Dream on! What we have here is a reminder that elections dip us into the hot water of truth vs. "image." We've been relying on "image" (mostly a strange two-dimensional critter drawn by media) to a more or less attractive candidate for leadership.
More often than not you are encouraged to accept the image or what John Cassidy calls "the damning reprieve."
...While Comey’s decision didn’t come as a shock, the manner in which he couched and explained it was startling. Far from saying that Clinton and her aides hadn’t done anything wrong, or pooh-poohing the e-mail investigation as a minor matter, the F.B.I. director confirmed that Clinton sent and received numerous e-mails on her private server which contained top-secret information, and he described the decision not to recommend criminal charges only as a professional judgement. “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey said. ...John Cassidy,NYer
Whew! Over that hurdle!
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Television was first licensed for commercial broadcasting on July 1, 1941. By 1960, 87 percent of American households had television sets, and they were watching an average of five and ahalf hours per day [Television Bureau of Advertising 2003]. Contemporary observers anticipated a “revolution” in politics, pointing to an “infinite broadening of the democratic process . . . giving all Americans a clearer understanding of trends and issues” [Mickelson 1960], a “new direct and sensitive link between Washington
and the people” [Stanton 1962], and “a better medium for truth” [Taft 1951]. What took place in the years after television’s introduction was not a broadening of the democratic process, but rather a sharp decline in political participation. Average presidential turnout in both the 1980s and 1990s was lower than in any
decade since the 1920s, and outside the South (where a substantial remobilization of Black voters muted the decline) it was lower than in any decade since the 1820s. ...Gentzkow,Stanford
