Our Virtual Primaries
by Jonathan Schell
The Nation magazine, Feb. 7, 2000
As the first voting of the 2000 presidential election approaches,
in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries, public disinterest
is palpable. There is simply no felt need for an election right
now. For the most part, people seem indifferent to politics, as
they have more or less since the end of the cold war. The fortunes
of the Dow Jones average-and, even more these days, of the NASDAQ-absorb
them far more than those of Bill Bradley, Al Gore, John McCain
and George Bush. If the low turnout in the last Congressional
election (36 percent) has not left anyone in doubt about this,
two recent polls-one by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, the
other by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University
of Pennsylvania-provided some striking particulars, including
the findings that 60 percent of the public thinks the campaign
is "boring" and that only 12 percent are paying either
"a great deal" or "quite a bit" of attention
to it. The respondents' level of knowledge about the candidates
was on a par with their degree of interest. According to the Shorenstein
poll, only 42 percent knew that Bill Bradley was a former basketball
star, only 32 percent knew that Al Gore was the son of a senator,
only 36 percent knew that John McCain is still a senator and only
12 percent knew that George Bush defines himself as a "compassionate
conservative." If the pulse of the body politic's interest
in its own activity were to get any weaker, you'd have to ask
if the patient was dead.
It is quite different, however, among a more limited group.
These are the political professionals, comprising, roughly, the
current officeholders, the candidates, the advisers and experts
to the candidates, the news media, the lobbyists and fund-raisers
in Washington and elsewhere, and other assorted petitioners to
power. While the public's fascination with politics has been waning,
theirs has been increasing. Although these groups quarrel viciously
among themselves, they have nevertheless come to constitute a
distinct class. In fact, their extreme partisanship, which seemingly
divides them, is one of their class characteristics. It is a characteristic
remarkably unshared by the public, which is as little divided
politically as it has been in the past fifty years. The impeachment
battle last winter was a striking case in point. A matter of obsessive
interest to the political class (I have to admit that I was a
member of this small minority), it was, after a flurry of prurient
interest, serenely disdained by most of the public. Like, say,
a power struggle at a Methodist convention, impeachment was of
absorbing interest to those involved but not much to anyone else.
You might, indeed, regard impeachment as having been a sort of
out-of-season election, as if the Washington political class,
disappointed that the framers of the Constitution had failed to
supply them with a struggle for the White House in 1998 or 1999,
had cooked one up for themselves.
This year, of course, the struggle for executive power has
been duly scheduled by the Constitution. Yet the gap between the
professionals' level of interest and the public's remains undiminished.
The professionals began to speak and write about the election
in earnest fully three years ago. As long ago as November of 1997,
for instance, there was a bout of "mentioning"-and so
of anointing- likely candidates for the Republican side. Early
in the month, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times visited Governor
George W. Bush in an early pilgrimage to Texas and remarked in
passing that a "former Bush official" (that is, a former
official in the administration of Bush pere) "thinks George
W. will be the next President," and threw in for good measure
the flattering view that "George W. is more like Reagan than
like Bush." Two weeks later, David Broder of the Washington
Post, often called the "dean" of columnists, wrote,
in an almost bald-faced "mention," that "three
years from now, he may have as good a chance at being elected
president as any Republican you can name." (In that column,
in which Bush is pictured "just back from a run" and
is described by an awestruck Broder as "laid back but still
very much in command," you can almost see the oil of anointment
being poured by Dean Broder's hand upon the pretender's head.)
It was around this time, too, that polling began in earnest. A
September 1997 Gallup poll of Republicans showed him in first
place among GOP contenders at 22 percent, and by February 1998
he was leading Gore in a New Hampshire poll. From then on, his
positive ratings continued to rise more or less evenly-figures
chewed over tirelessly on the growing multitude of political discussion
programs, in which such matters as the "negatives" of
candidate X, and the need of candidate Y to "secure his base,"
and the requirement that candidate Z "build a firewall"
in some state or other, were all thoroughly examined. How, we
may ask, has this state of affairs arisen? How has politics, which
is supposed to be the business of the entire society, become the
preserve of a professional class?
The beginning of an answer is that over the past several decades
such a development has for the first time become technically possible.
In earlier times, if the sap of popular interest failed to rise,
the political tree simply drooped or temporarily withered. The
Constitution, which provided for direct political participation
on election days but not otherwise, left any day-today politicking
up to the volunteer instinct. The result was that for most people
politics became a steady preoccupation only in times of exceptional
turmoil, such as depression or war. Otherwise, the elected representatives
were left, by constitutional design, to go about their business
with a certain independence. In recent times, however, what amounts
to an entrenched new system has grown up alongside the formal
constitutional one. Though its consequences for good or ill, which
are bound to be great, are not yet clear, its principal elements
can be identified. It rests on three legs: media, money and public-opinion
polling.
