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November 17, 2003

The battle inside...

Jay Rosen laments a politics that's "dumber than spam." Having a split professional personality, I agree 50 percent. The press-politics critic in me (the scholar part) agrees 100 percent that this is a bad situation:

What you get from a campaign by the numbers is the ads. That’s how the consultants, handlers, funders and candidates have agreed to play: your ads against my ads. The candidates themselves are often turned into ads, for that is what it means to stay mindlessly "on message"-- you become a walking ad.

Further, these candidates-as-ads are deployed, for the most part, only in the "battleground" states, and their messages are focused on the so-called "undecided" voters, making this minority far more important to an election than, perhaps, they should be. Our current media environment is largely to blame in this state of affairs. And that includes the gradual breakdown of old-time party politics, i.e. a situation in which most voters identify strongly with a certain party for concrete, if not always well-articulated, political reasons. The reforms of the Progressive Era began chipping away at the foundations of party politics. The emotionalism of television delivered the final blow.

Rosen explains how it works in terms of numbers and strategy:

To win you have to move the numbers. To move the numbers you have to target movable voters. So the first thing you do is forget about the non-voters. That's 50 percent of the country right there. They can leave the auditorium. (Losers.) Then you dismiss the states that are sold on Bush or sold on Gore. Gone are the people living in at least 33 of the 50 states, (those idiots) leaving no more than seventeen actually to think about. Here the press will help you out with its savvy references to “key battleground states,” which makes it sound reasonable to ignore all the others. (Those foolish states.)

Then within the "battleground" states, polling will identify the likely voters hopelessly sold on Bush or hopelessly sold on Gore, which is most people. (Pathetic creatures.) That leaves you with a handful of undecided voters, (the blessed) in the states that count. They are the electorate. Here the press comes to your aid again by fixing on undecided voters in "swing states" because it's trying to be a savvy analyst and it knows how the operatives think.

After all, what other logic is there?

This is where the political-communicator in me--that other half (maybe it's only a third)--begins to disagree. Rosen doesn't like this state of affairs, just as the scholar me doesn't and for many of the same reasons. But the political-communicator me says: "Yeah, but, the axiom of democratic governance is: You can't lead if you don't win. And you can't win in America being Vaclav Havel." Bucking the system, even one dumber than spam, is a sure route to loss of leadership--a form of political death. That's dumb!

The scholar me is more me than the other guy. So I applaud Rosen's effort here, and I highly recommend it to Rhetorica readers (and notice the use of anaphora at the end of the post--excellent rhetoric!).

It can be the case that such is our media environment and political system. It cannot be the case that we accept it without trying to change it.

Posted by acline at November 17, 2003 11:43 AM | | Spotlight