Spin Control: Rambling talking heads on cable news channels have spread across the ocean
One is Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, with the green and white mermaid signs nearly as ubiquitous in some European cities as in the Pacific Northwest.
The other is the Talking Head Pivot: the practice of people who appear on news programs under the pretext of adding context to an issue, but who really just shout at each other without paying any attention to the question they have just been asked.
This campaign season the THP shows up every evening on cable news programs and on Sunday morning news “magazines” when a mouthpiece for the Trump campaign sits on one side of a news anchor and a mouthpiece for the Clinton campaign sits on the other. The anchor could ask about the weather, and within a sentence the first person will pivot to today’s talking points and the other will interrupt with a counterpoint.
During a recent trip, it seemed clear the THP has caught on with 24-hour cable news networks in Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. I can’t speak Polish, German or Czech, so I’m making assumptions based on the facial expressions and volume of strident speakers who appeared as I surfed through channels for weather updates. The beauty of the THP is that one can get a feel for the ardor of the speakers without ever knowing what they say.
On their English-language counterparts available in hotels and guest homes, the THP was very much in evidence. Two weeks ago, Polish women essentially went on strike over proposed legislation to make that country’s already strict abortion laws draconian. Thousands of women, most dressed in black, refused to go to work, took to the streets and eventually convinced parliament to drop the whole thing.
Having just left Krakow for Prague the day before, we wondered how the protest was going and flipped on English-language Al Jazeera, which showed a few brief shots of demonstrators in the streets before a moderator tried to engage two speakers on a split screen. They talked over each other as they trotted out well-rehearsed talking points for or against the protest.
Except for some fine points of the legislation in question, it could have been a Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice argument on CNN. It was the classic THP: No matter what one talking head said, the other one would interrupt and pivot to the point they came to the studio to make.
While it is possible to scoff at the culinary value of Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes, they have the saving grace of disappearing in a month or so, replaced by a new season’s overly sweet caffeinated pick-me-up. The THP is likely here to stay.
For that, Americans should apologize to the rest of the world.
Presidential wannabes galore
In America, not everybody can grow up to be president. But almost anybody can run for it.
Washington voters will have seven pairs of candidates for president and vice president on the Nov. 8 ballot. But that’s a small number compared with people who dream of being president (or vice president) and have filed as write-in candidates for the office.
On the plus side, filing to run as a write-in candidate for the nation’s top or No. 2 job doesn’t cost anything. On the minus side, you’ll almost certainly never know how many votes you got, or if you got any.
Washington has a long tradition of letting voters express their feelings about the choices of candidates by writing in a name not on the ballot. This sometimes results in support of a favored politician who didn’t make it through the primary and sometimes in the scribbling in of “Mickey Mouse” or some other fictitious character. If it makes you feel better, that’s your right.
Write-in votes for a particular office are flagged when the ballots are counted by county elections offices. Sometime in November we’ll know how many total write-in votes were cast for each office in the state. But no one ever looks at the written-in names unless more write-ins are cast than the total for the top vote-getter in the race. The names don’t get sorted and counted unless there could be enough to win.
To have an impact on the presidential race, there would have to be hundreds of thousands, or perhaps more than 1 million, write-in votes – more than the total for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, whoever comes out on top in Washington.
The likelihood of that happening is about equal to the sun rising in the West tomorrow or the high school team at the bottom of the Greater Spokane League beating the Seahawks.
That doesn’t keep folks from around the country from filing write-in candidacy forms with the state elections office. So far, 41 tickets – including some that have just a would-be president with no vice president, and a few veeps with no prez wannabes – have filed. There’s a link to this cast of characters on the blog.
Spin Control, a weekly column by political reporter Jim Camden, also appears online with daily items and reader comments at www.spokesman.com/blogs/spincontrol.