Democrats Try Their Hand at Reality TV

For the (very brief) moment, Joe Biden appears to have fended off challenges to his run for a second term, but, as Jon Stewart said on Monday on The Daily Show, the four months until November is a very long time.  Events of the past few days suggest that Democrat insiders are looking to use that time to edge Biden off the ticket.  If the saying that imitation is the highest form of flattery is true, their strategy for this replacement action must be ballast to Donald Trump, the former reality TV producer, as he heads into his convention — because the strategy appears to be running a reality TV show from Washington, D.C.

This theatrical model of politics is familiar to a party that, since the Clinton administration, has treated Hollywood as a governing partner and has run campaigns that way since 1988.  But in the past, insiders could control the process, creating a spectacle that preserved their dignity and legitimacy thanks to the intermediary presence of journalists, who crafted leaks into narratives packaged to the public on a predictable schedule.  Now the narrative is being steered by insiders and reported by journalists as it happens, because the main player (President Biden) won’t follow the script.  In the process of fighting his intransigence, these players are turning themselves, half-wittingly and half-not, into scrambling real-world actor-directors in full view of Americans — and showing the lie of their claims to objectivity, respectability, or connection to the public.

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The witting part of this play surfaced in Stewart’s monologue last Monday, when he sketched out his dream Democrat convention: four days in which leading party lights made their best pitches to the electorate, with Biden himself remaining in contention, in the name of participatory democracy.  Leaving aside the fact that a sitting president who concedes to an open convention has given up the chance of winning it, what will occur in Stewart’s scheme is not popular democracy, but a reality television show: entertaining, with spontaneity, while pushing toward an end that is partly predetermined.  Stewart, seemingly un-ironically, actually compared his idea to Trump’s Apprentice.

His idea is not a one-off.  James Carville proposed it in The New York Times, arguing that Presidents Obama and Clinton stage manage four town halls to pull a presidential nominee from the herd.  A venture capitalist and Georgetown professor suggested the same thing in an internal memo, with Oprah and Taylor Swift playing the roles of herd-managers.

No one could accelerate this new strategy more symbolically, or get the unwelcome contender (Biden) out of the picture more charmingly, than George Clooney.        

Read more at American Thinker.