Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

I hate the attack ads.  That's a surprise to no one, right?  We all hate the attack ads.  Are the ones on the right worse?  Yes, by any measure they are, but when the ones on the left are already nauseating, what does it matter?  It's like debating whether smallpox is worse than bubonic plague.  Both of them are going to give you ugly, painful deaths, and that's just what most political ads are today -- ugly, painful, and deadly to any sense of community.  As one woman said to me while canvassing today "I don't care who wins anymore, as long as the election is over and those sickening ads stop."

I hate even the "good" ads, the ones that try to sum up complex issues into a thirty second sound bites and turn someone's career into a series of highlights shorter than the player spotlights that get run up between plays at an NFL game.  The ones that try to plant an emotional pump under your couch and lever you to the polls with tears in your eyes.  The ones that add a flourish of drums and hint of the trumpet, a little flash of the flag, as they draft Lincoln's "better angels of our nature" into service as partisans.

I hate the phone calls.  I hate getting them, and I hate making them.  I hate hearing some unstoppable robot droning from some distant database, and I hate having the phone slammed in my ears as, in my friendliest tone, I start off with "Hi, I'm calling from the Democratic campaign, and I'd..."  I hate the way that the phone callers, in an effort to beat the patience clock, scramble through their script at a speed that makes Alvin and the Chipmunks seem turgid, and how some poor volunteer is often pressed into service to deliver a message even more vicious than the worst of the ludicrous hatchet jobs featured in the ads.

I can't really say that I hate canvassing.  I like the excuse to get out and walk around the neighborhoods of my county.  I like seeing the drooping eyes and sunken cheeks of Halloween pumpkins a week past their prime.  I like learning who is working to restore a 1966 'stang in their side yard, and seeing that there are some people who care even less about their landscaping than I do.  I like the expressions on the faces of the dogs I stir up as I trudge from house to house, and no matter how they snarl, I never believe they're really unfriendly.  Unlike their owners.  I don't particularly enjoy having the door slammed in my face.  I'm none too fond of being told to do something anatomically impossible, or having a supposed pro-lifer tell me to "drop dead," as happened just this morning.  Worse yet, the guy who said it caught none of the irony.  And I really hate it when people tell me they have no idea how they're going to vote three days before the election because they've been "too busy" to study the issues or the candidates.  I want to smack them and say that I've got a full time job, a load of night school classes, a house that's falling apart, a kid in college, and I'm working on my thirty-fourth novel.  I'm busy, damn it.  If you don't know the issues and the candidates by now, it's because you just don't give a flying fig, and I really wish I could tell you to stay home and try to guess which stupid box holds the million dollars, but I can't do that.  I smile.  I hand over the literature.  I go to the next house.  

Frankly, what I hate is what this process says about our society.  I've heard some damn catty comments made about the state of the African-American community, most of them from African-Americans (make that most of the ones made in public).  Comments about how blacks used to value learning.  About how they used to respect doctors and teachers, and now they're making heroes out of nothing but entertainers and athletes.  Well, have a freaking puddin' pop, Bill Cosby, because there's not one thing about that doesn't go double nation in general and triple when it comes to politics.

This is our electoral process in the 21st century:

• Candidates spend hundreds of millions putting together ads that express their opinions in tiny snatches, or attack their opponents -- ads that are seen between spots for diarrhea medicine and "male enhancement" products during a three minute lull in some inane game show or even more idiotic "reality" program.
• Political committees follow suit, spending hundreds of millions more to make ads that are nastier than those to which the candidate's name is attached.
• "Unaffiliated" groups spend millions more, making ads so nasty that they hope the news will spotlight them for your slack-jawed "Oh God, I can't believe they said that" pleasure.  Meaning they have to be considerably nastier than anything that ran in the last cycle.
• A forest worth of trees are converted into postcards and mailers containing material far more vicious than anything that shows up on television, with databases on everything from your church attendance to your shopping preferences used to assure that you get the paper that is going to make you disgusted with one of the candidates.
• Armies of volunteers from all sides crisscross neighborhoods where 50% of people aren't home, another 25% shout at you over their disgust with the ads, and the remaining 25%  will say damned near anything just to get you off their porch.  People peer at you from inside their homes, so tired of interlopers on their property that they refuse to answer the door as you shove aside a dozen other pieces of literature to find a spot for your candidate's paper.  Rain-soaked political brochures are stuck in hedges, fluttering in the streets, and slowly bleeding their ink into the damp grass.
 

If you were to try and conceive of a system less conducive to a national discourse and democratic principles, you'd have to work hard at it.  I'm not disappointed by the skimpy numbers of voters who show up after these efforts.  Frankly, I'm amazed that anyone makes it through this barrage of half-truths, all out lies, and extra strength acid to cast a vote.

Think about this: the presidential election in Nicaragua this weekend, was done under conditions that met the Carter Center guidelines, but Jimmy Carter has said several times that the United States doesn't come close to the standards required before the Carter Center will go into a nation to monitor the vote.  They require that the entire nation have identical polling procedures, while in the US we not only change from state to state, we vary county to county, district by district -- with poor districts almost certain to get less attention and worse equipment than their neighbors.  The Carter Center also requires that all major candidates have equal amounts of television and radio air time, something the US doesn't even try to emulate.  

