Sunday, December 04, 2005
I Love It When The Big Guns Agree With Me
It's becoming a universal cry at the moment, the White House needs to get out and defend itself. But I really like the way Henninger is addressing it at OpinionJournal.
You can't out-yell a tornado, nor can you tame it, but Pecos Bill did manage to ride it, and while mythical, the image is appropriate. The best thing the White House can do at this point is join the maelstrom in hopes of getting out in front of it slightly.
There are some of us out here working pretty hard to get this message out, but we lack his authoritative voice, and we need it.
The Bush administration has underestimated the changed nature of modern media. The mainstream media alone is not the problem. All these political subjects--the war, immigration--get discussed at length, all the time, on talk shows and across the great expanses of the Web wilderness. In this new environment, the emotional content has become stronger and even more important than the facts, such as they are. The facts have been demoted. What's more, the language, the very vocabulary of all these conversations, has been ramped way up. Shrillness has monetary value now, and it has political value. If this were traditional spin, as the White House assumes, it wouldn't matter. But in our time the spin has become a vortex.He's right and the blog lays in the center of the vortex. Let's face it, not all of us bloggers are as eloquent as the traditional opinion makers and we tend to deal in volume and shrillnes and all those other things Henninger is adressing. Which is why the solution I suggested earlier in the week is a good one - A White House blog.
You can't out-yell a tornado, nor can you tame it, but Pecos Bill did manage to ride it, and while mythical, the image is appropriate. The best thing the White House can do at this point is join the maelstrom in hopes of getting out in front of it slightly.
There are some of us out here working pretty hard to get this message out, but we lack his authoritative voice, and we need it.
