Australian journalist Greg Sheridan observes the American presidential election and criticizes both sides, the media, and the American people in general for succumbing to the cult of celebrity:
THIS has been the worst US presidential campaign I’ve ever seen. Vacuous, fatuous, misleading, dishonest, trivial, at times unhinged in its disconnect from reality.
The politics of the world’s greatest democracy has taken something weird in its Kool-Aid.
How can I say this when both candidates are so attractive and so articulate?There is your first clue. The quality of a politician is frequently in inverse proportion to their good looks. Give me John Howard’s baldness, Paul Keating’s hatchet face, Kevin Rudd’s Harry Potter tonsure. The greatest US president of all, Abraham Lincoln, proves the point. He once remarked that he could not possibly be two-faced: “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”
This election marks the triumph of celebrity as the essential organising principle of US politics.
His whole analysis is revealing and despite the third paragraph is not just about “good looks.” (I had to include that in my quotation due to the great line from Lincoln.)
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