Probably most “Alas” readers have already seen this ad (youtube link), a well-done mashup of a Hilary Clinton speech and and a TV commercial Apple made for the 1984 Olympics.
I enjoyed the ad (I mean, sure, it’s unfair to Clinton, but as a political cartoonist I’m prepared to live with unfairness to politicians in the name of making a gag work). I do think there’s something horrible and 1984-ish about how the major media had anointed Clinton the One To Beat, long before a single vote has been case.
But I was surprised at the ad’s end, when it turned out to be an endorsement of Barak Obama. Obama? He’s part of the problem. He, Clinton, and Edwards are the three candidates for president that Big (Brother) Media are willing to acknowledge. When was the last time you saw an article focusing on Richardson, Dodd, Biden, Gravel or Kucinich? And that’s just within the narrow field of Democratic Party candidates. Who are the likely candidates from the Greens next year? The Libertarians? Is it ridiculous of me to think that a better media might, you know, inform me of this stuff?
There is — or could be — plenty of time. There’s no need for the media to anoint certain candidates winners or front-runners, an obviously self-fulfilling prediction. As it is, however, our media does a better job of warping democracy than facilitating it.
Update: Satan is digging deep into his closet for his warmest mittens and his dense down coat any day I agree with Paul Weyrich. But Weyrich is right to say that massing all (or most of) the primaries in a single, early month could have profoundly anti-democratic effects.
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It kind of reminds me of how Howard Dean was annointed approx 4 years ago, and then what happened?
I have vague recollections of a big Time article (and cover) picking him as the next US president when he didn’t even get the Democratic nomination in the end.
The media likes simple stories. A horse race is a nice simple story. The underdog is a nice simple story but it requires a likely winner. So we get what we have now.
The media is also a business and it’s cheaper when you don’t have to explain everything. So it’s nice when you only talk about celebrities. (I like Senator Obama but I don’t see what he’s done to prepare himself to be president. Same for Rudy.) Either way, you get what we have now.
You get cheap simple stories about people we already know.
I don’t like any of the mainstream candidates so far ( either the Republicans or the Dems) and it doesn’t seem like the MSM is doing much reporting on the actual positions any of the candidates.
By and large, those men (I assume Gravel is a man, and I know the others all are) don’t have serious support, measured either in proven donations or commitments from groups to work for them. It’s true that the media helps Clinton and Obama and etc. by not giving the bottom-tier candidates any free momentum; it’s also true that the bottom tier candidates* have no pre-existing big group of people shouting at them to run for President. Which isn’t true of Edwards or Clinton or Obama, all of whom have genuinely activated big chunks of the Democratic base (squishy quasiprogressives, hawkish centrists, and moony liberal intellectuals, respectively).
*A case can be made that Kucinich has activated an important part of the base, but it’s the part of the base the rest of the party wishes would just give some money, person some phonebanks, cast the safe Democratic vote, and then go away. Since the media is largely obedient to (both) party’s wishes, they don’t cover him much because the party isn’t going to support his run. (Kind of Leiberman in drop-shadow.)
You don’t need to invoke Big Brother when Oceania really has always been at war with Eastasia.
What is truly insane is the amount of media time being spent on an election that is still more than a year and a half away. Als0 insane is that there is an ever increasing time gap between the primaries and the general election. Neither of these things makes any sense (except that campaigning earlier than your opponents gives you an advantage, so everyone keeps campaigning earlier and earlier to protect themselves from having someone else start campaigning first).
There is no reason on earth it should take anyone a year to decide which of these candidates they support.
This is predicted to be the first billion dollar presidential election, and the fact that it is getting major media play more than a year and a half before the actual election is certainly part of that problem (yes, billion dollar presidential elections are a problem).
I agree about the timing.
Why is a billion dollar Presidential election a problem? To decide our top guy or gal, we spend about 1/10,000th of our GDP, every fourth year. That’s the equivalent of spending $25 on the process of picking a new manager for a small gas station. It doesn’t seem excessive, given the magnitude of the decision.
Didn’t the 2008 buzz start, like, the day after the midterm elections? I feel like there’s a really insidious reason to keep us in a perpetual campaign environment, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories, but I do believe in intersecting interests.
A billion dollar presidential race is a complete waste of money and means that candidates have to spend even more time on fund raising (which is probably also part of why we now have 2 year long presidential election campaigns, it doesn’t take anywhere near that long for people to decide who they are going to vote for, but it does take that long to raise a billion dollars). So three senators are spending all their time for the next two years raising money for their presidential runs, rather than actually serving the jobs to which they were elected. We already have enough of a problem with senators spending all their time raising money, but these three will be doing nothing else.
A billion dollar presidential race is a complete waste of money
Well, that’s an opinion. They aren’t wasting YOUR money, though, so why should your opinion count for anything?
As for the concern about them taking so long to raise the necessary funds, that’s an easy fix: repeal campaign finance restrictions and go to unlimited donations with total transparency. It’ll take them a month and you’ll be able to look everything up online.
Robert, what do you mean? You can already look up all political donations (over $200, I believe) online. That there’s a limit has nothing to do with it.
