Nasty=fun, policy=boring…
Among the many interesting moments in our discussion on Radio Rhetorica yesterday, Jay Manifold and I attributed the potential nastiness of the presidential campaign, among other things, to intra-generational conflict, i.e. two idealist Boomers fighting, as Boomers do, a campaign of vanquishment.
For background in this contention, you should read Generations, by Neil Howe and William Strauss.
For other clues to the potency of this conflict, you might also read Moral Politics, by George Lakoff. It adds a further dimension to the generational contention.
There are, quite obviously, many other reasons to suppose this will be a particularly nasty fight–not the least of which is the fact that it’s already fairly nasty months prior to the conventions.
Is a nasty campaign bad for politics, governance, and civic participation? Good question, and I’m not sure anyone has a good answer (meaning: hard data rather than speculation). I do suspect that the coverage of a campaign as a nasty campaign may alienate some voters. In other words, if nastiness becomes the master narrative, what will connect the people to the political process?
(I’m assuming now one of the central values of civic or public journalism: That the press should help make public life “work.”)
Day to day, most people are concerned with the details of their lives (now there’s a revelation!). These are important details that often intersect with governance and, therefore, questions of policy. This may be why we hear citizens ask policy questions in public forums. My evidence is purely anecdotal, but it seems to me that the average Joe doesn’t care much for the politics of politics, i.e. the process, the horse race, the nastiness. I think most people just want politicians to do a good job of running the republic. Here’s a moment from MSNBC’s Hardball that illustrates the point (analyst Frank Luntz speaking to Chris Matthews following a round-table discussion with voters):
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I have to say, up front, that I find your idealism charming, especially in someone your age. Unfortunately, it’s also aggravating. I know the Democrats say that character doesn’t matter, but what else do we have? Time after time, we have seen elected presidents reject what they averred as candidates. Only partisans make an issue of this – the rest of us realize that life in the Oval Office is not the same as life outside it. You cannot count on what a candidate says is his policy, because the realists amoung us know this can and will change. All that is left, is what you deride as “leadership-honesty-vision”. It also sets up the President as God, where his wishes and desires are absolute, without acknowledging that the Congress is involved, as well as the wishes of “the people”. How many really believe that the President drives the economy? Except for foreign policy, to a certain degree, what could any president do without approval of Congress? This why the Policy v. Personality issue is a canard. POTUS is not all-powerful, he is only presented as such by a national press not interested in doing the heavy lifting of true political reporting.
Oops–”someone your age” was a cheap shot–my apologies.
R- How on earth did you manage to read that as 1- a partisan rant and 2- some idealized image of the presidency?
But, Dr. Cline, as much as I like your description of an electorate interested in policy, all the conventional wisdom of those who make their livings selling audiences to advertisers denies it.
For years I’ve been reading and hearing journalists complain that policy reporting doesn’t sell papers or get ratings. Yes, the horserace stuff is easy to write, but it’s also easy to read; I suspect that news organizations would put more resources into reporting on governance if they felt there was an audience for it. They may be wrong, and you may be right, but it seems likelier to me that they are right, and that we are all doomed, doomed, doomed.
I really should have kept track, over the last ten years, of the times a friend has brought up a topic that, he or she declares, isn’t being reported. I almost always reply that it has been in the newspapers almost every day, or in radio reports on NPR, or in magazines. It frequently turns out that those friends don’t read a daily paper, only listen to an hour or so of NPR a day (while dressing, or driving to work), and don’t read serious magazines on the topics that interest them (Foreign Policy, for instance, or the International Labor Review, or even the Economist or the Nation). So, if my friends who are all, by the bye, serious, intelligent, wonderful people, and who by their own admission not only crave good journalism but are outraged by its absence don’t spend their money or time buying it, who will?
Here, again, I wonder if poliblogs will largely change this, once a tenth or more of the population reads some. Once people are used to googling for their news, they may become used to finding reports that already exist. It may be easier to make a profit working to the demand you suggest exists. I hope so. I sure hope so.
