Of course President Obama’s “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit was nothing but “milquetoast defense after quip after simple explainer,” as Alexis Madrigal put it at The Atlantic:
Much as many would like to believe that the medium determines the message, a modern politician is never unmediated. Not in a pie shop in Pennsylvania, not at a basketball game, not while having dinner, not on the phone with NASA, not on TV, not doing a Reddit AMA.
This resonates with a book I’ve been reading: Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer’s take on the 1968 Republican and Democratic national conventions. Near the beginning of the section “Nixon in Miami,” Mailer writes about the futility of trying to get a politician to say something interesting: Continue reading “Interviewing Politicians”