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August 02, 2004

It's the Kerry and Edwards Show!

(That title works very well with the Itchy and Scratchy jingle. Try it right now.)

Matt Yglesias notes:

(T)he race for the presidency does seem to get orders of magnitude more attention than the others. The convention, in particular, was more like The John Kerry Show, Also Featuring Bill Clinton, Barak Obama, and John Edwards than The Democratic National Convention, Starring John Kerry.

I can't deny this, because it was absolutely true. The level of excitement and the feverish pitch of the cheering built up slowly over the four days, as more and more delegates and media deigned to show up to listen to the speakers. And everything - everything - was, quite understandably, about Kerry in the end.

This shouldn't be surprising. In today's political climate, where the personal touch trumps even the most brilliant speaker or rational mind, and where a politician's choice of tie or birthplace is treated as something to be revered or castigated, we should expect that politicians will be packaged not as decision makers but as stories or narratives. And it's hard to keep track of multiple narratives in all the cringingly gory detail that is often presented in the mainstream media (Kerry eats pb&j on the campaign trail made for him by his personal butler! Edwards' face looks funny when he speaks!). If every single politician was subject to this sort of mythologizing narration, media pipelines everywhere would explode and spew their pointless information sludge all over America. (Perhaps this is what Tom Ridge was referring to when he raised the terror alert.)

So, the media picks and chooses. Of course, the people with interesting stories, like Jack Ryan, get reams of newsprint, but otherwise only the most important candidates are singled out. Tom DeLay may be just as bad as President Bush, just as Obama may have all of Kerry's best characteristics and more. But concentrating on both to the extent that the media has been trained to do would fry the circuits, so to speak.

Unless TV networks decide either to tone down their personal coverage of all politicians equally, this situation must continue or risk confusing or overwhelming voters with far too much trivial information about far too many people. In the same way that too many characters in a film can result in an overall disorientation and probable dislike of the movie, a concentration on too many politicians in the party can also backfire. Most voters just want to know about their local Congressional races, and the Presidency - force-feeding them more than that will always be a losing strategy.

Posted at 11:06 AM in Political Parties | Permalink

Comments

Building Kerry up at the expense of the rest of the Democratic Party may have been necessary - we do need to boot Bush out of the White House, after all - but it may have some unfortunate, unintended consequences. Bill Clinton was a great president, but during his 8 years in office, the Democratic Party did lose control of both houses of Congress, lost a number of governorships, etc. (Not saying this is Clinton's fault, but he did have a tendency to boost himself and care less than perhaps he should have about other Democrats.)

The man at the top is important, but not exclusively so and especially not at the expense of the party.

Posted by: Tom Beck | August 02, 2004 at 12:52 PM

Perhaps I made my point rather badly. I'm not saying that Democrats have built up the presidency over everyone else, I'm saying that they HAVE to build up the presidency over anyone else because of the way politicians are reported on nowadays. If there was more local rather than national coverage, I think it would be possible to pay attention to individual candidates in local markets. But with the centralization of the news media, it becomes impossible to do in-depth coverage of the congressional and mayoral races. How a news company based in New York or Washington can hope to adequately cover the house races in Texas or a governor battle in New Hampshire is beyond me, and is apparently beyond them too - hence the focus on the national race.

With centralization of the media comes centralization of the political coverage on one single race, the only pan-American race: the presidency.

Posted by: Zoe | August 02, 2004 at 01:35 PM

Zoe I would also contend that the media convers the presidency the most because that is where people, the voters, have concentrated their attention and effort since modern journalism existed.

Presidential election years have had greater turnout since we have kept accurate statistics on the subject. They get more coverage and more attention because the Presidency has a myth as well as an importance. It is rare that a seat in congress has a mythic quality to it, in fact, it almost never has (the last and possibly only time being the era of Webster, Calhoun, and Clay -- and even each one of them fought for the Presidency). That in itself creates better stories, the mythic figures of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts hang over every Presidential race. Whereas the mayors, congressmen and have few and far between to complicit such granduer and myth.

It is a problem with our democracy I agree ... but is it because we romaticize the Presidency too much or the mayors, congressmen, and governors too litte?

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August 02, 2004

It's the Kerry and Edwards Show!

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