Gone to the dogs

Voters are disengaged, and the media are restive and unhappy
about it. But don't blame the moronic undecideds -- blame it on a
post-political system that rewards money, moderation, and mush

by Dan Kennedy

As anyone who's heard the phrase "attack-dog politics" or "dogging one's opponent" knows, canine metaphors are hardy perennials along the campaign trail. The October 16 issue of Newsweek, however, introduced something entirely new. You could call it "dogged analysis," but that would hardly begin to do justice to the depth of the contempt it displayed toward those insufferable undecided voters, toward the issues around which George W. Bush and Al Gore have built their dispiriting presidential campaigns, even toward the political process itself. "Going to the dogs" is more like it.

A four-page fold-out chart titled "Family Fundamentals" depicts what is supposed to be a typical American family: a white, prosperous-looking middle-aged couple, their teenage daughter, their preadolescent son, and Grandma. All five ask questions about where the candidates stand on various issues -- worded, in most cases, to make them appear as selfish and self-obsessed as possible. ("We really could use some help with these taxes. Who will get us more money?" "Can either of these guys keep the price at the pump down?" "Both of them help us pay my tuition bills, but I'll still have to wait tables.") Next to their concerns are thumbnail descriptions of where the candidates stand.

In the fold-out chart, the only intellectual substance is reserved for the family's golden retriever, who complains, "Middle-class humans are so self-centered," and demands answers about the failed drug war, the threat of nuclear catastrophe, relations with an ever-more-powerful China, and the gap between rich and poor. "The next president will have to handle a complex series of unpredictable and rapidly changing technological, economic, and environmental problems in the context of disorienting globalization. Bow-wow!" proclaims what is indisputably the most sentient being in the room. Alas, Fido -- unlike his dimwitted masters -- does not receive a response to his concerns.

There are just two and a half weeks to go before Election Day, and the presidential race is the closest since 1960, when John F. Kennedy barely edged out Richard Nixon. Yet the public is tuning out. The broadcast networks scaled back their coverage of the staged, scripted conventions, and viewership of the parts that were broadcast was down considerably. The three presidential debates drew audiences of 47 million, 37 million, and 37 million -- barely two-thirds the number who watched in 1992, the last time the presidential race was hotly contested. The highly touted political Web sites fizzled; Voter.com, which boasts the presence of Watergate legend Carl Bernstein, announced layoffs in the middle of the campaign. Increasingly, political-news coverage is targeted toward the niche audience that watches the Sunday-morning talk shows and the all-news cable networks: readers of elite national newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post and political magazines like the pro-Gore New Republic and the pro-Bush Weekly Standard.

In the past few weeks, it has become especially fashionable among the media to bash the undecided focus groups: the pathologically uninformed stars of the post-debate shows. This past weekend, for instance, they were skewered unmercifully on Saturday Night Live, which has captured the political pulse this fall better than it has in years. At one point during a debate sketch, Bush practically begs a woman who says she's pro-choice, opposed to big oil companies, and in favor of HMO reform to vote for Gore, yet she continues to insist she can't make up her mind.

A front-page analysis in the October 17 Wall Street Journal by John Harwood and Jackie Calmes put it this way: "Many undecided voters may resolve their doubts less by sifting through the issues than by forming general impressions of the candidates in the campaign's final days. `These soft voters do not have a coherent set of beliefs,' says one senior Bush campaign strategist. `If we hear more about "Gore the Fibber" than "Bush the Bumbler," that would do it.' "

The Journal adds, "Right now, it appears that the election will turn on who among them actually shows up to vote." God help us.

"At some point in an election, an `undecided voter' becomes a euphemism for stupid and lazy, and that time is now," says Tucker Carlson, a staff writer for the Weekly Standard and a commentator for CNN. Carlson's solution: don't encourage them. "We've got to stop pretending that everyone should vote. Maybe democracy by the interested is good."

Of course, it's easy to sneer at the undecided voters, and, yes, they richly deserve it. But they are a symptom, not a cause, of what's gone wrong in the current campaign. The Bush-Gore snorefest is the entirely predictable outcome of a system that weeds out interesting candidates before the campaign even begins, that deliberately focuses on the least informed, least interested voters, and that requires any candidate who wishes to succeed to raise tens of millions of dollars before the campaign gets under way (see "Game, Set, Match," News and Features, December 31, 1999). Then, too, in a media-driven environment that plays up the importance of individuals and plays down political parties, the fact that one candidate is a Democrat and the other a Republican -- which says more about their political philosophies than a year's worth of sighs and smirks -- is rarely even mentioned.

