"This isn't really a convention, This is really an infomercial. And every night we'll have a different infomercial and people view it with a certain level of cynicism"
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A political convention is supposed to be democracy in pageant form; Estrich punctures that balloon by calling it what modern viewers already suspect it is: paid programming with better lighting. The move is deliberately unromantic. “Convention” carries civic gravitas, party history, the idea of deliberation. “Infomercial” drags it into the realm of sales tactics, audience targeting, and scripted testimonials. She’s not just being snide; she’s naming the medium.
Estrich’s sharpest insight sits in the repetition: “really.” Twice, as if she’s pushing past the polite fiction to the industry truth. Conventions don’t primarily persuade the undecided through argument; they manufacture a feeling of inevitability and competence, the way an infomercial manufactures urgency and trust. Each night as a “different infomercial” hints at segmentation: veterans night, families night, “economy” night, all designed to reach discrete demographics with tailored narratives. Politics as brand management, not coalition-building.
Then she grants the audience their own role in the performance: viewers “with a certain level of cynicism.” That phrase is almost generous. It acknowledges media literacy as a default condition now, a post-Watergate/post-spin era where people watch while simultaneously discounting what they’re watching. The subtext is bleakly modern: everyone knows the pitch is a pitch, and the system keeps pitching anyway because the goal isn’t truth, it’s attention and alignment. Estrich is diagnosing a feedback loop in which spectacle survives precisely because we’ve stopped believing in it.
Estrich’s sharpest insight sits in the repetition: “really.” Twice, as if she’s pushing past the polite fiction to the industry truth. Conventions don’t primarily persuade the undecided through argument; they manufacture a feeling of inevitability and competence, the way an infomercial manufactures urgency and trust. Each night as a “different infomercial” hints at segmentation: veterans night, families night, “economy” night, all designed to reach discrete demographics with tailored narratives. Politics as brand management, not coalition-building.
Then she grants the audience their own role in the performance: viewers “with a certain level of cynicism.” That phrase is almost generous. It acknowledges media literacy as a default condition now, a post-Watergate/post-spin era where people watch while simultaneously discounting what they’re watching. The subtext is bleakly modern: everyone knows the pitch is a pitch, and the system keeps pitching anyway because the goal isn’t truth, it’s attention and alignment. Estrich is diagnosing a feedback loop in which spectacle survives precisely because we’ve stopped believing in it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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