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American Idol Contestant, Timothy Geithner
The American people have got in the habit of shooting a man down for one gig gone awry. As Timothy Geithner discovered on Tuesday, his one bad turn was all it took for us to judge him so weak a performer that it will be difficult, maybe impossible, for him to recover.
Geithner came on the scene with some baggage - there was that unpaid tax bill and a stint as president of the Federal Reserve that now seems less than stellar. Still the question arises: Why do we rush to judgment of a man and matter of such overweening importance? From where stems this sense of our entitlement?
Blame it on the popular culture, which has affected, or maybe infected, the political culture. I call it "the American Idolization" of American life, for it is the Fox TV show American Idol and its multiple progeny that have taught us to dispose of people after what sometimes is no fault more grievous than a single bad performance.
Television still has a powerful hold on America's national consciousness. In a new-media world it's the one old-media business that has proved remarkably resilient. "American Idol," in turn, has been a top television show or even the top television show for eight years. Moreover it has birthed other shows, Dancing With the Stars, for example, which is also based on the proposition that while experts can and do weigh in, they have no more of a right to determine the outcome than do we. In fact, we finally decide, we the viewing public, who goes to the next round, who goes home, and who is the winner. We are encouraged at every turn to voice our vote immediately, by phoning in, text messaging, or going online.
Shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars are major fixtures of mass entertainment. Fully 44 percent of the American people watched "American" at least once, and in 2006 one in ten Americans took the time and trouble to vote their Idol preference. Similarly, Dancing has been a huge hit for ABC, while countless other television shows follow suit by in some way inviting viewers to participate in the proceedings. Even Oprah, who used to rely nearly entirely on in-studio guests, now Skypes regularly, in order to bring ordinary people into the conversation.
Most of this democratization of popular culture is to the good. It involves us in mass entertainment in ways previously unthinkable and entirely defensible. But when it spills into the political culture different rules must apply. The mob mentality that prevailed on Tuesday - in an instant Geithner morphed into a national whipping boy - was the result of our deciding on the spot that he just couldn't cut it.
But Geithner was not up for a People's Choice Award. Rather his appearances earlier this week were about economic policy during a time of crisis. The speed with which we tore him down demeaned a man of consequence who deserved to be treated accordingly. To diminish him, in particular so early in the game, is to diminish ourselves.
By
Barbara Kellerman
|
February 12, 2009; 2:16 PM ET
| Category:
Public opinion
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Posted by: B2O2 | February 16, 2009 5:52 PM
Politics is now a entertainment and congressional committees are rehearsed as well as broadway plays. And as for Gaither
the guy looks like a deranged Richard III.
Every speech and move he makes appears as though he is not mentally healthy.
Since he is now a performance artist we are judging him as we would any entertainer.
( we have found him incompetent since Wall Street meltdown/fraud happened on his watch
at the NY Fed)
we smell a phony.
Posted by: JohnAdams1 | February 16, 2009 5:23 AM
I agree he's been treated like an Idol contestant. But Kellerman completely misses the point.
We now treat our entire political engagement like a season of Idol. Who's the coolest? Who bungled his lines? Who best managed their media image? Talent and experience becomes secondary.
Don't blame the people. The media has turned our political culture into a joke with their constant focus on the horse race (Who "won the day" in the media?!). Celebrity journalists cover celebrity candidates. Everyone has PR agents to "manage" their coverage (dump the bad news after the evening news on Friday). Blago turned himself into the latest Idol contestant, blitzing all the talk shows. His media blitz itself became the news...his shameful impeachment was covered as almost an afterthought. Think his agent didn't know what he was doing? He played a pliable press like a fish on a line.
So don't complain about the Idol-ization of our politics. The media made that happen a long time ago.
Posted by: jeannebee | February 14, 2009 7:12 AM
You are wrong, to diminish Geithner is a show of the best of America, that America is informed about what is happening. Geithner deserves to be diminished, because he is demonstrably over his head. The man is a tax cheat, but purportedly is so indispensible, all of that is overlooked so that he can ascend to office despite his manifest ethical weakness. He has known for months he would need to present a plan. The president had said the day before that the plan would be very detailed. And then Geithner gets up and provides virtually no details about how trillions of dollars of OUR tax dollars will be spent. Ms. Kellerman's partisanship has made her blind to how unacceptable all of this should be in any politician, Republican or Democrat.
Posted by: Booklover1 | February 13, 2009 11:55 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.
We see a much worse case of bizarre over-democratization in the area of news consumption when it comes to science. Take global climate change. The world's climatology community has been in consensus for several years now that humankind is causing the earth to heat up dangerously with our emission of greenhouse gases.
Yet, whenever the latest damning study gets reported in the media, hordes of consumer-commentators swarm in to opine, many of them from the authority of their 8th-grade education, that they are "not convinced". Or you get stronger statements to the effect that "I really don't think man is causing this". It causes those of us who have worked in science to scratch our heads and wonder, how do these people still function in modern society? Do they go their doctors and when they don't like a diagnosis, say, "I disagree. In fact, in my opinion bacterial infections are a myth"?
What I want to say is, sure, everyone is *entitled* to an opinion. It doesn't necessarily mean that the opinion contains more wisdom than what you'd find in a random fortune cookie.
In this way, I worry some about the effect of blogs on the national media.