We begin, as many discussions about politics today should, with an analogy to pro wrestling. Consider the ‘‘foreign object’’ routine: One combatant produces a concealed item, usually from under his tights — a pointed stick or some hand-size tool of menace — and proceeds to jab his opponent with it. He perpetrates this atrocity in full view of everybody except the referee, who remains oblivious because a complicit third party (perhaps a tag-team partner or a manager) is distracting him.
Now consider our current Republican primary battle royale. Foreign objects might not exist literally in modern campaigns. But
there are figurative devices, known as ‘‘shiny objects,’’ that rely on the same principles of distraction, outrage and misdirection. They also involve a hapless dupe in the middle of it all — in this case, us.There is pandemonium in the squared circle of public life. Pretty much every day someone (a candidate, or a campaign, or the media) will ‘‘hold up some bright, shiny object,’’ as Carly Fiorina put it on ‘‘Meet the Press.’’ That increasingly popular metaphor is an apt one, because the various images it conjures — an intergalactic body glowing brighter as it moves closer to dumbfounded earthlings, a ball on a string held by a hypnotist, a mobile hung above a baby’s crib — all, to varying degrees, seize attention, whether through their novelty or through manipulation. In politics, a shiny object is the preoccupation of the moment: the 14th Amendment, or so-called birthright citizenship and anchor babies, or, inevitably, any poll.
In these dazzle-me-now days, there can be grave consequences for a candidate who comes off as gray and plodding and bogged down in nuance — let alone in shame or embarrassment. Writing in Esquire, Charles P. Pierce said he had expected that Scott Walker would be doing better with the Republican electorate at this point. ‘‘What I did not anticipate,’’ Pierce wrote, was “the rise of the shiny object that is The Man Called Trump.’’ Pierce added that he also did not expect that Walker himself ‘‘would turn out to be such an unimpressive lump of cheese.’’
Donald Trump ‘‘is the brightest and shiniest of all the bright, shiny objects,’’ said David Axelrod, a longtime Obama political adviser. Trump is like a one-man meteor shower of this genre. He sprays exhilarating antagonism upon all manner of Megyn Kellys, Mexicans or whoever his ‘‘loser’’ target of the day might be. He tweets around the clock, rides around in a shimmering helicopter and has that noggin of shimmering hair. He hurls us into the ropes until we find ourselves disoriented, careening against a turnbuckle: Where are we? How did we get here?
The shiny-object metaphor is not confined to the realm of politics. Business strategy, technology and marketing consultants have all referred to ‘‘bright, shiny objects’’ (or ‘‘B.S.O.s’’) to describe the fickle tastes of modern life. Urban Dictionary identifies ‘‘S.O.S.’’ (‘‘shiny-object syndrome’’) as ‘‘a condition which causes an inability to focus on any particular person while online dating.’’ (By the same token, a number of commentators have dismissed Trump’s recent success in the polls as ‘‘just a summer fling.’’) Its origin may actually lie with an older sort of stump performer. ‘‘Magicians use sleight of hand, dangling a shiny object in front of their audiences to distract them from the hidden deception going on elsewhere,’’ said Christopher Cerf, a co-author of ‘‘Spin-glish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceptive Language.’’
To some degree, politics has always involved deception. The advent of television intensified this, shrinking attention spans, creating ways to distort and vilify and dramatizing the existential stakes of prosaic debates. Think Lyndon Johnson’s devastating ‘‘Daisy’’ ad in his 1964 re-election campaign against Barry Goldwater, which showed a little girl picking petals off a daisy and the sudden explosion of a bright, shiny mushroom cloud.
In 1962, the historian Daniel Boorstin published ‘‘The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream,’’ in which he identified the dawning of the ‘‘age of contrivance,’’ marked by ‘‘pseudo-events’’: staged happenings that animate a cultural calendar (Hallmark holidays, anniversaries), as well as political set pieces (photo ops, candidate ‘‘announcement’’ speeches). Political pseudo-events have been the engine of television advertising, which focuses on smaller-bore matters, or ‘‘wedge issues,’’ that would have little relevance to an actual presidency but nonetheless shine a nasty glare on a candidate. George Bush attacked his Democratic presidential opponent, Michael Dukakis, by asserting that Dukakis’s support of a prison-furlough program in Massachusetts represented a permissive liberalism that he would take to the White House. (The shiny object here was Willie Horton, the escaped convict featured in an infamous campaign ad.) If television was a major development in the creation of shiny objects, the Internet was an Ursa Major development. Even the most isolated outrages become outsize on our little, attention-burning screens.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama and his campaign team warned against becoming too drawn to the ‘‘shiny objects’’ that preoccupied the press. ‘‘It was basically a not-subtle way of saying that political reporters had attention-deficit disorder,’’ said Dan Pfeiffer, a former top adviser to Obama. In our defense, though, the A.D.D. of political reporters is fostered by a warped and warping system. Media bosses demand a constant flow of material, which ensures that much reporting remains undigested. Customers want speed or will click elsewhere; competitors spew their own undigested news, and campaigns are only too happy to concoct it, or their opponents will. Shiny objects become tools of our least resistance. Polls and gaffes take less time and brainpower to comprehend than, say, Jeb Bush’s book on immigration policy.
In other words,
the press colludes with politicians in this culture of distraction-mongering. Meanwhile, a new class of political figures has built careers almost entirely on shiny-object status. It’s more fun than writing policy treatises and much easier than actual governing — and it pays better too.
Sarah Palin belongs on the Mount Rushmore of human shiny objects. She secured her place after John McCain made her his surprise running mate in 2008. In an appearance on CNN back then, the pundit Paul Begala lamented that Democrats seemed ‘‘to just not be able to resist’’ focusing on ‘‘the shiny object of Sarah Palin, who is not running against Barack Obama.’’ Less than a year after the campaign ended, Palin had quit her governor’s job and moved on to a lucrative career as a full-time media troll, pundit, author and rally headliner who has been paid eight figures since 2009. Like Trump, she became a reality-TV star (on a short-lived TLC series), which is always good for business in Shiny Object Land.
So is running for president. It’s good to convey a sense of being in play even if you clearly are not. Back in the innocent days of 2010, 2011 and 2012, reporters were always falling over one another to ask Trump whether he would run. NBC’s First Read memo summarized a Trump appearance on ‘‘Face the Nation’’ under the heading of ‘‘Your Sunday-Show Shiny-Object Alert: Donald Trump to CBS’s Bob Schieffer on whether or not he will eventually jump into the 2012 contest: ‘I hope I don’t have to. But I may — absolutely.’ ’’ No one really took it seriously.
But sometimes reality TV turns into reality. ‘‘The focus on the shiny object becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,’’ Pfeiffer said. ‘‘It turns the shiny object into the actual object.’’ And the Summer of Trump shines on.
- couple of "R.I." moments...
