posted 2007/02/26 at 15:45
When I wrote a few days ago about the need for American politicians to stop taking themselves so seriously, it made me wonder about whether I should be encouraging politicians to be so humourous. After all, American politics, at least in my lifetime, have been about too much style and not enough substance (a problem which has only seemed to worsen as the years have gone by here), and I want to help move politics towards more substance. Suggesting that politicians need to have more of a sense of humour about themselves, in a way, kind of feels like more of an advocation of style than substance, and I've been thinking this issue over for the past few days.
What I think is going on here is a battle of my pragmatic and idealistic sides. My idealistic side wants to think that if you just get the right candidate out there saying the right things, then s/he won't have a problem getting elected because the public will automatically gravitate towards the wisdom of his/her ideas. My pragmatic side, on the other hand, sees that there's already lots of evidence out there that people don't go for pure substance these days, and that perhaps dressing good ideas up in a bit of style -- whether it be humour, rhetorical vitriol, or what have you -- could at least help the right candidates "get a foot in the door" and then, once elected, try to change the political tone so that substance matters more than style. I'm having a hard time determining what side I fall on, though.
Let's go back to Dennis Kucinich again, because he's the only Democractic candidate at this point who I can see myself voting for over whomever gets the Green Party nomination. Last month Dennis got play on the political comedy shows when he sang from "Sixteen Tons" at a Rainbow/PUSH conference speech. Now, obviously I don't think it's fair that Dennis gets ridiculed in the media for basically not looking like what this country seems to expect a Presidential candidate to look like, but at the same time, even as much as I love Dennis, I have to admit that even I chuckled when I first saw this. After that, I was honestly tempted to e-mail Kucinich's campaign and suggest that they run with this, and create their own viral video mimicing those TV commercials of past-their-prime singers covering their old standards, with deliberately unsubtle alterations to the song lyrics to mention Dennis' stances on key political issues. It would bring absolutely nothing of substance to the campaign, yes, but it would show that Dennis has a sense of humour about himself, and I really think that something like that would end up helping Dennis in the long run.
Weeks have passed since I first had that thought, and now it seems kind of silly and a little bit stupid to me that I'd ever dreamt that up. At the same time, though, it's kind of hard to watch all this coverage of the Democratic nomination and have it be Hillary-Obama-Hillary-Obama all the time. I want politics to be more about substance than style, yes, but at the same time, I also want someone I can really believe in elected to office, and it doesn't feel completely wrong to play to style a little bit for the sake of getting someone of substance elected. How do I find a balance between idealism and pragmatism here?
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon