1137280069 (N) by Josh King

Author:Josh King [King, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-03-06T22:00:00+00:00

Twelve

2004: Bush, Dean and Kerry

(Or, the Sign, the Scream and the Windsurfer)

The High-Water Mark

The Age of Optics, inaugurated with Dukakis’s tank ride in 1988, reached its zenith during a sixteen-month stretch in 2003 and 2004, and has been in slow decline since.

Facebook was founded in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. It would take a few years for each social medium to become rooted in political discourse, but their rise was matched by a commensurate decline of newspapers and packaged TV news. Networks still aired segments and newspapers still ran photos, but their impact became diluted. A 2012 Pew Research Center study revealed that among those under thirty, “as many saw news on a social networking site the previous day (33%) as saw any television news (34%), with just 13% having read a newspaper either in print or digital form.”1

As Twitter feeds now grow stale by the hour, so too does the staying power of any single image that once remained in popular consciousness for days. The role of the advance man, once a type of movie producer entrusted to create and communicate a dramatic story from a day in the life of a campaign road show, is now becoming—with some notable exceptions—more of a functionary executing the orders of headquarters or the White House.

That was still far from the case during the presidential campaign cycle of 2004, the first to seriously harness the political power of the Internet beyond fundraising. It was an effective organizing tool, as Howard Dean proved, but also a burgeoning reporting medium, from TV networks posting content to the web to advance people emailing images of proposed event sites back to headquarters.

For George W. Bush, too, the 2004 campaign was taking shape as a referendum on his brand of swaggering leadership that he relied on during his rise to power on the thinnest of margins in 2000 and his early prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If he won in 2004, his critics, current and future, could not deny that his vision for the country was reaffirmed by American voters, a test his father failed in 1992.

The dominating backdrop during 2003 and 2004 was “GWOT”—the Global War on Terror. The pivot from domestic to military stagecraft happened in one moment at the Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, when Bush, two-thirds through his first year in office, was reading a book to schoolchildren to promote his “No Child Left Behind” legislation, which he had framed as the early trademark of his presidency.

The date was September 11, 2001. Midway through the ordinary stop, Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered to the president that America was under attack. That blurry video of Card and Bush, and the presidential grimace that followed, brought the Age of Optics into a new era as Air Force One embarked for unplanned stops at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska before finally returning to Washington, a city transformed over the course of hours from a peacetime to wartime footing.

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