Bitter Patter
by Hendrik Hertzbert
The New Yorker
Last Wednesday’s two-hour televised smackdown in Philadelphia between the two remaining Democratic candidates for President, which might have been billed as the Élite Treat v. the Boilermaker Belle, turned into something worse—something akin to a federal crime. Call it the case of the Walt Disney Company v. People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and of the United States, for that matter). Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time.
None of the other debates had been models of philosophic rigor. But, right from the start, there were clues that the sponsor of this one—ABC News, a part of the ABC network, which is owned by Disney—might establish new benchmarks of degradation. After brief opening statements from the candidates, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, ABC immediately cut to an advertisement for a cell-phone company. A commercial? Already? Were candidates for President of the United States being used as teasers?
After the break, one of ABC’s moderators, Charles Gibson, asked Clinton and Obama to “pledge now” that whichever of them wins the Presidential nomination take the runner-up as his or her running mate. ABC put on the screen a solemn quote from the Constitution (they were at the National Constitution Center, get it?)—the bit where it says, “In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President.”
It happens that this part of the Constitution was scrapped after the election of 1800. It should no more be cited as evidence of the framers’ wisdom than should the equally defunct passage calling for “three fifths of all other Persons”—i.e., slaves—to count toward congressional apportionment. It also happens that Gibson’s question was not only premised on nonsense but also profoundly unhelpful, because the only answers it could elicit would be both predictable and substance-free. And so they were.
(Continued here.)
The New Yorker
Last Wednesday’s two-hour televised smackdown in Philadelphia between the two remaining Democratic candidates for President, which might have been billed as the Élite Treat v. the Boilermaker Belle, turned into something worse—something akin to a federal crime. Call it the case of the Walt Disney Company v. People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and of the United States, for that matter). Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time.
None of the other debates had been models of philosophic rigor. But, right from the start, there were clues that the sponsor of this one—ABC News, a part of the ABC network, which is owned by Disney—might establish new benchmarks of degradation. After brief opening statements from the candidates, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, ABC immediately cut to an advertisement for a cell-phone company. A commercial? Already? Were candidates for President of the United States being used as teasers?
After the break, one of ABC’s moderators, Charles Gibson, asked Clinton and Obama to “pledge now” that whichever of them wins the Presidential nomination take the runner-up as his or her running mate. ABC put on the screen a solemn quote from the Constitution (they were at the National Constitution Center, get it?)—the bit where it says, “In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President.”
It happens that this part of the Constitution was scrapped after the election of 1800. It should no more be cited as evidence of the framers’ wisdom than should the equally defunct passage calling for “three fifths of all other Persons”—i.e., slaves—to count toward congressional apportionment. It also happens that Gibson’s question was not only premised on nonsense but also profoundly unhelpful, because the only answers it could elicit would be both predictable and substance-free. And so they were.
(Continued here.)
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