BEFORE YOU POST A COMMENT, READ THIS: Kos' latest fumble is more than a waste of space-- it makes us all look bad. If you want to criticize me for writing a post on this when other people already did, make sure you write Kos first, and tell him to clean up his behavior.
In his mid-day open thread, Kos is once again defending his bizarre teeth-whitening post. Kos writes:
It's amazing seeing the party that gave us Ronald Reagan's and George W. Bush's stagecraft is now so amateurish that they've given us green screen backdrops in major speeches in half-empty gymnasiums and -- yes -- yellow teeth. Image and stage handling are critical components in modern presidential campaigns, and have been so since Nixon sweated it out in his infamous debate appearance against a young, fresh-faced looking JFK. Pretending that it's not something that should be discussed, or that there's something unseemly about it is silly.
Everyone has their flaws. The effective campaigns know how to smooth those over while accentuating their candidates' strength.
Emphasis added.
But there's a difference between not discussing something at all, and not discussing something on a blog.
I almost feel silly that I have to take the time to write about something like this, but here it goes:
The green screen thing is ok to discuss on a blog, especially because the poor impression the blank green screen gives is so obvious. In our modern era of high production value, the shoddy design is noticeable and may make McCain look silly to a lot of people. It reflects on his operation, and says that the people he surrounds himself with are distracted or don't care about him and his campaign. We have to ask what kind of administration for the most powerful country in the world would those people be.
But the teeth thing- doesn't highlighting that on your blog run the risk of making us look petty and shallow, and making us look like we're the ones who are trying to deceive people with "stage-craft"?
I think it's arguable how important it was to whiten McCain's teeth in the ad, i.e., it's not that important. When you start talking about it in public as if it's the most important thing in the world, and like we're focused on it, that's when you lose political points and make us look like we're slime.
You almost have to be a rarely shallow person (that is, a member of a very small slice of the population, and perhaps a personality type that is not very likely to be serious about doing something like casting a vote) to even notice or care that McCain's teeth weren't as white as they could have been in the ad. They didn't look horrid.
If you cared about how white John McCain's teeth weren't, you're officially a rare sort of fop.