{"id":824,"date":"2024-11-11T18:30:51","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T18:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/?page_id=824"},"modified":"2024-11-15T15:31:16","modified_gmt":"2024-11-15T15:31:16","slug":"the-campaigns-pandemic-memory-hole","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2024\/section-2-policy-and-political-context\/the-campaigns-pandemic-memory-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"The campaigns\u2019 pandemic memory hole"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Prof. Michael Serazio<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor of Communication, Boston College. A journalist-turned-scholar who studies media production, he has authored three books: The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it \u2018Real\u2019 in Media, Culture, and Politics<\/em> (2023, Stanford University Press); The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture <\/em>(2019, NYU Press); and Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing <\/em>(2013, NYU Press).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instagram\/Threads: @mikeserazio<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Email: serazio@bc.edu<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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U.S. Election 2024<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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12. The campaigns\u2019 pandemic memory hole<\/a> (Prof Michael Serazio)
13. America\u2019s kingdom of contempt<\/a> (Prof Barry Richards)
14. Americanism, not globalism 2.0: Donald Trump and America\u2019s role in the world<\/a> (Prof Jason A. Edwards)
15. The politics of uncertainty: Mediated campaign narratives about Russia\u2019s war on Ukraine<\/a> (Dr Tetyana Lokot)
16. The U.S. elections and the future of European security: Continuity or disruption?<\/a> (Dr Garret Martin)
17. Trump\u2019s victory brings us closer to the new world disorder<\/a> (Prof Roman Gerodimos)
18. Abortion: Less important to voters than anticipated<\/a> (Dr Zo\u00eb Brigley Thompson)
19. Roe your vote?<\/a> (Dr Lindsey Meeks)
20. Gender panics, far-right radicalization, and the effectiveness of anti-trans political ads<\/a> (Dr Thomas J. Billard)
21. U.S. politics and planetary crisis in 2024<\/a> (Dr Reed Kurtz)
22. Trump and Musk for all mankind<\/a> (Prof Einar Thorsen)
23. Guns and the 2024 election<\/a> (Prof Robert J. Spitzer)
24. Echoes of Trump: Potential shifts in Congress\u2019s communication culture<\/a> (Dr Annelise Russell)<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Imagine this: It\u2019s 2004 and President George W. Bush takes the stage<\/a> at the Republican National Convention in New York City. Not once does he invoke the September 11th attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, alternately, picture this: It\u2019s 2012 and President Barack Obama is accepting his re-nomination<\/a> at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. He touches upon many topics, but never mentions the financial crisis that beget the Great Recession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unthinkable, no? And, yet, such was the equivalent omission from this year\u2019s presidential aspirants. The history-altering coronavirus pandemic \u2013 a rupture as consequential to American society and politics as those two preceding catastrophes \u2013 went almost entirely unremarked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In August at the DNC, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered<\/a> an efficient 35 minutes of wide-ranging oratory \u2013 biography, stakes, the usual platitudes \u2013 yet spared not a single word for Covid-19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A month prior to that at the RNC, Donald Trump indulged the director\u2019s cut version of a speech<\/a> \u2013 meandering through more than 90 minutes of digressive curlicues on Dana White\u2019s vacations, the Packers\u2019 playoff odds, and Hannibal Lecter\u2019s diet. The former-now-future president did glance, in passing, at what he again termed the \u201cChina virus\u201d: \u201cWe got hit with Covid. We did a great job.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that was it \u2013 then, in his telling, back to the stock market heights that predated the virus. This was a variation on the sleight-of-hand he\u2019d been<\/a> trying<\/a> out<\/a> last winter, beseeching crowds: \u201cWere you better off five years ago or are you better off today?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most elisions from the stump are understandably, if cynically, convenient; few are quite so elephant-sized. Four<\/em>years ago, he was still in charge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This pandemic memory hole runs deep, subliminally so: We might want to be done with the virus, but it is not done<\/a> with us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It reshaped<\/a> how and where works takes place, decimating downtowns; it stunted<\/a> a generation of students sequestered from their shuttered schools, impairing monumental learning loss; and, most irreparably, it snuffed out<\/a> more than a million loved ones across the United States. Many of those goodbyes could not be offered in person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your life is almost surely different from before 2020, because<\/em> of 2020. Such aftershocks were not left behind then, yet listening to these marquee speeches this summer, one could be forgiven for thinking they were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And all this is to say nothing \u2013 literally \u2013 of the lingering psychic energy from our plague year: the cost of social distancing that frayed community, culture, and nerves alike. That, arguably, was the most consequential story untold \u2013 the most important experience un-empathized<\/em> \u2013 by both Harris and Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leaders, self-evidently, set a policy agenda with their words \u2013 this is one of the more enduring truisms<\/a> of political communication theory. Yet they also set an emotional<\/em> agenda for the nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than any other single figure, the U.S. president can narrate collective memory, definitively so \u2013 and it is from that well of collective memory that political capital accrues and is drawn. If you want to tell people what to do, you have to speak, first, from where they came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why, then, did neither candidate speak, in any meaningful way, to that collective memory of the pandemic \u2013 was there no political advantage to be leveraged?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Harris, would a dirge interlude have sacrificed the joyful \u201cbrat summer<\/a>\u201d vibes she rolled up since replacing Joe Biden on the ticket? For Trump, would reminding the audience of his \u201cwarp speed\u201d vaccine accomplishment have, again<\/a>, risked a shower of boos from many who didn\u2019t want to take it \u2013 and certainly didn\u2019t want to be forced to?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All these explanations seem plausible. Neither party covered itself in glory with its pandemic management and few leaders \u2013 here or abroad (think Sweden<\/a>, think China<\/a>) \u2013 emerged politically unscathed. Only hindsight grants the wisdom of discerning let-it-rip underreaction from lock-it-down overreaction amidst a once-in-a-century public health crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet as politicians from Winston Churchill to Rahm Emanuel are said to have said<\/a>: Never let a crisis go to waste. Humanity is (hopefully) past the acute phase of Covid-19\u2019s wrath. The spiritual aftermath of that rupture, however, lingers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As with any problem, not talking about that doesn\u2019t make it go away. The leader who finds the right words to speak to our memory will find a nation in need of them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof. Michael Serazio Professor of Communication, Boston College. A journalist-turned-scholar who studies media production, he has authored three books: The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it \u2018Real\u2019 in Media, Culture, and Politics (2023, Stanford University Press); The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture (2019, NYU Press); and Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":1008,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-824","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nThe campaigns\u2019 pandemic memory hole - Election Analysis - United States<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.electionanalysis.ws\/us\/president2024\/section-2-policy-and-political-context\/the-campaigns-pandemic-memory-hole\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The campaigns\u2019 pandemic memory hole - Election Analysis - United States\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Prof. Michael Serazio Professor of Communication, Boston College. 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