There is no point in hiding my personal preferences regarding this presidential election, but this blog seeks to take an ironic distance on the media scene that surrounds it. And so two reminders that US Presidential elections often mobilize symmetrical elements.
My first example is drawn from the 1896 election when the cinema was brand new. The two major American motion pictures entities in the fall of 1896 were the Biograph company, owned by a number of Republicans including Abner McKinley–the brother of Republican presidential candidate William McKinley, and the Vitascope Company in alliance with the Edison Manufacturing Company. Biograph filmed McKinley at Home and premiered it in the company’s official debut program at Hammerstein’s Olympia Music Hall on October 12th. The screening was sponsored by the Republican National Committee, and many powerful Republicans filled the theater to cheer their standard bearer. Although the Edison group was also pro-McKinley in principle, commercial expediency forced them to promote Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan by filming Bryan Train Scene at Orange, NJ. The two films were shot two days apart. Bryan’s operatives had arranged for their candidate to stop in Orange, NJ for a photo-op that the Edison team could not afford to ignore. McKinley was filmed first, but the Vitascope Company could have easily gotten Bryan Train Scene at Orange, NJ into vaudeville theaters first. But they failed–almost certainly due to political sabotage. (It appeared on New York screens exactly one week later but with little fanfare.) One question is: How did the Democrats find out about the plans to film McKinley, so they could respond so quickly? Did they have a mole in the Biograph Company? Had Vitascope partner Norman Raff, who was from McKinley’s hometown of Canton, Ohio, try to film McKinley but was denied access? Despite the Democrats quick response, they were completely outplayed by the Republicans in this battle of the motion pictures.
My second example is a contemporary one: Donald Trump’s campaign has formed an alliance with Gennifer Flowers while Hillary Clinton has befriended Alicia Machado. Hillary has played it cool in the face of the Donald’s amazingly rude and ultimately quite
despicable threat to invite Flowers to attend the first debate and place her in the first row. (For those who forget, Flowers had a longstanding affair with Clinton back in his days as Governor of Arkansas.) In contrast, when Hillary evoked Machado in their first debate, Trump lost his cool––not only during their TV exchanges but on Twitter later in the week. The resulting displays of misogyny may well contribute to his undoing, but what might interest us at least for the moment is the symmetry.
In May 2016, as it became clear that DJT was going to be the Republican nominee and HRC was going to be his Democratic rival, Gennifer Flowers opened a new Twitter account (she had closed an old one several years earlier). We should assume that the Clinton camp was keeping tabs on Ms. Flowers, since she had been used as a political weapon against the Clintons in the past and was likely to pop up somewhere again.
Trump’s operatives, we can only assume, were reintroducing Gennifer Flowers to the public, waiting for the right moment to use her in the campaign. That same month an old article in Murdoch’s Daily Mail was updated.
This updated article gained little traction when it appeared, but that changed in the week leading up to the debate when Trump threatened to have Flowers attend as his guest––and she tweeted her acceptance. In the resulting firestorm of news stories, the Daily Mail profile of Flowers enjoyed renew attention. The on-line journal The Frisky was one of many to jump in:
These days, Flowers writes a sex advice column, “Ask Mistress Gennifer” for GuccioneCollection.com, a website dedicated to the lad mag publisher Bob Guccione. There she writes about topics posed by readers, like “I want my boyfriend to dominate me” and “My girlfriend wants me to get circumcised.” If you follow Mistress Gennifer’s sex tips, you might experience a little bit of Bubba “I’m going to have to thank Bill for some of the advice I’m going to be giving. It will be based on experiences I had with him,” she said. “Really, he taught me a lot.”
Incidentally I have not been able to find “Ask Mistress Gennifer” and GuccioneCollection.com is a long dead website. The big “news” that Trump’s operatives were apparently eager to share: Bill and Hill have a kind of arrangement or understanding about his extra-marital affairs because Hillary is bi-sexual. The implication––never quite stated––is that Hillary and Huma (Anthony Weiner’s soon to be ex-) have a thing.
Was it coincidence that Alicia Machado became a US citizen in May 2016 and then became an active Hillary supporter the following month? Trump does not think so.
Hillary may well be familiar with the expression, “Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.” Machado was a Miss Universe when Trump was running the show, and the two had a difficult relationship and ultimately a falling out. As reported in Wikipedia:
“She has spoken out many times against Donald Trump, who, during her year as Miss Universe, she claims called her “Miss Piggy” because she gained weight and “Miss Housekeeping” because of her Hispanic background.[3] Trump said: “She was impossible” and that “[s]he was the winner and you know, she gained a massive amount of weight and it was a real problem. We had a real problem. Not only that, her attitude, and we had a real problem with her.”[
Trump was not prepared for pro-Machado remarks during the debate. In this respect, Hillary used surprise to her advantage. And as is well-know at this point–Trump started tweeting about the two of them early in the morning of Sept 30th–the day I was on my way to Italy for my book launch (October 4th is the official pub date).
HRC was impressive in the first debate, and she came out on top in the Flowers vs. Machado match up. Trump’s misogyny and his disdain for Latinos were on full display. Nevertheless, it says something about the state of American politics when these two women–both of whom were center folds in Playboy–are at the center of a presidential campaign that is just one month away from Election Day. Certainly it gives the lie to the fact that the Donald is a good negotiator and deal maker. On one hand, Machado was his employee: apparently he failed to have her sign a nondisclosure agreement. On the other Hillary completely outmaneuvered him.
The Republican candidate would have been wise to remember the 18th century maxim, “Hell has not fury like a woman scorned.”