The continuing series of video excerpts of a speech Mitt Romney gave at investment banker Marc Leder‘s house in Florida in May is a sign of good things to come.
Before the current incarnation of our information revolution, the one precipitated by the fact that we are all now equipped with what during the Cold War would have been called spy cameras and the media means to distribute what we capture widely, it is increasingly impossible for political candidates, or corporate executives, to hide the different things they tell different people.
In the past, these men and women have been able to tell the rich what they want to hear, the unions what they want to hear, the small business owners what they want to hear, and the environmentalists what they want to hear, without anyone necessarily knowing what anyone else has been told. Often, these messages will have been tonally or substantially contradictory, early indications of which promises will be kept after the election or merger or acquisition.
But now, when we know that even someone who passed the vetting presumably required to be admitted to a $50,000-a-plate dinner at a private home can whip out their phone and get a presidential candidate’s lullaby to the wealthy, either these prevaricators are going to have to start establishing networks of Skull-and-Bones-like secret societies in which to deliver their less generally appealing ideas and proposals, or they’ll need to express the same sentiments, beliefs and predictions to everyone.
This could result in even blander public statements than we already hear, though how long the general public will be interested in pabulum without even a whiff of banana or prune flavouring is anyone’s guess. But at least it will, in the not too distant future I expect, mean that we’re all privy to the full extent of the candidate’s publicly utterable sentiments.
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Bert Archer writes for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter: @bertarcher.
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