My guess is that debating the candidate’s factual viewpoints is a full time job, and besides, only an useful job if you debate someone with the same level of knowledge but on the opposite side of the political spectrum. And such people are hard to find.
On the other hand, we are all experts on how (we think) the candidates do in the media, and how they do in the public eye. We debate the McCains missed step, Palin’s clothes, Obama’s choice of campaign poster. The debate isn’t superficial; far from it. But it is always about how such thigns will come across with " the voters" while the armchair campaign analists don’t seem to count themselves in with that group.
I’ve often wondered if this is an American phenomenon. By my understanding, in a lot of other countries, when a party is elected they usually have an easier time enacting their platform. In the UK, for example, the prime-minister is automatically the same party as the one that controls the legislature, political parties tend to block-vote and the Queen and upper house are just rubber stamps. The result is that a party runs on the legislation they intend to pass, and then when they win, they pass that legislation.
In the US, we have an overabundance of choke points. There are three different groups of people needed to pass legislation, they’re often controlled by different parties, the parties themselves are fairly loose coalitions with members often breaking ranks, there are a wide variety of procedural issues which the opposition can use to slow things down and the upper house of the legislature needs a super-majority to pass anything. The end result is that a party getting in power doesn’t neccesarily mean they can do anything.
So the end result is that debating policy seems kind of pointless sometimes. Elections ability to actually change policy are weak, and so spending a lot of time arguing over policy feels more like an intellectual exercise then something that might actually have an effect on our lives.
Columbia Journalism Review has pontificated about this… well basically forever. It’s called horserace politics: they cover politics like they cover sporting events. Rather than evaluate policy, they speak of how the candidates are performing.
I suspect that this tendency arose when newspapers started to pretend to cover things from a neutral point of view. If anything, this has gotten worse over the past 30 years, as modern conservatives have hissy fits when they spot alleged bias in the media. Liberals in contrast just settle for the goddamn facts. Roles were reversed in the early 1970s and of course there was a transition stage. And in additional to factual accuracy, liberals have a bee in their bonnet for bigotry.
Brad De Long’s blog rants about this: he thinks that top media outlets should compete for bragging rights on whether their readers are the best informed in the world. Editors would rather attract a broad, well healed and advertiser-friendly audience. That means their conservative wedge needs a lot of stroke in practice. So if a Democrat says that the earth is round and a Republican claims it is flat, the New York Times will say, “Opinions on the shape of the earth differ.”
That’s a start. The OP asks a good question – it is a puzzle. I’ll note as well that most media outlets will occasionally publish tables indicating candidates’ positions. Has anybody come across something like that for the Republican primary? Does anyone care? It must be hard to do, when there are 2 sane, 2 borderline and [del]four[/del] 3 batshit crazy candidates.
Also. Those who like policy are sometimes called policy wonks. Many of them run blogs. Ezra Klein runs a team at the Washington Post. Matthew Yglasias has a perch at Slate.
Also. Horserace journalists don’t predict elections particularly well. You should treat their commentary as noise. Exceptions include Charlie Cook, who at least is statistically literate and Nate Silver who actually qualifies as an elections expert.
ETA: Everybody’s opinion is legitimate w.r.t. sports. Speaking about the horserace permits indirect discussion of politics in polite society, without getting too rancorous.
Maybe, but most of the factors I mentioned aren’t in the Constitution. The result has been that even the possibility of passing any policy into legislation is pretty much “checked”. Much of the time I don’t think that even the partys legislative platforms rise above the “horserace” level, since even if a platform gets them elected they aren’t going to be able to pass most of it. There isn’t really any point in trying to figure out if the laws you want to pass are good for anything other then sounding good as soundbites to the electorate since your never going to have to or even be able to put them into law.
A serious question would be, what policies are there to debate? The Republican candidates aren’t offering any major differences in policy. Their policy is to be not Obama. They haven’t given any major policy initiatives to debate. All their rhetoric is pandering to their base, so nobody outside that base - and its unclear how many within - take anything they say as a prediction for the future.
For proof of this, see Ron Paul. He does say things that are different from the other candidates. He has exactly zero chance of getting the nomination and that’s correlated to the obvious fact that his brand of libertarianism has exactly zero chance of persuading any Congress, even one with Republican majorities in both houses, to enact it into law.
Any possible policy debate can’t start until next summer after the conventions, when a Republican is chosen to go up against Obama. Even so, the debates will essentially be Republican! Democrat! rather than policy specifics.
U.S. elections are normally about philosophies and personalities rather than policies. I can’t think of one in my lifetime that was truly about policy.
No, it is prevalent in the Netherlands, too, and we have an entirely different political system.
I like the word " horse race political journalism". It is exactly what I was looking for, and yes, it does allow more or less polite political conversation. Another thing it has in common with horseracing is that it allows the watchers allegiance to shift per second. The viewer goes from: “Go Dover, my girl, you can do it” to “C’mon Dover, move your bloomin’ arse! …” to " oh, you bleeding bitch, go get sold to a horse butcher". It doesn’t require the painful psychological process of identifing with an " apparent" loser. It is always: “my candidate is winning” to “that candidate is losing”. Talking about the same candidate.
