(Salon) New Book: Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies…(Must Read)

(Book Excerpt)

"Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You

Building a better Bush

How an Andover-Yale preppy, scion of one of our nation's most powerful families, was reinvented as a straight-shootin' Texan with "regular guy" values. An excerpt from "Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You."

Before a press conference in August 2002 at the Bush estate in Crawford, Texas, workers brought in hay bales to cover up the propane tanks sitting in camera view, the better to give the impression that the president was a real old-time rancher. Of course, Bush had purchased the spread just before the 2000 campaign. The hay-bale tableau was in many ways a perfect metaphor for the persona of George W. Bush himself: Artifice intended not only to conceal reality, but to give the impression that Bush is "real," a simulation of authenticity itself.

The popular perception is that George W. Bush is just a "regular guy" -- unpretentious, friendly, likes country music and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, not some highfalutin know-it-all who thinks he's better 'n other folks. But this image is a persona, carefully constructed over the years to deal with one of the key difficulties facing members of the Bush dynasty. After all, we are talking about a man afforded advantages available to literally but a few dozen Americans, who walked on a path paved with the priceless cobblestones of influence and wealth, who earned so little in life but was given so much. Given that Bush's father was defeated in 1992 in large part because of his perceived inability to understand the struggles of ordinary people, the son's advisers understood that a man with George W.'s particular combination of experience and skills could hardly be presented to the public as a model of empathy. So as the scion of the Bush dynasty was prepared for his entry into public life, he was burnished with a down-home gloss and a new man was created. The creation of this persona came off virtually without a hitch.

While some of the details may be phony and some may be false, the package comes off very convincingly. And the continuing success of Bush's regular-guy routine is what makes it less likely that reporters will question its veracity. Though they strike a cynical pose, assuming that all politics is artifice, nothing yields higher praise than an image successfully constructed. "Just as TV decries photo-opportunity and sound-bite campaigning yet builds the news around them," wrote communication scholar Daniel Hallin, "so it decries the culture of the campaign consultant, with its emphasis on technique over substance, yet adopts that culture as its own." The candidate who falls off a stage (as Bob Dole did during the 1996 campaign) or holds a press conference with improper lighting will become the object of scorn, while the one who performs in a flawless photo-op will find reporters praising the skill of his operation.

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http://salon.com/books/feature/2004/02/10/fraud_excerpt/index.html

:kick:

I was a terminal student for about 7 years, and I think if I could have afforded it, I would have stayed in longer. I'm jaded where professional academia is concerned though, because of the petty infighting that I witnessed first hand. That said, I believe in social reformation through education. I believe that we will not advance as a species until we get the collective IQ of humanity up 70 or 80 points or better. Yet given the behavior that I'm seeing from the hive these days, though, I'd say were just a step or two away from the final SNAFU. :-(