I’d like to say that unlimited donations would put the government solely in the hands of the rich, but that’s already the case, so apparently that there’s a limit has nothing to do with that, either.
What you don’t see are all the donations that happen around the law, defenestrated. Congress keeps chasing loopholes, and lobbyists and campaign donors keep finding ways to route around it.
Political funds are like pot. You can ban it, and no doubt the ban has some effect on the marketplace. But there’s still tons of it out there, you’ll never be rid of it, and it would make a lot more sense to just accept that people want it and have the state just provide some basic ground rules to keep things civil.
But they don’t need X amount of money. They need more money than all their opponents — or, failing that, they need to get as close to the leading fund-raiser’s totals as they can.
So your solution is no solution at all. If it’s possible to raise a half-billion in a month, as you claim (personally, I think you’re mistaken), then the most successful candidates will the ones who spend ten months raising five billion dollars.
By that logic, Amp, GM can expand its way out of its current troubles by simply selling ten billion cars at a margin of $1 apiece. Of course, that won’t work, because there aren’t ten billion people who both want and can afford a GM car. The demand for politicians, in other words, is not infinite.
Now, would perhaps they raise somewhat more money in an unlimited system? Probably. Just as we’d probably have more pot on the market if there were no laws against it. But we’re gonna have pot either way; wouldn’t it make sense to learn to live with it instead of trying to control it?
I understand, and to a degree share, the discomfort with the idea of unlimited funds in these campaigns. It’s just that the half-measures that can’t end it, IMHO, end up doing more damage to the political process than would be done if we just let folk do as they wish.
Okay, let’s say there’s only the amount of “demand” you’ve implicitly admitted to so far: the billion or so we already know exists under our constrained system, and the billion you claim could be raised in a month if only candidates could ask 100 super-rich people for money rather than having to hit up hundreds of thousands of the merely well-off. There may be some overlap, so let’s say that it’s a total of 1600 million available to spend on candidates, rather than 2 billion.
So we have candidate “A,” who raises a half-billion dollars in a month and quits fundraising. Then we have candidate “B,” who raises the same half-billion in the first month and then keeps on fundraising for the next year, raising an additional 300 million or so. Candidate “B” now has a huge advantage.
In practice, of course, candidate “A” won’t quit fundraising, because she can’t risk allowing “B” that huge advantage.
There’s no reason to believe that under an unlimited system, candidates could raise just as much in a month as they could in 12 months. So there’s no reason to think that they’d stop raising money after a month.
What I’d like to see done to the primaries is to take them off the public dole. If the Democrats/Republicans/Greens want to select a Presidential candidate, let them pay for it. Charge them for their use of the public electoral mechanisms.
Running primaries for particular political parties with public money gives their candidates a huge advantage. Let’s take that away. I think this would help minor-party or independent candidates come to the fore. All candidates will still run in the general election for free.
If due to lack of funds the major parties go back to the smoke-filled rooms to pick their candidates, so much the better. This isn’t the 1930’s. I’m guessing that people will be more likely to reject a candidate that’s clearly the choice of a small number of inside players and will then be more open to consider alternatives. And if the established political parties have to spend money on running primaries, then they’ll have less money to spend on attack ads and sound bites and will have to depend more on public debates, etc., with actual meaningful content.
The Constitution’s failure to mention or recognize political parties wasn’t an accident. This country’s founders thought they were a bad idea. I’m saying let’s not make any of them more privileged than any other. Let their supporters carry their own weight.
There is a reason why the 2008 Presidential campaign has started so early and it has very little to do with the media or the political machine. It has everything to do with the failure of our current President. His approval ratings are dismal. What to people do when they have lost faith in something? They start shopping around for something new. A candidate would be an absolute fool to not start campaigning during a time when people are seriously dissatisfied with the current government and eager to find something or someone to believe in and support.
Actually, the consensus I have read about why the process has started so early has had nothing to do with the present occupant of the office. The idea seems to be that this is the first election we’ve had in a very long time where neither the incumbent nor the sitting vice president is running. The party in the White House can consider their full range of possible candidates, and the party not in the White House does not have as a major consideration that they need someone with big-time “name recognition” because they have to worry about beating the President or Vice-President of the United States. Both parties have a large number of hopefuls that don’t see their way blocked by considerations out of their control.
In my lifetime:
President Eisenhower beat Sen. Stevenson
Kennedy beat Vice President Nixon
Vice President Johnson beat Goldwater
ex-Vice President Nixon beat Humphrey
Carter beat President Ford
Reagan beat President Carter
President Reagan beat ex-Vice President Mondale
Vice President Bush beat Dukakis
Clinton beat President Bush I
President Clinton beat Dole
Bush II beat Vice President Al Gore
President Bush II beat Kerry
The only one of these elections that didn’t have a sitting President or Vice-President running was 1972, 35 years ago, when ex-Vice President Nixon beat Senator Humphrey. You’ve got to go back to 1952, when Eisenhower beat Stevenson, to see an election where neither candidate had ever been President or Vice President.