Essay 1911

From The New York Daily News…

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Hil’s awkward closeup
YouTube ad touched a chord because, unlike Obama, she’s cursed to be cold on camera

By Stanley Crouch

We appear to be entering a vastly new and significantly dangerous world of Internet politics. We are all aware of the old cliché of never believing anything you read, but that suspicion must now be extended to high-tech media communication.

Last week, Paul de Vellis was found to be the creator of an unofficial Web advertisement for Barack Obama that, parodying Apple Computer’s famous “1984” ad, depicted Hillary Clinton as a kind of totalitarian monster in the mold of George Orwell’s “Big Brother.” Almost 2 million people saw the spot, which ended by asking viewers to visit BarackObama.com.

The culprit proudly confessed his act of electronic mischief to Arianna Huffington and posted a note on her blog. His point, he said, was that politics was changing and that the average citizen will have a bigger influence on things in the future.

Given the uncountable number of loons who can operate personal computers, that fact creates an inarguable contemporary truth: Like everything else, this can be as bad as good. DeVellis, the citizen-consultant, reminded us of something that focus-group-tested TV commercials never could: For some unexplainable reason, the electronic mass media invariably serve up Clinton as an ice queen but project and perhaps enhance Obama’s warmth.

Hollywood’s liberal and limousine brigade understands this — just as it noticed the fact that Bill Clinton removed the redneck stigma of a Southern accent and made it no more than a regional sound.

Anyone who has had the revealing experience of first seeing a speech of Sen. Clinton’s in person and then watching it on the evening news or C-SPAN knows this much: The junior senator from New York has a problem as great as the shadow of her husband. That problem is not her hairdo or whether she will get an eye job. It is monumental: Television cameras seem to hate her and rob her of what is, in person, considerable charisma.

In other words, everyone knows Clinton has trouble connecting through mass media. But it took a crafty commercial on YouTube to write that problem in capital letters.

That said, for all the power of imagery, there is one very great danger in charisma — one that is enhanced by electronic media. It is this: We all need to pay much, much closer attention to details and the ideas behind the screen to make sure that we are not caught holding the bag for someone we, when informed, would love much less than the camera does. In the search for “authenticity” — no more than a fast-food cliché this election cycle — we must not fall prey to yet another form of slickness.

If we are careful, we can learn how to live with this latest development in our culture, just as we learned how to live with all of those things that entered our lives before this moment. The world will be changed quite surely — but we need not be taken in by the superficial.