An unforgiving spotlight

American media’s love affair with Obama has turned sour

In a more sophisticated way than their Indian counterparts, the US media are focusing more on form rather than substance while covering the 2012 presidential race. So we were told that US President Barack Obama ‘lost’ the first debate to challenger Mitt Romney. In the debate between the running mates, Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, was deemed to have stood his ground against the more experienced Joe Biden, who’s been vice-president for four years. This was just because Ryan used some faraway place names in Iraq and Afghanistan and uttered some cue-card rhetoric about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Thanks to such superficial coverage, the opinion polls have sent out confusing signals and the media have reported its swings and roundabouts with alacrity, but has not paused to think that it might be the result of their racetrack coverage. Thus, the Obama-Biden ticket was winning, especially in the swing states; after the debates, however, the incumbents have lost ground among the undecided, independent voters. With the election just a few weeks away, the polls suggest a close race.

The only other time the signals were so muddled was during the Bush-Gore election 12 years ago. At that time too, the media spotlight on form obfuscated key issues about the candidates’ views on domestic and foreign policy.

In the current face-off, Obama, whose victory in 2008 was to have presaged a shift away from form to substance, is mired in the bogs of unfulfilled expectations. The hope of change stirred by his 2008 campaign has long withered. His 2012 campaign has been lacklustre and his supporters ravaged by the economic hard times and confused by his human rights ambivalence have lost enthusiasm for him.

The Republican campaign seeks to portray Obama as an incompetent leader who has fallen back on old Democratic tax-and-spend ways. Judging from what he said in the debate, a flummoxed Obama seems to have reverted to the saws of the Democratic Party: economic nationalism, rich versus poor — a divisive agenda. As for his healthcare and social prescriptions, the Republicans slyly suggest that four more years of Obama would turn the US into a European-style social democracy (just look where Europe is?).

In the Romney-Ryan narrative, under Obama, giant bureaucracies in the departments of commerce, labour and environment will hold sway over America’s economic future, which is a problem not just for Republican supporters but uncommitted voters who trend towards the Right. Also, Obama has said very little about the impact of the homeland security department that is seen to trample constitutional and human rights with intrusive policies. This is a problem for many Democratic voters and leftish independents.

No wonder Romney is catching up with the incumbent. The challenger was successful as governor of a liberal state, Massachusetts, from 2003 to 2007. He had a moderately good record in office and ran an enlightened, fiscally conservative administration that did pretty much what Obama is advocating on social issues. In the current campaign though, he has moved sharply to the right on social issues and disavowed his gubernatorial record on healthcare. He has chosen to mouth homilies about domestic (let’s put America back to work) and foreign (let’s take out Iran’s nukes) policy.

Romney’s campaign managers have sensed that Obama has been cut adrift by the media, after their 2008 love affair. As such, the media coverage focuses more on his negatives, shunning substantial analysis of what the Obama administration may or may not have accomplished. This is what happened to Al Gore, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008: he was painted as a part of the establishment being Bill Clinton’s vice-president and so a magnet for the negatives that Clinton attracted in his second term. In the event, Bush won the controversial election. The rest, as they say, is history.

A version of this post appeared in the Hindustan Times, October 22, 2012 

Keywords: Obama, Romney, US presidential election, debates, campaign

The splintered social contract

I wrote this piece in 2007. Thought I'd re-circulate it because to me it still seems relevant. I've edited it.

In September 1897, an eight-year-old girl in New York City, Virginia O’Hanlon, wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Sun. She wanted to know if there was a Santa Claus.

The letter drew a response from Francis Church, a lead editorial writer for the paper.

Church’s editorial, Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus, is widely regarded by students of journalism as perhaps the most famous edit ever written in America; it was the subject of a film starring Charles Bronson as Church.

Writing about the “skepticism of skeptical age”, Church reassured his interlocutor that Santa Claus did exist: “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy...”

As a graduate student specialising in editorial writing, I can remember virtually memorising Church’s words and hoping that some day mine would have such meaning. With Christmas upon us, the edit came to mind.

What happened to wide-eyed innocence? The question is relevant in India today, where cynicism and guile have hardened hearts all across the nation.

Humanism and compassion are stored on the highest, most inaccessible shelves of values.

Hard-bitten people have emerged as leaders in business, politics, education, entertainment and media. They hold sway over the national discourse.

Intent on getting ahead, they push and shove, scream and shout, lie and cheat. It’s about accumulation of power and wealth: the worst form of capitalism, without the moral anchor that the European Enlightenment provided in the West.

In 21st century India, while the economy booms, the social contract is splintered by divisive caste and communal agendas raised by power-hungry politicians and money-grubbing bureaucrats, not to mention hard-boiled industrialists.

Such Dickensian characters as the Artful Dodger, the scoundrel who dodges responsibility for the consequences of his actions, and Ebenezer Scrooge, the killjoy who has come to symbolise a lack of charity, are emulated; gentleness, guilelessness and similar values of what the editorial writer Church called “eternal light” are discounted, even scorned.

It is almost as if existence is a zero-sum game in which victory is never sweeter unless it’s at the cost of someone else.

This mindset has a deep and lasting influence on public affairs. The individual, corporate and political values that flow from such thinking eschew the larger cause, the public good, the common weal.

Conflict is the central theme and the media seem to wallow in it. Celebrities, bureaucrats, companies and political parties are featured like gladiators of ancient Rome, while bloodthirsty citizens watch from the coliseum stands.

In this sport, only these groups count: the players and the media..

Beyond that there is filth, disease, poverty and ignorance that provide compelling evidence of the failure of governance.

Given such lopsided public priorities, there are garish malls, office buildings and apartment houses rising from the middle of a rubble strewn landscape.

Everywhere there is confusion: badly designed roads, unmanageable traffic, overburdened public transport, ill-equipped public hospitals and stressed out citizens who contract the diseases of wealth such as coronary heart disease and diabetes without the requisite bank balances to pay for their treatment; never mind those poor people who die of easily treatable diseases like malaria and diarrhea.

As the twelwth year of the millennium recedes into history, it is clear that that a Las Vegas bonanza style seems to have overtaken the practice of public affairs.

Public policy must be rescued from the roulette tables and the slot machines of zero-sum thinking.

Winning and losing; all manner of one-upmanship and conflict, true, are  major drivers of history, to be sure.  Without a social contract, India is a victim of the Las Vegas approach that promotes short-term thinking when what is sorely needed is a long term vision to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor; to give some hope to the mess of villages, towns and cities that are hellholes.

Let me hasten to add that I am not advocating a return to the days of central planning when deadly serious bureaucrats focused on the long term objective of peace on earth even as the neighbourhood fell apart.

This article appeared on DNA website on December 18, 2007

The splintered social contract