During the primary season, there is no choice but to focus on strategy and not policy. The Republican candidates are essentially interchangeable regarding policy. Cut taxes, gut regulation, and suck up to the religious right. In the general election, it all becomes policy. Whether those policies have a prayer of being enacted is another story, but the Gingrich agenda will be markedly different than the Obama agenda.
That’s my answer, as well. Compare it to how news outlets cover the movie box-office results every Monday. Who cares if a film is “good” or “bad”, as long as they can tell us who wins.
You’d think so, but no. It’ll still be the same after the nominees are decided. We’ll hear who’s moving up in the polls and who’s moving down, who’s got momentum, whose convention speech generated the most enthusiasm, whether Candidate X should have appeared on an evening talk show or The View, whether they looked stiff or winked at the camera during the debates, etc. We may occasionally hear broad descriptions of their policy goals, but if you want any responsible analysis of whether those policies will have the results the candidate promises, you’re going to have to look hard for it.
True that. Most of such news items seem to consist of: “Hey, candidate X is up or down 5 percent in the polls. This can’t be a random fluctuation that will be different next week. No, this is a sign of a major trend shift. Let’s go to the studio to find an expert to pontificate on why candidate X is heading towards a landslide fail/victory. Is it that cheesy wink he made during the speech yesterday? Is the American public tired of hearing about his ties? Her past as a war hero? Her autistic son? Even though we used that tidbit do explain his success two months ago? We don’t know jack shit, but that won’t keep us from speculating wildly and even from issuing image advice to the candidate like he will listen to us!”
I agree there’s a little more policy talk during the general election (and that this GOP field is kind of unique in everyone (except Paul) agreeing on just about everything). But even in the General election and past primary elections, I’d say news coverage heavily favors horserace stuff over policy.
The only times I can remember in this country when news coverage favored policy is when an already elected President made a big push for a domestic policy initiative. When Obama proposed healthcare reform and Bush tried to pass SS and while he was musing about passing tax reform, I think there was a decent amount of debate on the substance of the issues, alongside the usual “who’s winning” commentary.
The answer is that many of them (not all) are lazy and not that bright, plus there is an overwhelming amount of airtime to fill on CNN, MSNBC, and FNC.
A particular comment about strategy is almost never “correct” or “incorrect” in a factual sense, and while policy speculation also suffers from this lack of quality control, a policy pundit needs actually to read policy and understand something about economics and world affairs–much easier to watch a couple of YouTube videos and marshall an argument justifying your gut reaction. Campaigns are all about spin and hiding the truth to some extent (details of a campaign strategy are far less effective if your opponent knows them). So no one in authority is going to call a strategy pundit on anything they say–if they’re wrong that’s a potential misdirection for a campaign’s opponents. As such, strategy-based punditry is relatively correction-free–even if an opinion is proved demonstraby false in the coming months, a pundit can always claim the campaign changed its strategy in the intervening time. It’s a no-lose proposition.
I agree. Romney, Gingrich, Cain, Huntsman, Johnson, Pawlenty, Santorum, Palin, Trump - none of them are currently holding any political office. So what political programs are you going to analyze?
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
That about sums it up for me - the majority of people, both on the street and in the media are probably not going to be considered “Great Minds”. So, that’s what you’re left with - talking about people (Candidates) and events (The Horse Race).
I think this sums it up. There are dozens (maybe hundreds) of news shows with hours and hours of time to fill. A well researched position statement on each candidate would take hard work to come up with and would only fill a few minutes of TV time. The rest of the time is filled up with Dr. Phil style micro analysis of each candidate’s wardrobe, hair style and whether he or she “won” in any particular exchange with another candidate.
The media is going to love Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho when he runs.
If I had to guess, it’s getting harder to convince people that the politicians are acting in their interests.
I wonder which policy issues were discussed in the 60s? Presumably not federal infiltration of “subversive” groups. Another poll from the 60s found that only 1% thought the Vietnam war was wrong on its face rather than a “mistake” or justified.
The checks and balances worked a lot better before the Republicans started abusing them. You didn’t used to need a supermajority to get something passed in the Senate. If you wanted to filibuster something, you had to go through the inconvenience of standing on the Senate floor and blathering for hours on end. There was no such thing as a “hold.”
I think the Senate has evolved into an institution that serves America very poorly.
That said, all of that noise pales into insignificance beside the influence of money in politics post Citizens United.
If the media actually evaluated the candidates positions and reported on those, what would they do the next day? The news sources need new material every single day and candidates don’t change theer postion fast enough to fit the news cycle (no jokes about Romney here.)
In fact, the media has a strong interest in making races as close as possible, otherwise there would be little to report. I believe they have such a strong affect on large races, like the presidential race, that no candidate can ever win by a large margin. If one candidate is ahead by some measure, the media focuses their brightest lights on him until some flaw is found or he makes some minor mistake. Only when the race is close does the media focus equally on both candidates. This also makes it difficult for a third candidate to be viable.