George W. Bush and Al Gore -- cautious, centrist, establishment candidates -- were anointed by their parties' heavy hitters years before the election. The only people who dared to mount serious challenges -- John McCain and Bill Bradley -- were themselves cautious, centrist, establishment candidates, albeit with a reformist bent. Each was swept away within weeks of the New Hampshire primary.

Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Harry Browne, et al. argue that the problem with this year's campaign is that third-party candidates have been shut out. They're wrong -- although it is regrettable that they weren't invited at least to the first debate. The real problem is that legitimate outsiders such as Nader and Buchanan have been so marginalized by big money and the ridiculously short primary season that they were virtually forced to run as third-party candidates rather than in the Democratic and Republican primaries.

Our presidential, winner-take-all system -- unlike a European-style parliamentary democracy, where small parties can play an influential role -- all but guarantees that the contest will be fought between two major parties. Yet increasingly, only well-funded, noncontroversial, experienced candidates can afford to run. (Unless you're Alan Keyes, in which case you don't care that no one actually votes for you.) Eugene McCarthy, who knocked off Lyndon Johnson in 1968, George McGovern, who won the Democratic nomination in 1972, and Jimmy Carter, who was elected president in 1976, would not have been able to run in the 2000 primaries any more than Nader and Buchanan.

Gore and Bush, then, are the products of a system designed to be as safe and predictable as possible. Given that, it's hardly fair to blame the public for being disengaged.

TO FIGURE out what's gone wrong with politics, you need look no further than the October 16 New Yorker -- the "Politics Issue," with a wistful Bill Clinton riding off into the sunset. Inside, Nicholas Lemann pays a visit to Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the focus-group Svengali who, before becoming a star on MSNBC, helped Newt Gingrich put together the Contract with America.

Luntz's methodology, according to Lemann, is to assemble groups of undecided voters, prod them into talking about their concerns, and put their language into the mouths of candidates. In Lemann's estimation, the focus groups put together by Luntz and others like him become the "Word Lab" that manufactures the bland, content-free rhetoric that has come to characterize political discourse -- Bush's "real plans for real people," for instance, or the "risky tax schemes" that Gore has accused Bush of promulgating. "Since the whole point of a Word Lab is to find out what voters already think and then design rhetoric to persuade them that politicians agree with it, the process leads to politicians' being shaped by, rather than shaping, public opinion," Lemann writes.

But whom is this rhetoric being aimed at? Not all voters, certainly. Most people, after all, decided whom they would support a long time ago. According to a recent survey by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, Bush has the backing of 88 percent of Republicans, and Gore has attracted 80 percent of Democrats. Thus, the poll-driven, focus-group-tested issues Gore and Bush are emphasizing -- prescription-drug benefits, Social Security reform, sex-obsessed TV shows, and the like -- are aimed not at the engaged citizens who've already made up their minds, but at the disengaged independents who wear their lack of party loyalty as if it were a badge of pride, but who in fact are clueless about the single most important difference between Gore and Bush.

You wouldn't know it to listen to them squabble about minor policy differences and talk about how much they agree with each other on certain issues, but Gore -- the last time anyone checked -- was still a Democrat, and Bush was a Republican. Yes, as Ralph Nader never tires of pointing out, each favors so-called free-trade agreements of the sort that have become the subject of international protests, each favors capital punishment, each is decidedly pro-business. Even so, you can discern entire world-views in their party affiliations. Gore wants a limited tax cut targeted toward middle-class families; he favors affirmative action; he would push for stricter environmental regulations; he is emphatically pro-choice; and he has a long record of promoting equality under the law for lesbians and gay men. Bush wants a huge tax cut that would mainly benefit the rich; he opposes affirmative action (or favors affirmative "access," or whatever); his environmental record in Texas is horrendous; he is anti-choice, and has cited ultraconservative Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas as models; and, despite refreshingly inclusive rhetoric from him and especially from his running mate, Dick Cheney, he is exceedingly unlikely to use federal law to break down the legal barriers that still relegate gays to the status of second-class citizens.

The point is that these are not just personal positions; they are party positions, and they define a large part of what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat. Party affiliation and identification, though, have become unfashionable, as even the parties themselves seek to play down their ideological edges -- witness the Republican Party's Disneyfied convention in Philadelphia, where the only partisan moment that took place all week was Dick Cheney's deliciously Darth Vader-like speech. ("It's time, it's time for them to go.") According to news reports, about 15 percent of voters are independent, as opposed to fewer than one percent 40 years ago. In Massachusetts, there are more independent voters (1,909,491) than Democrats and
Republicans put together (1,865,939). Yet as recently as 1988, there were
more Democrats in Massachusetts than independents.

