While I will vote for Democratic nominee Barack Obama and my informed conservative friends will vote for McCain because we understand that each will try to advance policies and political ideas that are consistent with our policy and ideological preferences, the voters who are the primary targets of each presidential campaign see the race VERY differently. Neither campaign is wasting much effort trying to woo informed voters, voters who both understand their own preferences and the ideological and institutional realities of governing. Instead, their efforts are focused like a laser beam on the so-called "swing voters." These are folks who do not know which candidate they will vote for in November. While it is impossible and inappropriate to paint this entire voting bloc with one brush, it is fair to say that the most impressionable among them (i.e. the low hanging fruit) lack substantive knowledge about government and politics. It is also clear that in an age of very close presidential elections that winning this group can make the difference. These are the folks who are featured on late night segments like Jay Leno's "Jay-walking." They cannot name their congressman nor do they have a conscious understanding of their own political interests.
It is for the benefit of these crucial swing voters that we all must endure the vacuous slogans like "change you can believe in" and "country first." It is for these folks that the national conventions seek to put on a show. It is for these folks that candidates bare their souls and show off their cute kids and strain to appear both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. It is for the support of these "folks" that the campaigns carefully obscure or "spin" any negative impressions regarding the life, family, and character of their candidates. Indeed, the selection of the nominees themselves (not just their vice presidential running mates) depends heavily on their "market potential" with this group of voters.
When the Framers of the Constitution designed our pluralist political system, they envisioned a "marketplace of ideas," relevant ideas, not a marketplace of people marketed to the most impressionable consumer-citizens on a very personal basis. While the election is very serious and important and the job is very serious and important and the candidates are serious people with serious and important policy agendas, the campaign to win the presidency is a farce and an embarrassing spectacle in which serious, knowledgeable people make fools of themselves vying for the attention and support of the most infantile consumer-voters with shiny keys, candy, and energetic/ enthusiastic games of peek-a-boo, and most importantly ridiculous exaggerations and out of contexts facts.
Any thoughtful evaluation of presidential general election campaigns in the last few cycles would be hard pressed to avoid being reduced to deciding which party's campaign was just dumb and which one was even dumber. As a liberal, I have a powerful rational incentive to try to convince such an evaluator to label the Democratic campaign as just "dumb" and the Republican campaign as "dumber." This year, based on this choice, I think I have a good case.
That vacuous slogans are dumb is true enough and both sides in this election are stressing "themes" and rhetoric that are clearly dumb. The question here is; which campaign's themes, slogans, and rhetoric are "dumber," and less relevant to the job of being president (and/or vice president). McCain's decision to put Governor Palin on the Republican ticket, a decision the pundits constantly remind us is the first presidential decision candidates get to make, seems to put McCain firmly in the driver's seat in the race for "dumber." Not because Governor Palin is unintelligent; she appears bright enough. Not because she has an atypical resume; some of our best presidents had atypical resumes. Not because she lacks any national or international experience; knowledge and skill need not always be developed "on the ground," so to speak. The reason McCain's choice of Palin secures the "dumber" label for his campaign is that she was picked because of a collection of individual characteristics that the pollsters can market to the voters who make the most difference, the uninformed "swing voters." She is: a woman, mom (hockey mom no less), wife, executive, beauty queen, mayor, governor, small business owner, and more. Hell she is even a mom struggling with serious family issues, just like real moms (pregnant daughter, downs syndrome baby) All of these things, carefully marketed (using out of context frames) are gold with the most impressionable "swing" voters.
There isn't even an effort to hide her role. They are practically daring Democrats to say "the emperor has no cloths." Poor James Carville was flabbergasted and only able to muster the comment that "this whole thing is just weird." Republican pundits and politicians are falling all over themselves to tout her positive attributes and superior qualifications, despite admitting in practically the same breath that they knew nothing about her until she was picked. A thoughtful listener would have trouble reconciling enthusiastic praise of her abilities from people who admit they never heard of her before. Wouldn't they? They tell us she is "tough." She has "executive experience." She is a women and a working mom. Her assent to the Alaska Governorship makes her "extraordinary," while her life story (which they just learned about) will appeal to average Americans by revealing how "ordinary" she is. Why don't they put some meat on these factual bones by describing relevant examples of her toughness and executive savvy? Maybe because they have no idea and because details only serve to give opponents opportunities to nitpick. Since the target audience is unlikely to have the patience for details or qualifications, avoiding them is a win-win. You give your intended audience what they need and demonize the critics who demand substance as self interested partisans, etc...
Any Democrat that questions her qualifications or quality is to be carefully and skillfully rebuffed (as opposed to rebutted). Instead of providing substance and detail to her claims of experience, Republican operatives follow the script by simply repeating the FACT that she's an executive, and none of the other three national nominees are executives. When someone points out that being a US Senator for four years provides far more opportunity to understand executive functions at the national level than a year and a half presiding over a state with a population smaller that an Illinois state senate district, McCain surrogates dutifully repeat their precious (if irrelevant and out of context) factual talking point that she alone has "executive" experience, period! The idea is to make the critics appear unreasonable for trying to "spin" the facts.
They do this believing that the crucial swing voters they are wooing will not look closer at the issue and will be satisfied with flat unsubstantiated claims. If one person has been an executive and another has not, the former will always know more about executive service than the latter. Right? No, but that's the implicit assumption being sold to uninformed voters. In other words, they figure that enough swing voters are "dumber." If the issue is foreign policy knowledge or military experience, they simply repeat ad-nauseum the out of context FACT that Palin is the Commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard and that Alaska borders a foreign country. By simply repeating these facts without explanation or qualification, Palin's boosters know that no one can dispute their claims and hopefully enough swing voters will not scrutinize them too closely. Critics are simply "bashing" Alaska and a good woman.
In order to distract these swing voters from closer scrutiny of these factual, but contextually ridiculous claims, the poll tested scripts instruct the talking heads to attack the critics for being elitist, anti-women, vicious partisans, etc... The goal is not to win an argument; it is to avoid one and to simultaneously generate unattractive impressions of the opposition. One does not employ such a strategy to impress or persuade a well informed audience. Imagine a medical doctor trying to persuade colleagues to use a particular therapy or medical procedure by extolling his or her personal connection to these colleagues and his or her very similar cultural values, rather than by detailing the medical evidence supporting the proposed therapy or procedure. Why is quackery so easily rebuffed in some contexts and so easily embraced in others?
The real kicker here is that serious efforts to explain to these vulnerable and impressionable swing voters how they are being manipulated are easily portrayed as manipulation itself. Such anti-intellectual spin is buoyed by people's susceptibility to pandering. Elitists lecturing "real Americans" about how dumb they are is no way to get the support of these very same "real Americans," and their true manipulators know it.
Bottom line: Both major parties have sunk to an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" mentality, leaving most of us as frustrated and annoyed spectators in a race to the intellectual bottom.
My slogan: "Vote for Dumb in 08, it Beats Dumber."