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| Where's the Beef? |
“Where’s the beef?”
“There you go again…”
And, don’t forget the scream.
During the debates leading to the Democratic nomination in
1984, former Vice President Walter Mondale famously asked his opponent, Senator
Gary Hart (D-CO), "where's the beef?" He
was challenging Hart to provide details instead of just visionary
concepts. Hart was talking about the
need to support entrepreneurship since small businesses create about 90% of the
jobs in this country (about 28 years before it was popular to talk about
it). But, Mondale stole the show with
his one liner cribbed from a popular Wendy's TV Commercial and that’s how the news
reported it.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was in London last
week. He needs a few smiling shots with
foreign leaders to bolster his campaign.
But, whatever his purpose, it has been sidetracked by the sideshow
resulting from his rather innocuous remarks about the London Olympics. I have listened to his Brian Williams interview – the whole thing not just the sound bites – and I didn’t think he
said anything so awful. But, we live in
a world where every word and phrase is parsed by the press, interpreted, reinterpreted
and misinterpreted.
Of course, the master of managing the media was the “Great
Communicator”, President Ronald Reagan.
His supporters enjoyed his bravado.
Remember when he said, “I paid for this microphone…” It was during the New Hampshire Republican
candidate debates in 1980. He used the
line to keep the moderator from cutting him off. That line got played and replayed by TV
news. No one bothered to point out that
he stole the line from a Spencer Tracy-Katherine Hepburn movie called State of the Union in which Spencer Tracy was – you guessed it – running for President
of the United States. And, of course, no
one remembers the issues being debated as well as they remember that line.
Perhaps Reagan’s most famous debate line was, "There you go again..." responding to then President Jimmy Carter during the presidential
debate later that same year when Carter was challenging Reagan’s position on
Medicare. The Medicare debate is hardly
remembered but the line is.
And, what about Howard Dean's scream? The former Vermont Governor and 2008
presidential candidate got a bit overexcited at a rally and let out a yahoo
that offended the sensibilities of… well, almost everybody. The governor was leading in the polls to that
point. But, the scream which was played
and replayed by all the news outlets… that scream was his
undoing.
Governor Romney has been through this drill before. He famously said, “I am not worried about the
poor” and was raked over the coals for that.
Did you hear the whole statement?
What he actually said was that he wasn’t worried about the very rich who
are obviously doing well or the poor who have a safety net; he was worried
about the middle class. As an aside, he
added that if the safety net has some holes in it, he would fix them. Does that sound like what was reported?
President Obama knows what it’s like, too. He is being attacked for saying that
entrepreneurs weren’t responsible for building their own businesses. Here is the exact quote: “If you were successful, somebody along the
line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.
Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that
allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a
business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Was he talking about the businesses or the roads and bridges? Well, if you have the opportunity to read or
listen to the whole statement, you can decide for yourself. But, the media typically clips out the sound
bite that will be most inflammatory. So,
they decide for you.
Isn’t it interesting that the sound bites of the 80’s were
taken out of the context of issues we are still debating today? Medicare, entrepreneurship? Shouldn’t the media be doing a deep dive on
those topics? The answer is obvious. Instead, watching the news makes me wonder:
Where’s the beef?
