Friday, August 31, 2012

Eastwood shows us the good, the bad and the ugly within the 2012 Presidential Election Campaign

San Francisco native Clinton Eastwood Junior showed us all exactly what kind of live unscripted act any acceleratingly aging alpha male who represents the greater society as its enduring cultural icon of youthful sun king like vitality, virility and vanity against the eventual sundrying effects of time. Being a pure Califonian actor turned Republican politico like former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Mayor of Carmel by the Sea from 1986 to 1988 always had a populist knack of running and ruling with common sense without extraordinary dollars, keeping any lawmaking to its minimum and doing the right thing in a nonpartisan way. Yet unlike the masterful Chrysler Super Bowl ad from earlier this year, where Eastwood using the embattled and indebted Motor City of Detroit as his backdrop as Eminem did the year before to make a similar halftime peptalk to America to look ahead of the current economic slowdown that which has only expanded by 1.7%, find a new way forward and win it all in the second half against the world, the Republican National Committee and its Republican National Convention in Tampa got stale partisan rhetoric about how a vote for good old conservative Red is better than bad old liberal Blue.

Instead of sticking with his wonderful salute of respect towards Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, whose Dream ideal and action of nonviolent civil disobedience continues to give various minority Americans hope, opportunity and towards true change, and simply repeating the same Chrysler Super Bowl ad mantra of "We are all in it tough time, but we can come back from this and it is time to bring America back", Eastwood turned the non standard celebrity endorsement into a simple standard celebrity endorsement for Willard from westward, this is exactly the kind of political communications tripe made for the mainstream media mass that stopped John Mccain and Sarah Palin in their tracks last time, when Americans looked through the translucent fast food wrapping paper covered in pork barrelled political fat from the Beltway that was their election campaign promise, will likely do the same for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan this time around as well as business investment remains low with that renewed economic confidence and drive towards starting up business expansion.

Unlike most of his Hollywood good versus bad guy movies, the real reason this could not sell is because it was not an international terrorist or domestic threat to national security and his homeland that invisibly sat in that empty chair on stage, rather it was the President and Commander in Chief of the United States of America Barack Hussein Obama II who was being portrayed as the bad guy in this oddly framed rendition of real life theater. Fabricating a political boogeyman when a real lack of leadership exists is just as much a problem, as it shows your team lacks the confidence in its game plan to attack the facts as they are, failing that, losing confidence and one begins to wonder if their action will be any different than that of the other guy who believes more in rhetoric and depends more on a teleprompter than America and its American citizens themselves. Talk is cheap, but excessive not evasive action is expensive and can leave one off worse than before, perhaps it has become time for all of us to paraphrase Teddy when Progressive Theodore Roosevelt intimated the warrior monk tactic of peaceful cautiousness without fear by beginning to walk the talk, speak softly and carry a big stick for America to go far and start moving forward.