But then, I’m depressed about the media this week, and about much else. Perhaps my Giants will start winning games, and everything will get brighter…
Redintegro Iraq,
-V.
V- I enjoyed your response (Rebecca’s too…although I’m giving her a little hell
Does the study exist that proves people don’t want to read boring policy articles? I doubt it. But–duh!–no one wants to read any “boring” article
The only reason policy articles are boring is that’s the way they are written much of the time. Journalists seem to forget their training when it comes to these articles, i.e. they all too often fail to look for the human angle, the compelling story. This requires, however, that they avoid the status quo bias, i.e. they must look beyond establishment sources.
A great example of this kind of reporting appeared in the Kansas city Star a few weeks ago–a series on making it in America as a full-time worker earning poverty-level wages. Geez, it was good stuff!
I doubt most readers find horse-race coverage interesting. It’s been well proven that this type of coverage dominates political journalism. People don’t like reading about politics. Hmmmm… 1 + 1 = ?
Jeez Doc, how did you come to the conclusion that my comments were a “partisan rant”? I didn’t “idealize” the presidency, I was commenting about those who place policy over personality/character/vision/whatever. Character is all we have to guide us since policy will change once the candidate enters the WH. I’m afraid we have another failure to communicate here. Hey V – welcome to the club – I’m ALWAYS depressed about the press!
R-
Okay, but there is one thing I’d like to “correct” for you. I’ve read a study that demonstrates clearly that presidents in the 20th C. kept about 75 percent of the campaign promises. That tells me it’s a misconception to suppose that “policy changes,” or, rather (since there are individual examples to the contrary), that all presidents change policy as a matter of course.
I suspect that most political involvement by average Americans is motivated by a direct threat and oriented toward managing risk. This helps keep American politics relatively nonideological and focused on specific policy questions. We want to know what those people are going to do for us — and what they’re going to have to do to us in order to provide the services we want; TANSTAAFL.
Obviously, some people get politically involved over “sexy” issues, usually Federal. A notable exception is 1st Amendment battles in public schools, which are resolved mainly at the state level. And fights do attract attention, so “nastiness” isn’t necessarily a turnoff.
But overt ideologists are nearly always regarded as extremists. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is about all the ideology most of us seem to need — or are comfortable with.
The focus on the practical is also an attempt to deal with the reality that in politics, no one individual gets what s/he wants. Even in a system the size of the Federal House of Representatives, there are 435 interactors (which computes to 94,395 possible two-way channels of communication), and the chance of any one of them successfully imposing a complete agenda (as opposed to the occasional bit of pork) on the rest is effectively nil.
Americans therefore, notwithstanding a lack of explicit understanding of how things work (or don’t) in government, intuitively realize that the more narrowly defined a candidate’s proposals are, the better their chance of at least partial realization. So we hammer them for specifics.
In this context, if American Presidents are really batting .750, then either they’re not promising much or keeping the promises vague and generally unmeasurable. Probably both.
Jay…re: the .750 batting average. Yes, that’s exactly what the data show: the promises among the 75% are nearly all specific to presidential prerogative (Carter: re-organize the White House) or “easy” in the socio-political context of the moment (Bush: tax cuts). Where presidents fail in keeping promises: 1- Specific policy over which they have no power and the socio-political contexts are against them, and 2- The vision thing, i.e. big fuzzy promises that have few concrete indicators of success (so rivals may spin the results in ways that make the president appear “ineffective”). My essay on the linguistic and rhetorical structure of campaign promises (due out in the 2nd edition of “Word Politics”–eds. Skidmore and Cline) deals with how to construct and report promises based on political fit, i.e. what’s possibly in a given situation.
Hmmm … sounds like a “promise process.” Take another look at that Deming Workbench.
Yep…it is a process, and the workbench model plays a role.