EVERY LITTLE HELPS

The first televised White House address was given by President Harry S. Truman on the 5^th October 1947. We are once again in the throws of the United States presidential elections.

The first televised general election presidential debate was held on 26^th September 1960, between U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, and Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, in Chicago at the studios of CBS station WBBM-TV.

“Television primes its audience to rely more on their perceptions of candidate image (e.g., integrity). At the same time, television has also coincided with the world becoming more polarized and ideologically driven” (Hayes P.235).

This quote, from Wikipedia, is from a person named Hayes. It is from an article by J.N. Druckman published in 2003 in the Journal of Politics [65(2), 559-571] entitled "The Power of Television Images: The First Kennedy Nixon Debate Revisited."  I am not even sure it means anything. How can ‘television coincide’ with anything? That some groups have expressed more extreme ideological views about political and social matters is evident. That these matters are reported by television news networks is also evident. Is it being suggested that the mere idea of being displayed on a television screen is encouraging the polarization of political and social expression?  Is the world being driven by polarisation and ideology or by television? How does television prime an audience to rely on something? If anything, television puts its audience on guard. So much deception is practiced on us (I include myself in this ‘audience’) that we are suspicious of just about everything we see and hear on television. Do we rely more on our perceptions of image as supplied by television? Do we perceive a person’s integrity through images or through actions?

Whatever your view, the Hayes quotation seems to me complete nonsense. People will gather what they want from the, so-called, debates. Each candidate will express a view about faith and the nation and how best to deal with the governance of the administration. They will not be able to stop criminal activity at a stroke. They will not be able to wave a magic wand and remove prejudice, racial and religious hatred from the world, and certainly not Mississippi. They will not be able to stop oppression nor will they wipe out poverty at a stroke. They are limited to the constraints of the office. The solutions they employ will on the whole be similar. The only difference between them is a matter of compassion and empathy. They will profess both, but the tenor of their expression is what separates them. The expression displayed by Mr Obama is far more empathetic towards the average citizen than that expressed by Mr Romney. The idea of the ‘stand tall and alone against all’ without government interference Mr Romney seems to favour, is the extreme, the polarised view of citizenship. Mr Obama, in my view, is of the ‘the duty of care’ approach to citizenship. It’s the difference between “I care about you enough to let you get on with it your own way” and “I care about you enough to help you get on with it your own way”.  As they say at supermarkets every little helps.