“I would just like to apologise…” is an opening line I’ve heard a lot over the last few weeks. Americans are embarrassed, and use phrases like “cluster-f***”, “sh**-show” or simply “insane” to describe the ongoing presidential election campaign. After three weeks in the United States I’ve yet to meet a single person who regards it as a positive experience.
They’re not only embarrassed, but curious to know how this reality TV show appears to viewers back home in “England” (I’ve almost given up correcting them). “If only our national election had been pay-per-view for the rest of the world,” opined the New York Times, “we could have wiped out the national debt.” I tell them two things: that “the Donald” has few defenders in the UK, while liberal opinion is rather more enthusiastic about Clinton than they are.
The reality TV element in this election comes mainly from the Republican contender, whose sheer unpredictability makes for compelling viewing. Rumours abound that an out-take from his hit series “The Apprentice” features Trump using the "n" word, while further allegations about his past treatment of women surface by the day. Indeed, it’s become so damaging that even his renowned love of publicity must be prompting a rethink.
But then it was ever thus. Politics in the US has always included an element of showbiz, certainly since the actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan occupied the White House. Clinton’s problem is that she clearly dislikes this aspect of the political game, more interested in policy than presentation. And although not beyond making necessary compromises – she agreed to a Sturgeon-like makeover to help her husband win back Arkansas in the early 1980s – it’s not who she is, unlike the larger-than-life, constantly tweeting Mr Trump.
Television, meanwhile, has long dominated presidential races, from Kennedy vs Nixon in 1960 to ubiquitous television adverts, both positive and negative, local and national, and on almost every network and affiliate. In Missouri, the telegenic wannabe Democratic Senator Jason Kander (a great nephew of the “Cabaret” composer John) is promising to take on Washington – a common refrain regardless of party – while one of his ads has him defending his support for gun control while assembling an AR-15 blindfolded.
Yet for all that it’s not actually hugely surprising that politics, in the US as elsewhere, has ended up becoming like a reality TV show. People are angry, legitimately so, and many, presented with a binary choice between another “establishment” member of the Washington elite (i.e. Hillary) or someone who’s assiduously cultivated the print and broadcast media for almost forty years, see nothing out of the ordinary in opting for the latter.
Fittingly, the third and last televised presidential takes place in Las Vegas next week, an appropriate backdrop as this most showbiz of elections reaches its denouement.
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