From NPR “It's All Politics” Blog
The Conventions' Version Of Reality TV
By Alan Greenblatt
They've been all over the political conventions this year — not just politicians, but "real people."
Both Republicans and Democrats have featured lots of average, non-office-seeking Americans who have offered up stories about how their children are serving in the U.S. military, or how they built up their own businesses through personal grit....
Testimonials from satisfied customers are nothing new, adds Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He points to an ad, printed all the way back in 1710, quoting one Hannah Pawlyn rhapsodizing about how a certain elixir brought "immediate Relief" to her daughter, who had been suffering from "a Complication of Distempers, and such a Giddiness in her Head."
"What's different now," Nunberg says, "is partly the increasing importance of having a 'personal' sense of the candidates, a feeling that can't be adequately conveyed by a politician's speech."...