An eye-opening trip behind the political scene demonstrating how showbiz helped money wreck our political landscape. If you...
How the methods of show business took over presidential election campaigns—and how political candidates have paid the price.
Public relations executive King chronicles the rise and fall of what he calls “the Age of Optics, where playing to the camera and creating compelling imagery forces candidates far from their comfort zones.” As a former campaign advance man and director of production for presidential events at the White House, the author knows his material well, and he recounts it with irresistible detail culled from firsthand experience. It all began in 1988, when the Democrats enlisted staff from Hollywood, the Oscars, and the Olympic Games to help stage their convention. Soon, the job categories of movie production—e.g., advance man, staging, site-builders—were swelling the vocabulary of political staffing. Campaign image-making took over because “spectacle sells.” Due to public familiarity, advertising techniques provided a framework. The author quotes Republican media consultant Robert Goodman: “[Ads] don't let you decide for yourself what to think. They tell you how to feel.” The result has not been friendly to politicians. In 1988, Michael Dukakis tried to enhance the image of his national security credentials with a joy ride on an Army tank. Unfortunately, even the people on his team thought he looked “like a peanut.” For the Republicans, it was the gift that kept on giving. King goes on to chronicle other bloopers, including John Kerry's windsurfing break, Howard Dean’s scream, and George W. Bush's “Mission Accomplished” banner. As the author notes, many candidates have fallen prey to the “fateful actions and decisions of staff…[that] will occupy a place in the politician’s eventual obituary.” What happens in front of the camera is fair game, and it has become all too easy to tell politicians to do or say anything at any given time.
An eye-opening trip behind the political scene demonstrating how showbiz helped money wreck our political landscape. If you enjoy the TV show Veep, you’ll enjoy this book.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-137-28006-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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