The Presidency as a Consumer Experience (Part 1) | The 21st Century
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2019
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode of Whistlestop travels to October 12, 2012 when Democratic candidate Barack Obama was declared the loser at the first Presidential debate against Mitt Romney and Twitter won.
Whistlestop is Slate’s podcast about presidential history. Hosted by Political Gabfest host John Dickerson, each installment will revisit memorable moments from America's presidential carnival.
Join Slate Plus for full, ad-free access to Whistlestop and your other favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Whistlestop show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/whistlestopplus to get access wherever you listen.
Podcast production by Jocelyn Frank. Research by Brian Rosenwald and Elizabeth Hinson.
Email: whistlestop@slate.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to whistlestop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson of 60 Minutes. |
| 0:10.7 | Superficial, sudden, unshifted, too fast for the truth. Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth? |
| 0:18.5 | What need is there for scraps of news? How trivial and paltry. |
| 0:23.5 | Am I talking about Twitter? No, I'm talking about the telegraph. Those words you just heard were from |
| 0:28.8 | an article published in the New York Times on August 19, 1858. People have been complaining about the |
| 0:36.1 | speed of communication for 150 years. We can't think fast enough to keep up with all of it. Why does it all need to be so fast? These are modern complaints we feel. So maybe they're just the same old complaints. Nothing new, which means there's no great danger to our democracy and our presidential system, which, of course, |
| 0:54.9 | as you'll remember, is the topic of this podcast. |
| 0:57.1 | Well, we'll see about that. |
| 0:59.0 | But first, a word from our sponsor. |
| 1:02.2 | Our whistlestop today is October 3rd, 2012, and it's just 40 minutes into the first debate between |
| 1:07.8 | Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. |
| 1:09.4 | Ben Smith of BuzzFeed has posted an item on |
| 1:12.6 | the site entitled How Mitt Romney Won the First Debate. In keeping with the ethos of the site, |
| 1:18.2 | Smith was only writing what everyone in the political press was already thinking and saying privately |
| 1:22.8 | in the filing center. President Obama had stumbled out of the gate. Reporters on Twitter were |
| 1:28.8 | expressing this view. Television executives reading Twitter were encouraging their analysts to have |
| 1:34.1 | the same view, even though the debate had still about an hour to go. David Axelrod, a top |
| 1:39.5 | advisor to President Obama, told Peter Hamby, who was then of CNN and who wrote a report about Twitter |
| 1:45.6 | and the campaign for the Schorinstein Center at Harvard. One thing was clear was that the Republican-oriented |
| 1:52.1 | tweeters and also their influence on what reporters were tweeting was far more effective in that |
| 1:58.1 | debate, continuing with Axelrod. and we really beefed up on those efforts |
| 2:01.9 | in the second and third debate. These tweets tend to frame how people are reading this, |
... |
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