The Recall Show With Jay Leno
Her we go. A bunch of journalism professors have a problem with the way Arnold used the media. They fear it is undermining...something. Maybe the most telling statement came from a putz from Columbia:
"This seems another step in the same muddy ruin of politics that we're trekking through," said Todd Gitlin, a journalism and sociology professor at Columbia University. "It's the same part played by Oprah in the process of sanitizing and normalizing Schwarzenegger as a legitimate politician." Schwarzenegger appeared with wife Maria Shriver on "Oprah," in one of his very few televised interviews during the campaign.
And Gitlin doesn't like this development. "I object to the power they harbor in the first place, and I object to the further erosion to such line as there has been between the spectacle and the political process."
In truth, Gitlin objects to the fact that mooks like him and his ilk are steadily becoming more irrelevent every passing day. Ultimately, whether his crew want to admit it or not, elections are popularity contests, pure and simple. Voters pull the lever for the candidate they like, or the opponent of the candidate they hate. When Guiliani won his first term as mayor, it was laregely because the voters here on Staten Island hated David Dinkins. We hated that pompous bastard not because he was black--as many people charged--but because the SOB treated this borough like shit, never deigning to pay any attention to our concerns. Jeez, in four years the bugger only bothered coming here a couple of times. He fought the Navy's construction of a Homeport on the Island's derelict East Shore; refused to consider closing the Fresh Kills landfill, and basically told us to eat shit and fork over the tax dollars he spent everywhere else.
Rudy campaigned relentlessly on the Island, promising to close the dump, and promising to listen we we came to him with our concerns.
BINGO! Rudy got something along the line of 78% of the vote out here. But, at the same time, an equally large percentage of Island voters announced that we were fed up with the city's political chicanery and wanted to secede from NYC.
Rudy got the message: You don't come through with your promises, we're outta here. So he did what he promised with the dump, and came out here to town hall meetings on a regular basis. When he endorsed Bloomberg, it gave Bloomie a lot of help out here.
But that wasn't the main reason he dominated the Island vote. The main reason he whomped the competition here was HE WASN'T MARK GREEN.
Green, a Naderite "Think of me as Bobby Kennedy" Manhattan uber-liberal, was another NYC pol who never saw a tax he couldn't double and considered the outer boroughs wallets to be picked. Bloomberg, meanwhile, was promising to keep taxes where they were and bring his business acumen to the city's waste-filled budget. We pulled the lever for Bloomie by a 3-1 count.
Bloomberg turned around and raised property taxes 18.5%, and rammed the anti-smokers brigade agenda down our throats. That might fly in Manhattan, where most of the people rent and are so hopelessly liberal that they get shares in Birkenstock at birth, but these two moves alone showed the outer boroughs that Bloomberg was full of shit and shining us on to get his butt elected.
He's toast come the next election. He cannot not survive a Republican primary, which is why he's battling to have the primaries be "party-free" affairs. He figures he can throw enough dough at any opponent to win. And he's probably right.
But there are enough people (like me) looking at real estate listings in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to make the victory ring hollow if he doesn't get his ass in gear and start cutting the hell out of the city's overblown budget, which mirrors the crap that drove Arnie to Sacramento. All that is needed is a media-savvy candidate to fight him. And this city is the media capitol of the world.
Hell, I'd vote for freaking Trump at this point.
Her we go. A bunch of journalism professors have a problem with the way Arnold used the media. They fear it is undermining...something. Maybe the most telling statement came from a putz from Columbia:
"This seems another step in the same muddy ruin of politics that we're trekking through," said Todd Gitlin, a journalism and sociology professor at Columbia University. "It's the same part played by Oprah in the process of sanitizing and normalizing Schwarzenegger as a legitimate politician." Schwarzenegger appeared with wife Maria Shriver on "Oprah," in one of his very few televised interviews during the campaign.
And Gitlin doesn't like this development. "I object to the power they harbor in the first place, and I object to the further erosion to such line as there has been between the spectacle and the political process."
In truth, Gitlin objects to the fact that mooks like him and his ilk are steadily becoming more irrelevent every passing day. Ultimately, whether his crew want to admit it or not, elections are popularity contests, pure and simple. Voters pull the lever for the candidate they like, or the opponent of the candidate they hate. When Guiliani won his first term as mayor, it was laregely because the voters here on Staten Island hated David Dinkins. We hated that pompous bastard not because he was black--as many people charged--but because the SOB treated this borough like shit, never deigning to pay any attention to our concerns. Jeez, in four years the bugger only bothered coming here a couple of times. He fought the Navy's construction of a Homeport on the Island's derelict East Shore; refused to consider closing the Fresh Kills landfill, and basically told us to eat shit and fork over the tax dollars he spent everywhere else.
Rudy campaigned relentlessly on the Island, promising to close the dump, and promising to listen we we came to him with our concerns.
BINGO! Rudy got something along the line of 78% of the vote out here. But, at the same time, an equally large percentage of Island voters announced that we were fed up with the city's political chicanery and wanted to secede from NYC.
Rudy got the message: You don't come through with your promises, we're outta here. So he did what he promised with the dump, and came out here to town hall meetings on a regular basis. When he endorsed Bloomberg, it gave Bloomie a lot of help out here.
But that wasn't the main reason he dominated the Island vote. The main reason he whomped the competition here was HE WASN'T MARK GREEN.
Green, a Naderite "Think of me as Bobby Kennedy" Manhattan uber-liberal, was another NYC pol who never saw a tax he couldn't double and considered the outer boroughs wallets to be picked. Bloomberg, meanwhile, was promising to keep taxes where they were and bring his business acumen to the city's waste-filled budget. We pulled the lever for Bloomie by a 3-1 count.
Bloomberg turned around and raised property taxes 18.5%, and rammed the anti-smokers brigade agenda down our throats. That might fly in Manhattan, where most of the people rent and are so hopelessly liberal that they get shares in Birkenstock at birth, but these two moves alone showed the outer boroughs that Bloomberg was full of shit and shining us on to get his butt elected.
He's toast come the next election. He cannot not survive a Republican primary, which is why he's battling to have the primaries be "party-free" affairs. He figures he can throw enough dough at any opponent to win. And he's probably right.
But there are enough people (like me) looking at real estate listings in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to make the victory ring hollow if he doesn't get his ass in gear and start cutting the hell out of the city's overblown budget, which mirrors the crap that drove Arnie to Sacramento. All that is needed is a media-savvy candidate to fight him. And this city is the media capitol of the world.
Hell, I'd vote for freaking Trump at this point.
posted by Unknown @ 9:43 AM
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