I hate this process, and I'll tell you southing else: politics is putting politics out of business.  

We're proud of how much we've raised for our candidates, and while I certainly like the broad base of small contributions that have swelled Democratic coffers more than the deep corporate pockets being turned out to float the Republican boat, both sides are working against a law of diminishing returns.  It's not just that there are too many ads, it's that those ads are up against the same kind of economics that are making all advertisers wonder about the validity of the traditional TV/radio ad model.  Why bother to run your ad on a pricey New York local network affiliate, when only a very small percentage of New Yorkers are watching?  And of those who are watching any program, a good chunk of them are speeding past all the ads.  There's a kind of entropy at work in television ads, a fade from the sharp, powerful pulse of the initial networks to the broad, geographically disconnected audiences of cable and satellite.  Some of the people seeing your expensive ad for an office in New York might well be living in Nebraska.

Paper mailings and phone banking are both falling victim to their own sheer volume.  Sure, you can still get across a message that fast enough to be delivered in the five seconds before the phone hits the cradle or scanned as the card heads for the trashcan "Republicans = Evil!" but that's about it.  This demand for brevity of message is also part of what's causing messages to become more simplistic and less truthful.

Thomas Hobbes famously described the lives of most men as "nasty, brutish, and short," and that's become the rule for 21st century political messages.    

Campaigns have to face the fact that that whether they're dealing with paper, with phones, or with ads, a large percentage of what they spend is simply wasted.  Not only that, but the more they spend in one cycle, the more people are snowed under, the more it all becomes just background noise.  The more it becomes even less effective.  The more they have to spend, the longer they have to spend it, the most they have to bury us in their words, to get anywhere near the effect they got last time.  

The long and short of it is that the campaign system we've known, the system that grew up over the last fifty years, is dying.  You might see this kind of election again in 2008 and 2010, probably will, but the cost of those elections will be so enormous, their statements so monstrous, and their demands on volunteers and candidates so extensive, that 2010 may well be the last.  

We have to find some other way to select our candidates.  And with that... well, I'm open to suggestions.

I've written before about paradigm shifts in technology and in society.  They're perfectly obvious looking back, but all anyone can see looking forward is that things suck, and their about to get suckier.  You can see the incentives well before the solutions drift into view.

The simplest option might be to eliminate political advertising.  All of it.  Let candidates put themselves forward in public forums, give them plenty of space for debates, have the primaries, have more public debates.  Maybe give each of the major candidates their own half hour on PBS each week.  Give them newspaper columns in every daily paper.  Let them fill their web pages with a all the details of their campaign that they want.  Then vote.  I like the idea, but I'm scared of it, as well, not least of all because I can't square this thought with my interpretation of the first amendment.  

Another idea is one that's been broadly discussed, public financing.  Depending on the office and the state, public financing, or partial financing, is already in place, and the dire consequences predicted by those who have wanted corporations to have the sole role in determining who can have the dough have proven to be unfounded.  In some ways 100% public financing for all federal offices would probably end up looking quite a lot like the previous solution.  There would have to be more access to the media than any reasonable amount of tax dollars might buy.  In fact, I'd suggest that if you're anxious to sell this idea, sell it as a requirement that a broadcast license requires X number of hours of air time for each candidate.  That way, it can be done without running afoul of the "I'm not paying for them to put ads on TV" crowd.  You might even institute a "cap and trade" system, giving each candidate a chance to wrangle with other campaigns in selecting the best time and location for the ads.

Here's another idea, one that I've proposed before, but which last time I couched in allusions that managed to offend even folks who might otherwise have supported the idea.  The idea is this: let candidates campaign through charity.  Candidates can raise all the funds they want, but instead of spending fifty or a hundred thousand dollars on a television ad, let a candidate give that same money to a charitable organization. Candidates will get publicity through these charitable acts, demonstrate their positions in their choices, and hey, the charities get some funding.  If candidates want to make a speech as they hand over the check, let them.  The best thing about this idea is that it can be done through phases.  Start out with a requirement that 10% of all campaign funds be given to charity.  In 2006 alone, that would have meant about $300 million went into the bank for people who really need it, instead being turned into electronic attacks.  Worried that candidates might give to charities that reinforce their own ideas?  Let them.  Heck, let them race to give away more money than required.  I'll cheer, and so will the people waiting at badly under-funded charities.  Turn the two candidates into charitable fundraisers-in-chief of their parties and the moral voice for their positions.  Let them turn their gifts of leadership and charisma into a means of providing for those in need.  Maybe they won't agree on who needs the money the most.  Good, because I don't expect them to.

Even if it's not a requirement for 2008, let's make it an expectation.  Let's challenge every candidate to spend 10% of their funds on charitable giving rather than advertising.  

In another hour, I'm going to shower and drag myself to the front lines.  Footsore and nursing a migraine, I'll be back out there knocking on doors and handing out material.  

But I'd very much appreciate any ideas on how we can end this system.