"Really," said the Scarecrow, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being such a humbug."
I keep seeing news articles every day which openly discuss and analyze the President's PR strategy RE: Katrina.
On the one hand, these articles are the proverbial "Look, there's a man behind the curtain" moment.
But a ceremonial visit is not enough. The difficulty so far for the administration has been making the images and words match the reality that people are seeing on their screens.
"There's no question that these sorts of television images have a big impact on people and in many respects shape reactions to the White House," said historian Robert Dallek. "But at some point it's the reality that bites.
"The images that have been constantly on television--a city that is under water, people who have been displaced, sobbing, crying, the evacuation of people--you can have this kind of spin-doctoring and have people say all sorts of things, but I think these realities on the ground [matter]."
On the other hand, the fact is that these stories are out there and don't seem to cause much of an outcry (other than Aaron Broussard's "I'm sick of press conferences") is profoundly discouraging.
We know they're manipulating us. We know they're trying to clamp down on images. We know they're succeeding with some people, when the GOP soundbite words are now showing up even in some survivor narratives. How successfully they manipulate images has become a news story with a life of its own. It's like an open secret that no one even seems to care about -- present company excluded, of course.
What's discouraging, I guess, is that Americans of all people, don't just rise up in a body and riot. There ought to be more outrage, on hearing over and over again that we're not being governed "from a place of authenticity". It's like we don't even know how to value the truth anymore, or how dangerous manipulation of the truth is.