Bush’s PR Boo-Boo
George W.’s handlers are masters of the presidential photo-op, posing their boy just perfectly to convey a positive message for the TV cameras.
But Bush’s puffers and buffers boo-booed badly in St. Louis recently. George had been flown in to make a political sales pitch for his tax-cut plan to help the superrich. To cast this multibillion-dollar giveaway in a soft, warm, and fuzzy “populist” light, his handlers chose the warehouse of a St. Louis trucking company as their press conference setting. It seemed perfectly suited to make us think that his program is all about helping small businesses in the heartland to create jobs for America. Don’t think of it as a tax cut, was the spin, think of it as a grassroots plan to revitalize our sagging economy.
So there was George as the cameras rolled, giving his speech in front of what appeared to be stacks of cardboard boxes ready to move out. Only there were no real boxes in the picture. Instead, he spoke in front of a canvas backdrop painted with boxes and bearing the proud, bold letters: “Made in America.”
Why the faux prop, why not use the real boxes that were stacked all around the warehouse? Because, at the 11th hour, the Bushites discovered that the actual boxes were plainly stamped for all to see with the words: “Made in China.”
Oops. This was definitely off message. The spin of the day was that Bush’s tax scheme for the rich would trickle down to Made-in-America jobs — not more imports from low-wage hellholes like China. This was not good. OK, said the handlers, we can put George over here in front of a painted backdrop, but, still, this place will be crawling with reporters. What’ll we do to keep them from seeing the real boxes?
That’s when Bush workers were given rolls of tape to go through the whole warehouse, literally covering up the “Made in China” markings on each box.
Hey, look on the positive side — Bush found yet another use for duct tape. Is that stuff still made in America?
The Disneyfication of Downtown
There’s a new trend in the development of “downtowns” that is some combination of the Wal-Martization and the Disneyfication of shopping. This is not a happy trend.
Wal-Martization is the process of deep-pocket, low-wage, chain-store outfits coming into communities and using both predatory pricing and a massive advertising budget to kill the local competition, forcing out the hometown groceries, hardware stores, pharmacies, bookstores, etc. They have squeezed the economic life out of hundreds of downtowns.
But it turns out that, gee, lots of folks miss downtown — you know, strolling along Main Street and popping into this shop or that. So, now come the Disneyfiers. Having destroyed downtown, national developers now are replicating it with what they call “outdoor malls,” with faux “main streets” and brightly painted stores that appear to be independent entities.
The developers say they are trying to “create a town-center feel with local flavor and get away from the could-be-anywhere feel of standard malls.” Indeed, the developers now deride the old indoor malls, asserting that people today “don’t want to go inside of a big air-conditioned building where it’s noisy and dark.” But, hey, Mr. Big Developer — that’s the very ambience you created and promoted to crush our real-life downtown businesses.
As for “local flavor,” they’re not talking about the Chat & Chew Cafe and other genuinely local stores, but of Starbucks, the Gap, Barnes & Noble, and more of the same-old, same-old chain operations that are everywhere. Yet, they even try to imbue these plastic places with noble social meaning: “It will be something of a gathering place, not just a retail market,” said one national developer.
But their new “downtowns” are not downtown and offer no real community. Isn’t there enough dishonesty in the corporate world without them claiming that more chain-store commercialization of our communities is something noble?
This article appears in February 21 • 2003.