And in the role of President…
: Jon Margolis (a long-ago colleague) writes in today’s Times that movies — and radio and the internet — won’t swing the election:
With talk radio, the 24-hour cable news networks, the Internet and blogging, technology and popular culture have all been offered up as vehicles for revolutionizing presidential politics. This election cycle, the Internet was a useful fund-raising and organizing tool for Howard Dean. Useful but insufficient; even a good tool cannot rescue a poor candidate. Talk radio and cable news are not inconsequential; if nothing else, they help explain the overall decline in the quality of American journalism. But they have not elected anyone.
Neither will “Fahrenheit 9/11″….
Campaigns are won or lost depending on what is happening in the world and how effectively the candidates campaign. Popular culture is just a postmodern term for entertainment, which is a lot more fun than politics, but totally different.
Right. We’re smarter than that. We can tell a comedy act — whether Moore or Coulter — from a candidate, even if the comics think they’re serious and the candidates don’t know they’re comical.
