What we do at TPM has changed a fair amount since we went from being a one-man operation to a small newsroom. But one of the things we hear from readers — not from very many readers but with some consistency over time is that TPM focuses too much on the ‘horse-race’ and not enough on the policy positions of the candidates. So I hope this won’t sound defensive but I’d like to explain my thinking on this issue because it’s actually one I’ve had pretty strong feelings about since well before I started TPM.
To put it simply, it doesn’t surprise me that people think we’re dedicating a lot of time to the campaign horse race because that’s what we’re trying to do. Now there are certainly lame and not so lame ways to cover it. You can get more or less distracted by the irrelevancies kicked up by the debate, you can ignore whether what one side’s saying is true or untrue and treat it like a he said/she said rather than digging down to provide some refereeing of the bamboozlement. And though I like to think we do pretty good on that score certainly we have and will fall short at times.
But my basic take on this is that at this point in the campaign the vast majority of our readers knows the basic policy differences between the candidates. Most of you are people who are into politics and are looking for really good coverage of the campaign. And that’s what we’re trying to provide. And the campaign is a race between one or more candidates. So, speaking for myself, I’m into polls. I want to know what the different campaigns strategies are, what issues voters are interested in and responding to, who’s putting together good field organizations on the ground, etc. And I think readers are too.
Now, as you know from my blogging on Social Security, fiscal policy and lots about foreign policy, I’m very into the policy debates. But I think I can do both, be interested in both, walk and chew gum at the same time.
But I’ve always thought (and this is what I meant when I said that this is something that I’ve thought a lot about since well before I started TPM) that there’s something a little ‘eat your spinich-ish’ about folks who cry out, in the thick of a campaign, how everyone’s focusing on the ‘horserace’ rather than ‘the issues’. I associate it a lot with the work of Thomas Patterson, a fellow up at the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School and others of a similar bent. And in that vein of thinking there’s an always implicit and often explicit belief that investment and interest in politics itself is somehow discreditable or that there was a pristine before-the-flood time in our history where politics was a matter of disinterested mandarins dishing out and serving up issues to an attentive citizenry — much as lawyers do to juries. But I don’t think that’s true. And I’m glad it’s not. I think it’s no surprise that the eat-your-spinach crowd has hugely invested in the idea that our more engaged politics of recent years has, is and will turn voters off from politics when in fact every measure — voting, media viewership, small donor giving, etc. — all show
that precisely the opposite is the case.
If you’ll forgive me, as I wrote about exactly a decade ago in the American Prospect …
It’s true that one can scarcely imagine a Walter Lippmann or a Joseph Alsop duking it out on Crossfire, or rating the State of the Union address on the McLaughlin Group’s notorious scale of one to ten. But that’s not the point. Popular politics has always been like a waterfall, graspable only in motion, always in descent, and yet never quite falling. Politics is not simply a matter of issues — at least not as we generally understand the term today. In a democratic society, politics is not just a means to governance but a form of public spectacle and drama. It is filled with rooting for your side; the joys of partisanship; the camaraderie of shared beliefs; the reveling in political talk; the pleasure of invective.
To say that politics in a democratic society involves pomp and spectacle is not a concession. Nineteenth-century American politics, from Jefferson and Jackson to Bryan, was filled with the most scurrilous political attacks, vicious cartoons, a blatantly partisan press, torch-lit parades, and overt appeals to emotionalism of every kind. There is no such thing as an engaged politics that does not to some degree derive its vitality from antagonism. That’s a reality high-minded liberals seem somehow to have forgotten. And it’s one they ignore at their peril.
What we try to do, though certainly we fall short sometimes, is dig deeper, to find the stories that other outlets are ignoring or come at them in a different way. But the critique of interest in politics in itself — that it is corrupting, unseemly or a tendency journalists are supposed to correct in readers — is not one I buy into.
