*sigh* You’re making essentially the same argument I did in my recent post on Dennis Kucinich — that vision alone isn’t enough. And it isn’t. But that’s not the point. The point is that the way presidential campaigns are covered tells us next to nothing about the candidates. We get the images crafted by their campaign managers, and the news media does nothing to knock down these images to see what’s behind them.

And I think taking a hard look at policy proposals can reveal a lot. Back in the 2000 campaign Paul Krugman literally was a voice howling in the wilderness that George Bush’s campaign promises about taxes and the budget surplus didn’t add up. Hardly anyone else noticed, and I don’t believe anyone on television or radio raised the concerns that Krugman raised. Instead, we got endless chatter about how Al Gore is dull and wooden and even a serial liar (a claim based on right-wing lies that the press easily could have knocked down if it had tried; instead, they went along with “the narrative”). George Bush, on the other hand, may not be the sharpest tack in the box, but he’s a decent guy, and wouldn’t you like to have a beer with him?

And the fact is that Bush did go ahead with his tax cut plans. He did exactly what he promised, with a vengeance, and congress went along. But he couldn’t do the other things he promised, because the tax cuts ate up too much revenue, just as Krugman said they would.

There were a great many, um, questionable and well-documented items in George Bush’s past that revealed he might not have been the Boy Scout he claimed to be, but the public barely heard about those. Instead, they just got the media images (George Bush is a nice guy; Gore isn’t) and news about the campaigns themselves.

Further, I think looking at policy proposals can tell us if the candidate has a clear grasp of the issue, or if he doesn’t. I believe all of the Dem candidates (including Senator Clinton) have made noises about getting out of Iraq. Does that mean they’re all the same on the Iraq issue? What about the fact that Senator Clinton was one of the last Dems in Washington to stop supporting George Bush’s policies? Does that tell us something about her judgments? And then there’s Dennis Kucinich, who has been against the war all along. I slammed Dennis Kucinich’s plan to replaced US troops with UN troops, because this tells me Dennis Kucinich hasn’t noticed that the UN isn’t terribly good at containing and reducing violence. This tells me that Dennis Kucinich doesn’t grasp the complexities of the situation and that his knowledge of foreign affairs is about a quarter of an inch deep.

In 2003 I set up a web page that compared policy proposals of all of the Dems chasing the nomination. Some of them had well-thought-out ideas, and some of them didn’t. I thought it was useful to check this stuff out, not so much because I expected these plans to be carried out if the guy was elected, but because it told me which candidates understood the issues. It’s a clue to where his head was, in other words. If a candidate is making stupid proposals, it’s a pretty good clue he’d be a stupid president, I’d say.

You miss my point. I wasn’t saying that the media shouldn’t push campaigns to be more substantive on the issues, or that people are too stupid to understand more issue-oriented coverage. I’m just saying that there is a certain professorial naivete in thinking that campaigns can be distilled to the issues, that people can be led into voting that way, and that a president elected on those terms will necessarily be the most effective kind. A critical question is whether the president can unite enough constituencies to get congress to work with him/her on a common agenda. In some cases, that may require articulating a set of common goals and avoiding specifics. It may also require a willingness to force one’s own core constituents to accept less than everything they want. That’s why symbolism might turn out to be far more important in evaluating how effective a president might be than examining his/her detailed policy position on health care.

Well, okay. Maybe. But there’s a qualitative difference between,
say, CNN and The Washington Post. We shouldn’t lump them
together. Larry King intoning gravely about the latest development
in the Anna Nicole Smith case is not the same as Dana Priest
reporting on Walter Reed, or Nicolas Kristoff writing about Darfur.
Organizations like the Post and the Times still fund and produce
important investigative journalism that is outside the scope of the
blogging community.

That’s true, but there have times when the president and congress work together on a common agenda. It hasn’t happened for a long time, but it’s possible

I think you’re selling people short. I think a whopping majority of working folks do understand that there’s something very wrong with the health care system and that a few tweaks are not going to fix it. I also think that most voters are intelligent enough to understand the problems and the proposals if they were explained clearly. The problem is that you never get that kind of discussion on television or radio, which is where most people get their news.

But consider that people figured out that Bush’s Social Security proposals were a crock, even though there was little substantive discussion on television. A majority of Americans refused to buy into the Terri Schiavo hysteria, even though television and talk radio were pretty much taken over by right wingers spreading disinformation.

If Krugman thinks the media can explode that by demanding more specifics about each candidate’s energy policy, he’s dreaming.

I am old enough to remember when presidential campaigns were a lot more about issues and proposals than they are now. I think the past 30 years or so, in which so much emphasis is placed on the candidate’s personality, is an anomaly. I reject the idea that most voters don’t care or are too stupid to appreciate issues and policy proposals. The real question is, how to reach them with real information?

From Goddard’s Political Wire:
A new national Zogby telephone poll finds Sen. Hillary Clinton leading the 2008 Democratic presidential race with 33% support, followed by Sen. Barack Obama at 25% and John Edwards at 12%.

On the Republican side, Rudy Giuliani gets 29% support with Sen. John McCain at 20%.

Key general election match ups:
Giuliani 47%, Clinton 40%
McCain 47%, Clinton 39%
Obama 46%, Giuliani 40%
Obama 44%, McCain 40%
Giuliani 46%, Edwards 40%
McCain 47%, Edwards 38%

Winning the presidency isn’t about issues as much as it is building coalitions of people who identify with certain groups. People want to know that the candidate they’re voting for is on their team. They don’t learn that from position papers. They learn that by observing (among other things) whom the candidate is reaching out to, where his/her support comes from, and who his/her enemies are. If Krugman thinks the media can explode that by demanding more specifics about each candidate’s energy policy, he’s dreaming.

The only way to keep all this horse-race crap to a minimum would be to make presidential races A LOT shorter. If this cycle is any indication, there’s not much hope of that.

But there’s a difference between “cares, and is able, willing, and blessed with sufficient time to parse thorough policy debate” and “cares, but is easily duped.” Or “cares, but is more than willing to accept a platitude as a stand-in for actual insight.” And certainly, it would be hard to deny our collective attraction to mind numbing, shallowness trumpeting escapism. Maybe I’m saying that we see idiotic banter on Hardball for the same reason Vin Diesel movies make a lot of money.

I don’t know. I hope I’m wrong. I do think that this is a great theme of modern American life: that the ever quickening pace of things has steadily stripped away insight, complexity, nuance, and breathing room from our experience. We’re so filled up with that noise you talk about, so assaulted by it (think the mobile, always-on workplace…think multi-tasking), that I wonder how reasonable it is to expect the average cubicle bound suburbanite to competently engage in political discourse.

Incidentally, I think Obama, in his best moments, speaks to this tension; he seems genuinely to understand that people who live the life of The Idealized Modern Worker (mochas, Blackberrys, meetings, action items, PowerPoint slides) sense something hollow about the experience, that they’re not quite as happy as they should be, that they feel vaguely disconnected, strained by the sheer pace of their lives. He’s addressed this explicitly (in his Call to Renewal speech, for example) and powerfully, and I think this, beyond the standard “government needs fixing” and “we need to get out of Iraq” calls, separates him and accounts for much of his appeal. People do yearn for something beyond Cokie Roberts’ dazzling insight that Hillary Clinton “needs to look less stern,” or Obama reacting to Hillary reacting to David Geffen.

Anyway. I might have ended up making your argument. If so, good, because mine was a lot more depressing.