“When Obama was running for the Senate in Illinois in 2004, his two main opponents in both parties were destroyed by the release of their respective divorce records; Obama won the primary easily and ended up running in the general election against Alan Keyes, a Republican carpetbagger who came to Illinois to talk about abortion and not much more.”
This passage isn’t particularly important in the scheme of the article. It was intended to explain the history of Obama’s political career in his run-up to his presidency, and how he was very adverse to criticism from the media in the beginning. The reason why it interested me was because of the conclusions we might draw about a democratic process that allowed those events to potentially determine a President from a non-President. If those other candidates had not been ruined by their divorce records, Obama might still be a member of Congress. I’m sure that this sort of ruining your opponents career over the skeletons in his closet mindset has been going on since the beginning of the country, but I think that the nature of this process that weeds out candidates in such a manner is possibly being affected by the same changes ongoing in the media that Auletta was talking about. The proliferation of this un-researched quick-story journalism that is more pro-conflict biased, is probably making our democratic process also even more susceptible to this demagogic sort of mentality.
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