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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It worries me that the speech was “a success” because it reminds me of experiences with publicity\/promotion types for whom \u201csuccess” is a non-negotiable perfect attribute, like the speed of light, so that even products that everyone knows<\/i> became bestsellers because of shrewd advertising or clever placement or well-arranged (or bought) endorsements are, afterwards, used as the metric of \u201ca great product,\u201d from a quality<\/i> standpoint. In other words, the same people who figure out how to hype a mediocrity so it gets attention and notoriety and sells well, then turn around and characterize it as genuinely worthy (rather than admitting, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t very good\u2014we, or people just like us at another company, merely packaged it successfully\u201d).<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the same thing with politicians, and it\u2019s much more this way with Republicans than with Democrats because (post-Goldwater) they don\u2019t think the same way about their constituents: they\u2019re not interested in what those constituents actually think or believe or what damage this does\u2014notwithstanding the occasional heroic moment like John McCain, astonishingly, correcting a town hall questioner who called Obama a Muslim\u2014they just want the numbers, the sales, the votes. (My friend, a Trump supporter\u2014for reasons apparently having to do with regulatory agendae and a mistrust of the NATO order and its trade systems, as well as a certain hard-to-define cultural anarchism\u2014was a big fan of Obama; when I say, \u201cYou mean the Kenyan Usurper?\u201d he shrugs and says, \u201cThat\u2019s politics.\u201d)<\/p>\n
So Nixon (at first) and Reagan and Bush II and Trump (not yet but eventually) are elevated to \u201cgreatness\u201d because the salesmanship worked well, since each man\u2019s superficial attributes were malleable and compliant enough to fit into the stylistic “President” package (as Trump fit that package last night). And the goal is met; the elections won (just like those products hit their sales goals) and the agendae advanced,* so that eventually this quality itself becomes \u201cgreatness\u201d; the operatives can\u2019t tell the difference themselves any more because they\u2019ve devoted their lives to erasing that distinction in the public\u2019s minds.<\/p>\n
*Hollywood producer Joel Silver, asked about the artistic merits of Die Hard<\/i> and his other early hits, famously snapped, “I don’t make<\/i> art\u2014I buy<\/i> art!” (meaning, the movies’ success allowed him to expand his personal collection of paintings\u2014and all goals are met).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It worries me that the speech was “a success” because it reminds me of experiences with publicity\/promotion types for whom \u201csuccess” is a non-negotiable perfect attribute, like the speed of light, so that even products that everyone knows became bestsellers because of shrewd advertising or clever placement or well-arranged (or bought) endorsements are, afterwards, used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44304,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44303"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44303"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44393,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44303\/revisions\/44393"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}