Chief Barack of the Americans

Hopefomercials

Thesis: The Obama administration* should run half hour infomercials explaining their agenda.

Entertaining, you know. Get someone fun to host (Oprah!) and just lay it out. Explain the reasoning. Make it substantive, but make it fun. We’re asking people to engage in a higher level of discussion with a more mature, more difficult-to-explain set of values, and they mostly hear it thirty seconds at a time and then Bill O’Reilly yells about it. People have an appetite for politics as entertainment, and no one in the world has more star power right now than Barack Obama.

Bush’s people were right: the media is a filter, and it benefits an administration to bypass it as much as possible. But they was wrong, as in so many things, in the approach. (They had the beginning of the idea with their obsessive branding, but ultimately that’s not a great way to communicate.) You don’t get around them by not talking to them, you just want to control as much as possible what the conversation is about. Politics 101, right?

But the assumption has always been that people find policy boring, and have to have it distilled into talking points—I think the problem is that policy has just never been properly presented. No administration has ever tried explaining their IDEAS in long-form television, as opposed to campaigning two years out of every four with thirty-second distillations.

This is frustrating, because I think that most progressive ideas benefit from longer explanations, from firmer rational foundations, from logical drilling-back. To think, rather than bellyfeel. The opposite of what Stephen Colbert knows in his heart. The opposite, moreover, of what O’Reilly and his ilk claim to think in what they claim are their brains.

But people have to be led to it. The short-attenion-span crowd still drives the agenda in this country, and Obama won by having the sizzle to go with his steak. This election showed that the assholes are not invincible (partly because the left has finally had some success co-opting their tactics, Keith Olbermann), but they still have sway. The game was still played on their field—they just lost because they committed the ultimate own-goal of nearly ruining the country.

But! More people watched Obama’s ad than watched the last (albeit truncated) game of the World Series, and the campaign can’t possibly have spent all its money. There’s always been some (understandable) aversion to presenting policy in infomercial form: it feels like it cheapens it somehow, that advertisement is for campaigning rather than for governing. But television is not an inherently vapid medium, it just gets used that way. To govern, you need to drive an agenda, and to do that you need to talk to people wherever they’re paying attention, and that’s still TV. It’s the Internet, too, and there’s a whole vast wonderland of things to do there, but really, it’s TV.

John McCain said it: Obama is the biggest celebrity in the world—and that’s a fine thing. Get Aaron Sorkin on board, have Spielberg direct. Have George Clooney explain the finer points of tax credits for solar panels!

Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to talk to the country on his own terms, and it won’t last long. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

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* That’s awfully nice to write