My attention has recently been drawn back to the handful of diaries I wrote at dPOS, much of which I had subsequently forgotten. In the aftermath of the Georgia debacle, this one seems relevant. It is reproduced verbatim, including the introductory parenthetical.

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Thursday Oct 30, 2008
(This is a repost of my diary from yesterday, which went largely unnoticed. Given the theme, reposting it today has metacharm.)

What goes around, so we're told, comes around. This may be a good thing, given how short our public memory can be. If what went around did not come around, most of what has been would be lost forever. Even the good stuff.

In 1066, an exhausted, hungry army of Saxon pikemen (with some archers in support) stood on a hill and held off the assaults of the assembled mounted nobility of Normandy. The knights were essentially helpless against the 20 foot pikes that, butted against the earth, formed a thicket that could not be penetrated by the knights' horses.

At some point, the knights retreated, in some disorder. The Saxons -- who were, recall, exhausted and hungry -- lost their discipline and charged down the hill after the fleeing horsemen. The knights rallied, reversed, and brought the hammer down on the now chaotic array of foot soldiers. The victors, it has been noted, get to write the history; in this case, what they wrote was that the "retreat" was a feint, a cunning tactic to draw the Saxons off the hill. Yeah. Right. "We meant to do that." Nevermind that the Saxon king was slain not by a lancer but by an archer.

There was a lesson to be learned at Hastings in 1066, and the lesson was this: Mounted knights were helpless against well-trained, disciplined foot soldiers with pikes and shields; and that the lowliest-born archer could bring down the noblest of warriors. Unfortunately, the lesson that Europe learned at Hastings was, "Knights are the bestest!" We haven't ever lived down the result of this unfortunate unlesson: the rise of the feudal aristocracy, whose descendants determined most of European (and eventually, world) history for the next 900 years, and whose descendants still own a rather startling share of Europe's wealth. By the time what had gone round came around again, in Henry V's demolition of the French army at Agincourt (prefigured by a similar outcome at Crecy, half a century earlier), it didn't matter any more. The nobles were ensconced, having claimed for themselves as birthright what once had been a matter of both merit and social need.

So anyway.

Back in 2004 I was grumbling about the pathetic state of the Democratic Party -- that they'd learned nothing from the 2000 or 2002 elections. More particularly, I argued that they'd learned nothing from the 1992 elections, when a somewhat daffy multi-gazillionaire rode those multi-gazillions to one of the most successful third-party performances in American history. And how did he do it? Simple: By renting a few large blocks of network time, and sitting down to have an adult conversation with the American people.

What Ross Perot proved was that the American people would sit still and pay attention while someone addressed them as thinking adults. He also proved that they could be persuaded by the arguments presented. Unfortunately, however, the victors get to write the history, and the victors in this case were uninclined to credit their triumph to the improbable combination of a charismatic, likeable candidate; 12 long years of GOP rule (the public does tire of whomever is in office, regardless of the job they're doing); and a high-profile third-party candidate going on TV for half an hour and bludgeoning the incumbent. Rather, they claimed all the credit for themselves. It was their crafty "triangulation" message. It was their 50% + 1 strategy. It was their "war room". It was this, that, and the other thing. It was everything but the real thing.

And so, what had come around was banished again to political unmemory.

Wait! What does that mean, "banished again"?

Ah. Public memory is short. Think for a moment. What are the most famous speeches in American political history? Hmm. There's JFK's inaugural. There's the Gettysburg Address. The Cross of Silver speech. There are speeches remembered because of a single line: "Give me liberty or give me death." But, JFK notwithstanding, probably the single most noteworthy political speech of the second half of the 20th century was ... drumroll please ... Nixon's Checkers speech.

Yes, that's right. Public memory being what it is, it would surprise me if more than half the people on this blog knew any significant thing about it, but trust me, a hundred years from now any student of American history will still know something about that 1952 speech. The Checkers speech is extraordinary for several reasons, not least being that even though it saved Nixon's place on the Eisenhower ticket, and thus Nixon was clearly the victor, he wholly failed to write the history: Even by the mid-60s, the speech was remembered as a humiliating exercise (which it was) in which Nixon made a complete laughingstock of himself.

What was the Checkers speech? It was a half-hour of TV in which Nixon went before the American public and read a laundry list of his finances, in order to rebut accusations that he had been the beneficiary of some sort of campaign slush fund. Checkers was a cocker spaniel, given to the family by a supporter. Nixon -- good-humoredly, by the way -- avowed that regardless of public opinion, they were keeping the dog.

