Inconsequential

People who follow politics and political coverage often criticize the media for not explicating policy proposals and instead focusing on polls and swing states. Such critics see the media as too focused on distractions. Now, following Tuesday's Presidential debate, an online public hears Romney's "binders full of women" comment and amplifies it, silencing other discussions for a day or so.

Maybe the "binders full of women" is sort of amusing, and within that amusement is the sense that some things are odd about Romney. Some things are, but nothing evidenced in his comment is revelatory unless you've never thought about who Mitt Romney is beyond his brand, "successful businessman".

The larger discourse on women voters and women's issues seems far more revealing about what we're like, and how we perceive ourselves and those around us. Women are sort of treated as a political g-spot in need of some serious finessing. This gender-oriented political discourse seems to say that a candidate needs to understand and address things women "care about" without appearing to stereotype women or lock them in the home. This CNN article on Romney's women-talk during the debate cites a political science professor voicing such a concern:

"His discussion of work-life balance appeared condescending to some because of the reference to women cooking dinner."

So the candidate must embrace gender difference but frame his embrace in terms of equality. Maybe most or all political discourse aimed at a specific segment of the voting public includes some version of outlining that segment, then erasing those lines, of conjuring their image, then making them disappear, but women are a good, current example of this, I think. The finessing and specific, pointed targeting of women leaves an impression that women are both foreign and essential to political discourse. A political writer in The New Yorker touched on all this when addressing political ads aimed at "women voters":

... that ad, like every ad targeted to women voters for the last half century, including those made by both campaigns this election season, assumes that women are wholly different species of citizen than men. The political imagination of American women, at least according to American political advertisers, begins with our cervixes and ends at the kitchen door.

Notes:

• The "binders full of women" meme nearly obscured the best bit of political gamesmanship by anybody of either party in years: Obama's "Proceed, Governor".

• Embracing gender difference while seeking equality is sort of similar to how feminist theory works in academia, I'd say, from my very limited experience with it.

Goodnight, Moammar Qaddafi

Hours into the revolution in Libya, media extracted the sanctifying, legitimizing force of the word "government" from descriptions of Gadhafi's rule, choosing instead to use phrases like "remains in power". He was called colonel or leader, but not President. Accordingly, his army then lost its claim to legitimacy. They became "forces loyal to Gadhafi" or some variation thereof. Examples from various mainstream news sources:

Forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi
Forces loyal to the unseated ruled Moammar Qaddafi
Forces loyal to Col Muammar Gaddafi
Forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi
Forces loyal to the once powerful leader Col. Moammar Qadhafi
Forces loyal to the embattled leader

The official story

I watched President Obama's speech on Libya last night. On ABC, Stephanopoulos et al. claimed the major theme was success. I thought it was that due process had been followed, and I felt this message was aimed at the critics who charged that he'd acted without the consent of Congress. In his response he announced that " ... nine days ago, after consulting the bipartisan leadership of Congress, I authorized military action ... ". This was where the speech got rolling.

Now, Yes, his response was aimed at critics, but not only the Conservative and Progressive leadership who pitch sound bytes all week; he was also addressing a voiceless group with no articulated criticism to offer: The American public confronted with foreign events that are too ambiguous and dynamic to reach conclusions about.

Of course, most Presidential speeches of this sort address the public, and the public is typically composed of critics, both approving and disapproving. But in this case the public's role as critic is highly unusual. We ordinarily have our minds made up about things; not this time.

I think that, as a collective, people are not sure who our allies are right now, not sure democracy is for everyone, not sure what our country's role should be, given our problems at home and ongoing engagements abroad. Mainstream media has done a fine job portraying dissidents in Libya as victims, and the violence as one-sided. But the air of civil war hangs over this story, and the ink from Sunday's paper hasn't covered that smell completely. Large swaths of the public feel ambivalent about populations in other countries, especially the Middle East and Africa. So, last night, for the first time in a long time, the American President faced a population of critics with more questions than preformed opinions. His strategy?: Frame events within our claimed value system, and tell us how the winners will write history.

Framed!

This blog/editorial posted on The Economist web site discusses the framing of current violence in Libya and the subsequent US/UN response. The author argues that the violence is in fact a civil war and not merely a popular uprising; furthermore, the implication of this, he writes, is that the US/UN intervention is the deciding of a civil war and not an attempt to protect innocents from violence. The latter, however, is how the media and US government have portrayed the matter.

But when the author guesses the media's motivations for framing events as such, I can't tell if he's being sincere or sarcastic. Probably the former, I'm afraid.

The Economist blog/editorial: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/03/rhetoric_intervention