Reason #4,350 for why people who despise political maneuvering can't stop watching it

The narrative is made up of many . . . understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic story line. . . .

[On Michael Dukakis's speech during the last night of the 1988 Democratic Convention:] "The best speech of his life," David Broder reported. Sandy Grady found it "superb," evoking "Kennedyesque echoes" and showing "unexpected craft and fire." Newsweek had witnessed Michael Dukakis "electrifying the convention with his intensely personal acceptance speech." In fact the convention that evening had been electrified, not by the speech, which was the same series of nonsequential clauses Governor Dukakis had employed during the primary campaign ("My friends . . . son of immigrants . . . good jobs at good wages . . . make teaching a valued and honored profession . . . it's what the Democratic Party is all about"), but because the floor had been darkened, swept with laser beams, and flooded with "Coming to America," played at concert volume with the bass turned up.

[from Joan Didion's essay "Insider Baseball"]