Political campaign finance law has come a long way since those days -- the sort of campaign slush fund that Nixon was accused of hiding was almost indistinguishable from the standard fund that is at the core of every political campaign nowadays. But back then, you couldn't just give somebody money for them to spend on getting elected. At the time, it hardly mattered: nominees at all levels were chosen by party insiders, and then the party spent the money getting those nominees elected. For example, in 1952, the Republican party had committed to buying, among other things, two half-hour TV slots for the VP nominee to talk to the electorate. (Of course, it was not in their minds that their nominee would end up blackmailing them into handing over one of those slots so that he could defend his place on the ticket!)

Because Nixon failed to write the history (not that he didn't try -- with a ghostwriter he did write a semi-biography called Six Crises, one of whose titular events was the Checkers speech) the lesson was forgotten. Or worse, as at Hastings, an unlesson was learned: The candidate had made a fool of himself. This was the unlesson of the sophisticates, those who were appalled, rather than charmed, by Nixon's folksy self-abasement. As usual, the sophisticates were uninterested in how the ordinary citizenry had responded. We will long be paying the price for the failure of our elite's imagination in this case.

What goes around, comes around. Some things which ought to have been remembered were forgotten. American political parties replaced the half-hour serious conversation with the 30-second sound-bite. For decades, this was the way it was done. Then, forty years post-Checkers, another politician (did he remember the Checkers speech? did he know the context? did he remember that it was a political triumph?) revived the format. He was extremely successful.

Sure, Perot said a few oddball things. Sure, the late-night monologues had a field day. But the people were listening. They attended. They considered. They were moved.

But the victors rewrote history, and Perot in memory became a short wacky dude with big ears, Dennis Kucinich's rich uncle, the object of ridicule by smug know-nothings. No, that is not fair: They knew something. They knew which side their bread was buttered on, and it wasn't the side of a candidate buying a big block of airtime and standing up to talk straight to America.

It is so odd.

Most people don't even seem to understand how commercial television works. They seem to imagine that Obama must be spending an incomprehensible fortune on these 30-minutes slots. After all, look how much a 30-second buy costs. A 30-second buy costs a lot because you are buying the audience that the network draws with its own programming. There are only (?) seven minutes of ads in 30 minutes of TV -- but those ads pay for the full 30 minutes, including the money the network must pay to the production company of whatever show is drawing the viewers. It costs less to book a 30 minute infomercial than it costs to buy 7 minutes' worth of ads -- assuming your infomercial costs a lot less to produce than a 22 minute sitcom, complete with overpaid actors and screenwriters (OW! What the? Lieber?!! OW! Stop hitting me! OW! OKAY OKAY OKAY! The writers deserve every penny! OW!).

Obama's 30-minute production last night was not an act of genius -- at least, not unless I'm a genius, since I was telling everyone in 2004 that this is what Kerry ought to do. Nor was it particularly risky. It was certainly not groundbreaking. To the contrary, it was an obvious thing to do (tried and proven in history), provided that one has sufficient faith in the electorate to take their vote seriously, and sufficient faith in oneself to communicate, squarely and uncondescendingly, with the mass of the people. It is pure Jeffersonianism: The super-educated elite politician, the "natural" aristocrat, addresses the informed, publicly-educated electorate in order to persuade them of the merits of his policies and the qualities of his character.

What all this means is that you have a job to do. You must talk it up: So that folks recognize that it was important. We want to write the history this time, and the history we want to write is that the public is good enough and smart enough for the 30-minute political infomercial to become a standard part of the future landscape of American campaigns.

Updated for Second Incarnation of Diary:It was pointed out by a commenter yesterday that Dukakis, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush I again all bought 30-minute election-eve segments. Whatever they did or said was not notable enough to anchor those broadcasts to the firmament of political memory. I was somewhat disappointed by Obama's broadcast -- a bit heavy on sentiment and light on analysis. People can and will respond to real facts -- like charts showing the stratospheric wealth of the top .1% of Americans versus the bottom 90%. (Perot showed this, as did Gore with An Inconvenient Truth.) I don't think it was a disaster by any means: I think it probably reassured some people about Obama's motivations and cares and concerns, and probably swung some votes. I was just hoping for something a little different.