The Triumph of Gesture Politics

[housewolf]

(Tsunami Aid) You would expect that passing judgment about which kinds of aid and which modes of delivery work best would be a complicated matter. But you would be wrong. In Europe, at least, the public has separated the heroes from the scoundrels with a simple yardstick -- lost vacation time.

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the essence of leadership has changed into something that is less and less about significant undertakings and more and more about dramatic stunts. Thus, at least one European newspaper described President Bush's effort to aid tsunami victims as a bid to show U.S. compassion. What was important was not the particulars of Bush's own aid plan, but whether the public would find it convincingly noble. Not that programs don't matter, but in the public mind they are secondary to (and their success is dependent on) the personal gestures that accompany them.

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The expression ''gesture politics'' generally describes the substitution of symbols and empty promises for policy.

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this confusion crops up everywhere. After last year's Republican convention, the editor of The New Republic, Peter Beinart, noted the tendency of speakers to praise President Bush's war in Iraq not as a wise effort but as a sign of personal ''inner strength.'' They insisted that we were safer after the Iraq invasion -- not because of anything it accomplished, but because it showed we were led by the kind of person who invaded Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/magazine/23WWLN.html?oref=login