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irate:
no. i see bush as entirely vacant.
such appeal as he has image-wise is a function of the contexts afforded his handlers by the trappings of the presidency and enacted by television news networks/segments, which, regardless of the various interpretations of "biais," are one in their support for the legitimacy of the office no matter who is in it.
if your starting assumption is one that sees bush as a person as a mediocrity (and i do not think that anyone, anywhere, imagines him otherwise, if they are honest for a moment), then his constancy, such as it is, looks more like a rigid, at times terrifying, refusal to think about a complex world, a complex situation. i do not see any way in which this refusal can be understood as a good thing.
as for opinion--by which i assume you mean polls--for the most part there are so many methodological problems, and so little detail about the methods reported, that they amount to factoids which function primarily to give television (and to a lesser extent the print dailies) the illusion of being something like a democratic feedback loop. which of course they are not--they are framing devices for advertisements....
i sometimes think that an inflatable sex dolls, always surprised, or a toaster oven, would acquire a certain illusion of gravitas if it was treated with the same assumptions, staged in the same way.
both would be constant.
neither would sway before opinion.
as for gore, i think his was among the more inept campaigns in recent memory in that he somehow ceded critical terrain to the right in the fabrication of his public persona, allowing him to somehow be positioned as too intellectual for--well who? (i never have understood this one...for who, really?)
on top of it, his dlc handlers had him in a fight with bush over giving an illusion of being centrist, which meant that their positions tended to converge in many ways, such that it could come down to a high school level popularity contestr--which bush in fact lost--but which he was able to win because his legal team was simply better when it mattered most.
you have to be pretty naieve to impute any inward qualities to the public image of a Leader--if you have ever been in a play, for example, you already know why--what you do, how it looks, is all that matters to an audience--your motives, who you are, is only transmitted through gestures. you structure an empty space that an audience fills with its own projections (this is not at all to say that the process undertaken by an actor does not require tremendous skill--but live is different from film clips, obviously---anyone can look authoritative in edited clip form).
not a bit of this implies or assumes any personal charisma, whatever that is
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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