The media are both of the paid and the unpaid variety. It
is the need for paid media-above all, for television advertising,
which is the greatest expense in modern campaigns-that has summoned
forth the huge sums of money whose corruption of the political
process is now a prime campaign issue. The money in turn has monstrously
inflated the ranks of the army of lobbyists that has descended
upon Washington. If the candidates didn't need the large sums
of money required for the paid media, they would not need to alter
legislation to satisfy the lobbyists, whose influence would correspondingly
shrink. The season of paid advertising, moreover, has been extended
ever since, in the last presidential election, it occurred to
President Clinton's adviser Dick Morris to go on the air with
voluminous ads more than a full year before the election. (Industry,
too, has been in the political-ad business on its own behalf ever
since the healthcare industry's successful advertising campaign
against comprehensive healthcare.) As for the unpaid media, anyone
who has failed to notice the dominant of the sheer presence of
an inflated media establishment on politics has only to attend
a political convention. There, alongside the delegates, numbering
a few thousand, the observer will behold a fantastic sight. It
is the science-fiction-like media city that has sprung up alongside
it. Built of a sea of catering tents and other jerry-built contraptions,
and all the towers, cables, satellite antennae and trucks of the
media age, it supports the journalists and their technical crews,
who together outnumber the delegates (who usually have little
to decide in any case) by as much as eight or nine to one. Here,
the disproportion between what is being "covered" and
those "covering" it becomes visible to the naked eye.
The instant media cities are, of course, merely an outcropping
of the gigantic industries of the information age-industries as
immense and powerful and as thoroughly devoted to their aggrandizement,
growth and profit as any military-industrial complex. These are
industries, however, that, like the politicians they cover, feed
on public attention, and in fact would shrivel without it. To
attract that attention, they of course need stories, the bigger
the better. An O.J. Simpson trial or an impeachment is to these
industries what the B-2 bomber or the Seawolf submarine is to
the Pentagon. A presidential campaign, though not in a league
with O.J., is nevertheless a major story. Yet herein lies a problem.
How, in a political system that provides for a presidential election
only once every four years, can the story be sustained in the
fallow years-between a Dowd's or a Broder's "mention"
and the decision three years later? How can the story develop?
What will its events be?
That is where public-opinion polls come in. Their importance
is often underestimated. They are commonly seen merely as precursors
of elections. It would be more accurate, by now, to recognize
them as little elections in themselves. Last year a brief comedy
was enacted by the state of Louisiana when it sought to supplant
lowa as the first caucus state. Louisiana missed the point. The
supposedly first primary is already preceded by any number of
other de facto primaries: the Gallup primary, the Harris primary
and the Roper primary, to name just a few. Where is Representative
John Kasich now? Where is former Governor of California Pete Wilson?
Where are George Pataki, Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole? All
dreamed of the White House. All strove, to a greater or lesser
extent, to get there: All saw their hopes crushed by poll results
just as thoroughly as Alan Keyes's and Orrin Hatch's will certainly
be by the results in lowa and New Hampshire. Does anyone imagine
that these people would have dropped out of the race if, on the
morning of the day of decision, they had picked up the newspaper
to discover that they had poll numbers on a level with George
W. Bush's? Would Bill Bradley's campaign get the respectful coverage
it now receives if he had the undetectable support in the polls
enjoyed by Orrin Hatch? Would the press attach the word "quixotic"
to Hatch as if it were his middle name if his poll ratings were
equal to Bradley's?
myth has arisen that the primary campaign is driven above
all by fundraising, often called the "first primary."
The importance of money in politics-and the importance of getting
it out, through campaign finance reform-is decidedly great, and
the new parallel system that is growing up around the traditional
constitutional one would grind to a halt without it. But fundraising
is no more the first primary than is New Hampshire. Consider Bush's
progress. His rise in the polls began, as mentioned, in late 1997
(the key event was probably Colin Powell's withdrawal from consideration
as a presidential candidate that November). Bush's fundraising
didn't begin to show its remarkable success until the beginning
of 1999. After eight years of Bill Clinton, the Republican Party
above all else wanted a winner. It was Bush's consistently high
poll numbers-in match-ups not only with other Republican candidates
but, more important, with Al Gore-that identified him as that
winner.
Bush had a double advantage in the polls. First, the fact
that he was the son of his father the President gave him (or perhaps
gave some blurry composite image of father and son) almost 100
percent name recognition-a result other politicians can strive
in vain for a lifetime to achieve. Second, his great popularity
in Texas gave him a natural springboard to national popularity.
Indeed, in the context of modern politics, the old adage that
nothing succeeds like success could be rewritten as nothing succeeds
like high poll numbers. With these in hand, all good things-money,
endorsements, good news coverage (when did you last read about
the "stumbling" of a candidate who had just risen in
the polls ?) - follow. When Elizabeth Dole dropped out of the
race, she blamed the influence of money over politics. The more
important truth is that she was killed by the polls, in which
she remained throughout in single digits. Had they risen above
20 percent, she would have had all the money she needed.
Politicians with low poll numbers like to say that there is
only one poll that counts, and that is the poll on Election Day,
but they are fooling themselves. If anything, Election Day has
become a secondary event, which merely confirms what has been
told already by the polls. Of course, if polling were egregiously
inaccurate, none of this would be true. But that is not the case.
In almost all elections, the final polls tell us, within a few
percentage points, what the outcome will be. Elections become
the certification that the polls were accurate; in other words,
if there were no elections, we'd never know whether we could trust
polling.
The elements of the new election system are interdependent.
With no television there would of course be no paid television
ads. With no paid television ads there would be a greatly reduced
need for the immense sums of money. With no need for money, there
would be far less opportunity for de facto bribery by the lobbyists.
Without the proliferation of the unpaid media there would be no
one to discuss the "campaign" for three years before
it occurs. Without polling, there would be no events to discuss.
Acting together, these elements constitute an apparatus that
keeps the campaign going, with or without the interest or participation
of the public. They make possible the politics we have today,
in which campaigns are so intensely interesting to a growing political
class and so deeply boring to the rest of the country.
Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The
Nation Institute.
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