Robert Mueller and the Tyranny of ‘Optics’
How did he look? (Old, halting, at times confused). What did he say? (Not enough). How did he say it? (Monosyllabically, whenever possible). The first stretch of Robert Mueller’s grueling marathon testimony had barely ended when the national commentariat concluded that he’d had just about his worst day since an AK-47 round pierced his thigh in Vietnam 50 years ago.
“DAZED AND CONFUSED” was the Drudge Report’s blaring headline. But the Twitter verdict of NBC’s sober-sided Chuck Todd was almost as severe: “On substance, Democrats got what they wanted,” Todd wrote. “But on optics, this was a disaster.”
—the kryptonite of the modern media age, the glimmering, crystalline material that can subsume substance at every treacherous turn. Or as the former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett on Twitter: “When
