Insider Baseball Quotes

“What continued to dominate the rhetoric of the 1988 campaign, however, was not this awareness of a new and different world but nostalgia for an old one, and coded assurance that any evidence of ambiguity or change, of what George Bush called the “deterioration of values,” would be summarily dealt with by increased social control.”
― Joan Didion, Insider Baseball

“This perfect recycling tended to present itself, in the narcosis of the event, as a model for the rest: like American political life itself, and like the printed and transmitted images on which that life depended, this was a world with no half-life. It was understood that what was said here would go on the wire and vanish.”
― Joan Didion, Insider Baseball

“The folks in the hall are so important to how it looks,” Lane Venardos, senior producer in charge of convention coverage for CBS News, said to The New York Times about the Republican convention. The delegates, in other words, were the dress extras who could make the set seem authentic.”
― Joan Didion, Insider Baseball

“This notion, that the citizen’s choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a “difference,” is in fact the narrative’s most central element, and its most fictive.”
― Joan Didion, Insider Baseball

“All stories, of course, depend for their popular interest upon the invention of personality, or “character,” but in the political narrative, designed as it is to maintain the illusion of consensus by obscuring rather than addressing actual issues, this invention served a further purpose.”
― Joan Didion, Insider Baseball

“It is understood that this invented narrative will turn on certain familiar elements. There is the continuing story line of the “horse race,” the reliable daily drama of one candidate falling behind as another pulls ahead. There is the surprise of the new poll, the glamour of the one-on-one colloquy on the midnight plane, a plot point (the nation sleeps while the candidate and his confidant hammer out its fate) pioneered by Theodore H. White. There is the abiding if unexamined faith in the campaign as personal odyssey, and in the spiritual benefits accruing to those who undertake it.”
― Joan Didion, Insider Baseball

“The narrative is made up of many such understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic story line.”
― Joan Didion, Insider Baseball