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The media have turned politics into pure contest: reporters interpret every aspect of presidential campaigns by asking who's ahead and by what strategies they got there. This is in distinct contrast to what voters ask whenever they get a chance to quiz a candidate in a town meeting or other uncontrolled venue. The press wants to know how the candidate is going to get ahead or stay ahead. The public wants to know how the candidate is going to solve their problems—disappearing jobs, excessive medical costs, or drugs in the streets.

In his cleverly argued Atlantic Monthly cover story in April of this year, U.S. News editor James Fallows concluded that this disparity of interest is one of the major reasons Americans hate the media.

But the current picture is not so simple: It is not merely a case of the press turning the campaign into a contest (for politics has, at least since Machiavelli, been that) while the public and the candidates are interested in solving serious social challenges. No. If August's made-for-TV conventions taught us anything, it was that politics has been Oprahcized; it has been tuned to our national love of courage in the face of tragedy. The parade of plucky overcomers and valiant disease-of-the-week victims was the stuff of daytime talk television and made-for-TV movies. The message was compassion and courage. But the experience was vicarious. No demand was made that we tighten our belts, volunteer in service of country or humanity, or even stiffen our upper lips. It was highly refined and processed emotion—Cheez Whiz for the psyche politic.

TO MARKET, TO MARKET
What this media-culture campaign says about the American political process is really a comment on the American marketplace. In the summer 1996, Wilson Quarterly, University of Florida English professor James Twitchell argues that advertising is our way of giving meaning and significance to products that are functionally interchangeable. Thanks to industrial standardization, most products today exhibit no clear superiority over their competition; they are essentially alike, and advertising, says Twitchell, is our way of trying to give significance to what is literally run-of-the-mill. (Why, for example, does a designer's name on my blue jeans make me feel better about wearing them than if they simply said Wrangler? Whatever it is, our denim decisions have little to do with quality and much to do about nothing.)

One wonders, in the current campaign, to what extent the candidates are true choices rather than mere echoes, to what extent they are, as Twitchell likes to say, fungible. As both candidates have driven for the hard center, leaving their more idealistic constituencies on the Left and the Right, image and emotion have become, if not the stuff of politics, at least the preferred mode of discourse. If we continue on this course, it will be a national disaster.

It will be a disaster, first, because when candidates cannot be distinguished, voters become skeptical about the political process and apathetic—not just on election day, but year round. Achieving cultural change requires enthusiasm from people at the edges in order to arouse those at the satisfied center. It requires hard work and persuasive argument from those with a clear vision of a better, more just society. But when the two giant political engines run along the same track, voters who might find such vision appealing are likely to stay home.

It will be a disaster, second, because it creates confusion. Immediately following the Chicago Democratic convention, Christian pollster George Barna released a surprising study:

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October 7 1996, Vol. 40, No. 11