"Politainment" a Real Danger to the Future of our Nation

In this craze to get people "engaged" in politics, we have turned down the extraordinarily dangerous path of mixing politics and entertainment in ways we have never before witnessed and which can’t possibly benefit us in the end.

Watching Hillary Clinton interviewing with Dave Letterman Thursday night was the last straw, albeit just a precursor of the election year to come. Do we really want our political leaders to behave like stand up comedians? Must we insist the minds of our candidates be diverted away from their serious job of being a leader to the opposite job of keeping us entertained? Don’t we already have enough professional performers to do that? If the only way to compel the voting public to become involved with politics it to turn our candidates into amateur entertainers, it’s a pathetic prospect for the future of our nation.

The trouble began when political operatives misinterpreted a whole lot of signs and concluded that being liked was the key to winning votes. That is a wrong assumption. The key to winning votes is to have a leader we respect. Ronald Reagan didn’t earn the votes of the opposition party because they liked him, they voted for him because they respected him. The fact that he was an amiable man was just frosting on the cake.

President Bush is an unfortunate case in point. His handlers worked overtime during his campaigns to make him a likable guy, the sort of guy you could have a beer with, like the guy next door. The point that the politicos have missed is that we don’t want the guy next door as president, we want someone better than that. We want someone who looks and behaves like a president. We want someone who wears the mantle with confidence, and who represents us around the world as the epitome of what an American should be. We want someone that everyone will respect, even if we disagree with their views on certain issues. In that, George Bush has failed miserably.

The same trap awaits the stable of presidential candidates as they face the coming year. Those same politicos (or their progeny) still haven’t learned their lesson. They are still insisting their candidates be "down to earth" in order to be liked by the common man. Worse, they think the way to do that is to turn their candidates into amateur entertainers, to keep the audiences laughing, thus proving their candidate is liked.

We need to maintain the separation between entertainment and politics, and recognize the difference between the two, even if we happen to see them both on the same TV. Otherwise, one day we’re likely to look up and find ourselves with a President whose only skills are in entertaining, and not governing, and that would surely be the beginning of the end of us as a respectable nation.