Friday May 16, 2003 at 1:26 AM
Presidential Stagecraft
Appearing in Politics
Nobody ever said the White House shouldn’t present the President in the best possible light, but this article from the NY Times illustrates just how far they’ve gone. A couple of memorable quotes:
On Tuesday, at a speech promoting his economic plan in Indianapolis, White House aides went so far as to ask people in the crowd behind Mr. Bush to take off their ties, WISH-TV in Indianapolis reported, so they would look more like the ordinary folk the president said would benefit from his tax cut.
And later in the same story…
Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, [the speech on board the Abraham Lincoln] even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush’s right shoulder and the “Mission Accomplished” banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call “magic hour light,” which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.
It makes me more than nervous to live in a society where the government is cherry-picking talent from Hollywood.
Comments
Nothing new here...
Another way of looking at it is that Hollywood has bred an expectation of perfection and no serious political candidate is willing to discount any small detail.
This can of course be traced back to the great debates of 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon. Nixon, recovering from knee surgey with a five-o-clock shadow refused make-up and looked horrible whereas Kennedy was tan from campaigning in California. On radio they seemed pretty evenly matched but on TV Nixon went down in flames.
More at http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/K/htmlK/kennedy-nixon/kennedy-nixon.htm
Posted by: Jim on Fri May 16, 03