Yesterday's CBS poll has even better news for Obama, showing him opening up a lead on Clinton again and also leading John McCain. This is a pattern we saw a while back when Wright's sometimes incendiary sermonizing became a round-the-clock staple of cable TV, talk radio, and the blogosphere. As the shock wore off - in part due to its constant repetition - Obama rose up again. The same pattern happened again with Bittergate.
I keep seeing this too, and not just in the Obamahillarython.
I don't mean to sound like a scold or a moralist here, as I want to make a simple observation about what I think is an unconscious (and illogical) mechanism, and what might arise out of a perfectly natural human reaction to shock inundation.
The schock factor -- and things that shock -- drive the news cycle, the talk radio cycle, the blog cycle, and even the fashion cycle. When elections are factored in, timing becomes critical, because there's an initial shock, then a wave of repetition, and than finally (when enough people tire of it), it tends to fizzle. Jeremiah Wright keeps coming back, and generating new shock waves, but there's only so much to be said, and only so many people who want to dwell on it 24/7. Most people -- no matter how informed they are -- do not belong to the Jeremiah Wright junkie subset of political junkiedom. Not even your ordinary political junkie can keep it up on the level of all Wright shock, all the time. (Thank God for Bill Ayers; at least there's shock rotation!)
None of this is said to minimize Wright or Ayers -- as I've said I think the latter is far more egregious than the former, and justifies not supporting Obama. I am just saying that the ordinary citizen cannot be expected to be shocked all the time by the same thing, simply because of a steady diet of shock.
But would anyone expect him to? Well, yes. Every time I turn on the radio, there's a steady diet of "new" shock -- most of which is not really new, but just being turned over. You could turn over a rotting carcass you'd seen before in order to express horror over "new" maggots crawling, but would it really be horror?
My worry here is that while news, talk radio and even blogs are often driven by a desire to compete for the shock factor, what is the effect over time with ordinary people? Do they become harder to shock? If so, might that account for the erratically cyclical nature of the shock waves?
More ominously, what are the longterm effects in terms of voting patterns? We've all heard about the backlash, or blowback principle; how might this work with ordinary voters? Clearly, this is why last-minute shockers are the most effective; hence every negative campaign that wants to be effective should always aspire to the perfectly timed so-called "October surprise."
But what would happen if people were tired of surprises in advance?
I'm still thinking of Mayor Street's bug! For those who've forgotten, the FBI planted a bug in his office during a corruption probe. Normally, the discovery of such a bug shortly before an election would doom a candidate -- especially a candidate behind in the polls as Street was. But in Street's case, race and BDS were brought into play, and the FBI bug scandal was transformed into a major advantage, with Street seen as a victim.
Sympathy blowback is neither predictable nor rational, but in the right hands, it works. Are some partisans better at playing this game than others?
Nor have I forgotten the way the Monica Lewinsky scandal created sympathy for Bill Clinton in such a way that ultimately, the crime of perjury was subsumed into his sex life. While some Americans sympathized with Clinton, many more came to sympathize with him by way of reaction against the people who screamed about the immorality, and who demanded that everyone else be as shocked as they were.
Of course, the Lewinsky scandal occurred before blogs, and before the Internet was as influential as it is now. That phenomenon we once called "the news cycle" is now aggravated by so many things that it's unpredictable. Millions of people are shocked, millions publicly weigh in, millions tune out, and millions react against the shock.
What happens to the issues over time? How are normal people to determine to what extent they are issues, and to what extent they are fuel for cycles?
Honestly, I don't know anymore. While I know what I think about any given issue, I'm don't like repeating myself, and I'm beyond cynical.
It would be unreasonable of me to expect people to be shocked if I am not.
The more shocked people want me to be, the less shocked I am, and the more annoyed I become by those I perceive to be demanding that I be shocked.
Is there such a thing as shock burnout?
(Maybe that'll wear off too, so I can focus on "issues.")
BOTTOM LINE: Wanting to shock people is natural enough, but scolding them into being shocked can backfire if they become annoyed.
posted by Eric on 05.06.08 at 09:10 AM
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I agree, but would offer an historical correction, because it hits a particular hot button of mine. I recall very few actual people complaining about the immorality of President Clinton with Ms. Lewinsky. The conservatives I read complained about the lying, the denial of justice to previous victims, and the predatory behavior of the president. That an elected official had sex with a young woman was small potatoes.
