Shades of 1972

The first shade:

After Nixon's re-election, Pauline Kael famously said that she knew no-one who had voted for him. Much the same seems to apply with Bush's election. In a sense, blogs are to blame for this, though this time there is certainly no shortage of blogs that support Bush. What blogs have done for me is they have put me in touch with Clever America, an America that we foreigners always knew existed but only had the most fumbling of contacts with. This sense of connection happened with 9/11, though I didn't read blogs obsessively until I found Salam Pax (who isn't American, see Ground Rule 3). So powerful is Clever America that we eventually became seduced by our own propaganda until, despite the warning signs that there was no clear opinion poll lead for Kerry, we felt the election loss as a personal catastrophe. Which it is, of course.

Clever America won all the arguments in 2004, while noone was listening. Clever America is arguably the future of American softpower, just as Hollywood has been the most obvious manifestation of softpower until now. Pauline Kael was, as we all know, a film critic, so in 1972 she was at the very heart of American softpower. If Clever America is going to be the new softpower of a no longer hegemonic United States, then it will be those commentators today who are the most crushed now by the Bush victory who reveal themselves to be the closest to the power axis of the future. (Did I mention Ground Rule 3?)