So what happened? In large part, television and the role of the media supplanted the old party structures. Television thrives on personal drama, on personality, and this has led to the rise of candidates who are essentially on their own -- running independent of their parties, or even against them (think Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1976, or Gary Hart in 1984). As Alan Ehrenhalt put it in his 1991 book The United States of Ambition: "The skills that work in American politics at this point in history are those of entrepreneurship. At all levels of the political system, from local boards and councils up to and including the presidency, it is unusual for parties to nominate people. People nominate themselves. That is, they offer themselves as candidates, raise money, organize campaigns, create their own publicity, and make decisions in their own behalf."

With the votes of partisan Democrats and Republicans already in their pockets, and with the undecideds eschewing any sort of party or ideological identification, Bush and Gore have every incentive to design their pitch for the 10 percent or so of the electorate who haven't made up their minds. Rather than any substantive discussion of race and the state of urban America, or a foreign-policy exchange that goes beyond sloganeering, we get lock boxes and fuzzy math and prescription-drug benefits -- right down to (as a hilarious debate parody making the rounds on the Internet puts it) a federal employee showing up on the doorstep of every senior citizen in the country to help remove the childproof cap.

Bush and Gore "have had a hard time finding much to disagree on, and I think that's very frustrating to people," said Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, part of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, during a recent appearance on WBUR Radio's The Connection. "I think people genuinely realize that they're choosing stylistics, not substance." Yet Jones acknowledged that there are huge differences between Gore and Bush on vital issues that they're not talking about -- such as abortion rights and the Star Wars missile-defense system.

Thus it's not surprising that the public judged Gore and Bush to have done more or less equally well (or badly) in the debates. On debating points, Gore overwhelmed Bush in their first and third encounters, leaving his opponent looking disastrously uninformed. Gore hurt himself, however, by going into full pander mode, coming across as though there wasn't anything he wouldn't do or say to ensure his election. That was far more unattractive than his supposed ill manners. And with Gore (like Bush) deliberately playing down real differences on big issues between Democrats and Republicans (as opposed to playing up the minor, personal differences he has with Bush on how frequently to test public-school students), the undecideds had no compelling reason to move to his side.

WITH THE traditional political-media complex breaking down,
the candidates have increasingly turned to alternative media -- and the media themselves have mutated in unusual and interesting ways. Network shows such as Meet the Press and This Week remain highly influential, but their audience of political junkies and decision-makers is not particularly large. Their main value comes when news is made, and excerpts are played later in the day on TV newscasts and reported in the next day's papers.

But politicians are no longer satisfied with such trickle-down media, and are increasingly turning to the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Regis Philbin, David Letterman, and Jay Leno to reach a wider audience. This phenomenon is not entirely new; Bill Clinton's sax-playing appearance on Arsenio Hall's show in 1992 helped save what was then a candidacy on the ropes. But Bush and Gore have taken this to another level, treating non-political talk shows as though they were just another stop along the campaign trail. (Gore took the alternative-media thing to a new low last week with his, uh, upstanding appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone. Hey, big guy, is that a hard-money contribution in your pocket or are you just glad to see us?)

By no means is this a bad thing. The public deserves a chance to see the candidates in as many -- and as many different kinds of -- forums as possible. Besides, as Jake Tapper noted in Salon last Friday, Letterman -- while not exactly adopting Ted Koppel's prosecutorial style -- was actually better about asking Bush follow-up questions than many "real" journalists have been, pressing him repeatedly about the death penalty and about what the American response should be to the terrorist attack on the USS Cole.

Tapper makes a rather traditional critique of the political press: that the candidates are talking about issues, but the media aren't covering them. "I certainly have been talking about the personal styles of Bush and Gore, but not to the exclusion of their positions," he told the Phoenix. "Of course, there's no overwhelming issue like there was in '92," when the country was slipping into recession and the federal budget deficit was raging out of control. "But to anyone who's ever been denied coverage by an HMO, the right to sue is a very important issue. I really think that one of the problems in this campaign is that just about all of us in the press box are upper-middle-class or more. I think if it was a requirement that to be a member of the national press you could only make $22,000 a year, you'd see much different coverage."