Nonetheless, I was repeatedly told that we on the Religious Right were very upset, were obsessed with the president's sexual behavior, etc. No matter what was said by conservatives, it was interpreted that what we "really meant" was that it was all about sex. I came to believe the opposite - that to the Clinton defenders it was all about sex, and the mere suggestion that someone might possibly associate all this with their precious sexual rights had completely unhinged them.
The Clintons played this beautifully, painting all investigators - especially the ones who had them dead to rights on other issues - as maniacal bluestockings. The press gratefully complied, because it was for them a twofer: they got to kick conservatives and sell papers by talking about sex. Like the Kyoto Treaty and the accusations of stealing elections, history has been successfully rewritten as its opposite.
Maybe we weren't listening to the same talk radio shows, but I remember huge social conservative outrage over the idea of sex in the Oval Office, the semen-stained blue dress, the idea that this fueled sexual licentiousness, and was degrading and coarsening the culture. While many of these things were true, their repetition turned people off at the time, and the Clinton supporters cleverly manipulated the conservative outrage as leverage.
Here's the conservative Ashbrook Center recapping in 1999.
With the President?s conviction doomed and his poll numbers in the stratosphere, many conservatives adopted the all-too-popular pastime of attacking the American people. Some suggested that Americans had lost their morality, while others went so far as to say that politics failed, and that people of virtue should quarantine themselves lest they be polluted by the decadent culture. These charges are dire if true, for while the Founders designed the constitutional structure for men and not angels, they nonetheless knew that the success of the regime depended upon the continued good character of the citizenry. While there is some evidence of cultural decline, the rumors of cultural collapse are premature.
I remember it well. The legal issue was perjury, but the moral scoldings were very, very loud, and the Democrats used them to their advantage. I had lots of arguments at the time saying that conservatives should stick to the perjury issue tactically, but it just wasn't possible.
As Mona Charen said, it was a "National Dirty Joke":
I think what may have also been going on was not so much a war over whether the scandal involved sex (it did), but over how much sex should matter. Aside from the legal arguments, there were two activist sides in the Culture War which wanted sex to matter -- for very different reasons. One side tends to loudly champion sexual morality while the other loudly ridicules it. The latter depends on the former.
Ordinary people -- those who are not activists and who fall in between -- are repelled by whoever is the loudest.
Clinton pretended to be an ordinary guy who just got caught, and this generated sympathy with the ordinary people whose reaction to the affair was to get tired of it.
I didn't expect anyone to abandon the conventional wisdom all in one go, Eric, but the two articles you quoted support my claim. Both state that it was standard media sources - not usually regarded as conservative shills - that kept telling us about the sex.
I was reading National Review for much of my news at the time, and hearing Rush on the radio during lunch. They, at least, were focussed more on the criminal acts and on the remarkable evasions of Clinton and his protectors in the MSM. Rush, as I recall, fielded quite a few callers who kept accusing him (and by extension conservatives) of being obsessed with the sexual angle. He kept laughing at how he would spend ten minutes on the serious issues and throw in an indirect one-liner about the sex and have to spend the rest of the show defending his obsession. Perhaps there were other conservative sources that I wasn't paying attention to, but I have to consider those the big two.
The media kept reporting that conservatives were obsessed, but I didn't see it well backed up. I beg you to reconsider your position sir.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
I agree, but would offer an historical correction, because it hits a particular hot button of mine. I recall very few actual people complaining about the immorality of President Clinton with Ms. Lewinsky. The conservatives I read complained about the lying, the denial of justice to previous victims, and the predatory behavior of the president. That an elected official had sex with a young woman was small potatoes.
Nonetheless, I was repeatedly told that we on the Religious Right were very upset, were obsessed with the president's sexual behavior, etc. No matter what was said by conservatives, it was interpreted that what we "really meant" was that it was all about sex. I came to believe the opposite - that to the Clinton defenders it was all about sex, and the mere suggestion that someone might possibly associate all this with their precious sexual rights had completely unhinged them.
The Clintons played this beautifully, painting all investigators - especially the ones who had them dead to rights on other issues - as maniacal bluestockings. The press gratefully complied, because it was for them a twofer: they got to kick conservatives and sell papers by talking about sex. Like the Kyoto Treaty and the accusations of stealing elections, history has been successfully rewritten as its opposite.