Times said about the interview than what actually was said in it. Perception has so thoroughly replaced truth that I, your average citizen, no longer even feel compelled to watch something—an interview, a debate, a breaking news story, whatever—since I know it truly will matter more in the long run of the campaign what the Times or the Post says about it. Any given candidate could be incredibly articulate, intelligent and generally erudite one day but if some blogger in Podunk, USA thinks the candidate was being—heaven’s forbid!—elitist, that’s the story. Apparently, we don’t want intelligence in our presidential race and we are apparently showing it by upholding that blogger as the voice of the American people and holding his words as more important than those of our ostensibly intelligent, committed leaders.
So here I am, throwing my hat in with my blogger comrade in Podunk. But rather than complaining about words I can’t understand in a campaign I increasingly just plain old can’t stand, I am calling out for a higher level of responsibility and intelligence in our political machine. I want it to matter what actually happened. I want it to be more important what was actually said than what was inferred. I want a system where a candidate can say something on Wednesday and then Thursday just skips the round-table debate over what the candidate ‘really’ meant. Call me idealist, elitist, wishful or a Frank Capra left-over, but I am an American voter and I am calling for a higher standard than we are currently holding ourselves to by allowing perception to triumph over substance.