Tapper makes a good point, but it's just the slightest bit off-target -- just as it is with Paul Taylor, the free-time-for-candidates advocate who, according to Howard Kurtz's media column in Monday's Washington Post, is trying to shame ABC's local television stations into providing more-substantive coverage of the presidential candidates. It's like the debate over so-called civic journalism, in which the media attempt to hold candidates to account on a series of substantive issues. It works when the candidates themselves are making a serious attempt to address real concerns. But when the entire process becomes a cynical exercise in appealing to the uninformed with focus-group-tested catch phrases and clichés and lies (as Tapper notes, Bush is now attempting to take credit for a patients' bill of rights in Texas that he fought against tooth and nail), a press that focuses on sober-minded analysis of the issues is approximately as useful as a pianist who plays Chopin in the front parlor of a whorehouse.

That's why, increasingly, news consumers -- especially younger ones -- are getting their politics from late-night comedy programs such as Letterman, Leno, Politically Incorrect, The Daily Show, and Saturday Night Live. Harvard's Vanishing Voter Project recently found that only 14 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds planned to watch all or most of the first presidential debate. Yet a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that 47 percent of Americans in the same age group obtain at least some of their presidential-campaign news from the comedy shows. "The link between politics and comedy is now fully institutionalized," wrote Marshall Sella in the September 24 New York Times Magazine, citing the Pew survey as evidence for his conclusions. "News outlets now present comedians not as escapists from hard news but as legitimate commentators upon it."

And if you can't beat them, join them. That's the only possible explanation for a story by Hank Stuever in Monday's Washington Post, headlined IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO WHO'S CUTER. To wit: "Women trust Al -- he's sturdyish, recycles, enjoys camping, wants to save money for the future he feels you'll spend together. Men are more charmed by Dubya -- he's likable, sporty, has stock tips, winks, seems like he'd blow hilarious snot rockets and have towel fights in the locker room. So who's cuter? The United States is being such a girl about it. Which is why the United States can't
decide."

TO BE SURE, there are good reasons for this year's disconnect between the public and the politicians (and the media that cover them). For one thing, we are living in a time of unparalleled prosperity. Even the much-vaunted gap between rich and poor, though still distressingly large, has been closing during the past couple of years, as the African-American unemployment rate has fallen to a record low. "The way the public shows its appreciation for good times is total and complete avoidance of the political process," says Massachusetts Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, who worked on Bill Bradley's doomed presidential campaign.

Then, too, the ideological wars of recent years have burned themselves out. The failure of the Clinton health-care plan marked the end of big-government liberalism. The Gingrich-inspired government shutdown resulted in the death of small-government (or no-government) conservatism. This is an era of divided government, of conservatives who want to appear compassionate, of liberals who promise to cut taxes and pay off the national debt. Al Gore and George W. Bush, decidedly prosaic politicians, also labor in the shadow of Bill Clinton, who combines a larger-than-life persona with a sleaziness that has sharply diminished the presidency. People may be detached in part because of a sense of contentment; but it's more complicated and more ominous than that. Beneath the fat-and-happy façade is a foreboding sense of disengagement.

David Brooks, of the Weekly Standard, got at it as well as anyone in two recent appearances on The NewsHour. "The election is happening as if across a crowded restaurant on television, or across a crowded nursery school," he said. The following week, he returned to that theme, commenting on the startlingly muted public response to the terrorist attack on the Cole. "You know, we went to war 100 years ago because someone sank a ship of ours," he said. "This time it was as if there were an airplane crash. People talked about the technical issues of the Cole, and the size of the boat. People felt sorry for the victims. But there seemed to me almost an amazing lack of indignation, and an absence of `let's go get these guys' -- you know, `let's get really fired up about this' -- which is a piece of the complacency that has surrounded the whole race."

Brooks is on to something, and he came even closer in observing how much more comfortable and normal-seeming running mates Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney are than Gore and Bush -- and how that says something deeply disturbing about the way we pick presidents.

The truth is that everything that's wrong with Campaign 2000 was perfectly clear by the end of 1999. The rise of the undecided, uninformed voter, the disengagement, the restive political press, the increasing influence of comedy shows, the marginalization of non-mainstream candidates such as Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan -- all of these are the direct result of a system that rewards insider candidates who can talk moderate mush out of one side of their mouths and persuade well-heeled contributors to write checks out of the other side; who can tolerate, and even thrive on, the freakish fishbowl existence of a modern presidential campaign; and who have shed every rough edge or interesting quirk many, many years ago.

Right now, amid good times, voters are disengaged. Come the next economic downturn or foreign crisis, though, that disengagement will turn into disenchantment, or even alienation. It was there in 1992, when Ross Perot won 19 percent of the general vote. It was there in 1996, when Buchanan and his pitchfork peasants won the New Hampshire primary. Even this year, it was there in the streets of Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and it continues to show up in the huge crowds Nader draws.

Next time, the dog that didn't bark -- except in the pages of Newsweek -- will demand to be heard. Woof!

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.