The Frankfurter School

It should come as no surprise that John McCain’s running mate has an unmarried pregnant teenage daughter.  In a campaign that is solely about narrative, with characters and scene-by-scene conflicts that are crafted only to arouse sympathy, anger and ultimately the biggest audiences, what better twist could there be than to include a teenage pregnancy at the beginning of the third act.

This is human drama at its highest level, and Sarah Palin, who is running for Soccer-Mom-in-Chief is a shoo-in for awards season.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the McCain campaign already knew about this because if they’ve been following the numbers for this story line on film and TV, this was the best thing they could do for their ratings.

One of the surprise television hits of the year has been ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which tells the story of how a family deals with an unmarried teen’s pregnancy, and I bet you know how that story ends (and it isn’t with an abortion).  This closely follows the cheery and cheeky but oh-so-sweet movie Juno, about a teenager who didn’t mean to get pregnant, but after considering all of her options realized that carrying the baby to term and finding it a good adoptive home is the best way to live her life.  This movie was a hit at the box office last year and surprised everyone with Oscar nominations at year’s end.  Clearly, teen pregnancy is a story that is quite resonant with audiences, especially since they all make the surprising choice to keep their babies, no matter how unpopular that idea seems at first.

Narrative has overtaken journalism in American culture, and there is no “news” anymore that isn’t a “story.”  Reporting that contains characters you can identify with, a clear conflict, and a surprising outcome now completely dominates our news coverage.  Initially this was a style called New Journalism when it was became popular two decades ago but now it is neither “new” nor “journalism.”

Whether you see Sarah Palin as a hero or villain in the story of this campaign, she is exactly the kind of character that we are accustomed to from movies and television, and she brings familiar and relatable stories to the news cycle.  Whatever her policies may be (and they will hardly matter), her inclusion in this race may have been one of the savviest character choices anyone has ever made in order to hit all Four Quadrants of the marketing department’s audience analysis for this election movie.

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