The Biggest Obstacle to Electing the Right President

Like many members of the Skilled Political Debate Group at Blog Catalog, I'm marking the one-year countdown to the election with some thoughts on what's going to make it tough to elect the right President in 2008.


The biggest obstacle to electing the right President is the marketing culture in which we live. It's a culture in which sound bites are powerful and anything we really want people to hear must be reduced to a few-second clip. It's a culture in which the written word has to be formatted in bullet points and short, bold-headed paragraphs if it's to be read. It's a culture in which newspapers are careful to work the key points into the first paragraph of an article because they know that the vast majority of their "readers" never turn to page eight to continue the story. And it's a culture in which most newspapers and consumer publications work to keep their articles at a 7th-9th grade reading level.

On what, then, do voters base their decisions? Note that I did not say, "On what, then, are voters to base their decisions?". The answers to the latter question are myriad and crystal clear. One good piece of information would be a candidate's voting record as a Senator or Congressman--but not the checklist many interest groups or neutral voting organizations put out. That's not enough information, not because the information can't be trusted but because it's meaningless standing alone. Knowing that a Congressman voted "for the bankruptcy bill" or that a Senator "opposed a bill that would have brought our troops home from Iraq" is meaningless unless you know what the bill contained, what its impact would have been or has been, and what information was available at the time the official made his decision. The significance of those votes would also be clearer if you knew whether or not they were consistent with the candidate's previous positions, and if not, what accounted for the change.

And, of course, as our tolerance for dense text and long explanations diminishes, our world is growing more complex. At the very moment we most need to focus deeply, to understand the details, to analyze the connections and to think beyond the sound bite, our time and our patience have all but disappeared. The vast majority of us simply don't have enough information to cast a reasonable vote.

There's a lot of talk every election year about how terrible it is that voter turnout is so low. I'll agree that it's a shame that more potential voters don't participate in the political process, but I don't think that's all about voting. In fact, I think too many people are voting. People who are voting based on ten-second sound bites and whether or not someone "looks Presidential" should either be educating themselves about the issues and the candidates or staying home from the polls. And those aren't the worst votes cast by any stretch of the imagination--they pale in comparison to the voters in the 1986 Illinois primary who made Janice Hart and Mark
Fairchild the Democratic candidates for Attorney General and Lieutenant Governor on the strength of their NAMES. After the election, many voters admitted that they'd had no idea who the candidates were. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about why voters who (by their own admission) knew nothing about the candidates chose Janice Hart over the party-supported Aurelia Pucinski. Because the candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor run on a single-vote ticket like the President and Vice President, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Adlai Stevenson III left the party's ticket and ran as a Solidarity candidate, losing the election by the widest margin in Illinois history.

Just a little rule of thumb: If you've never heard of a candidate, YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T VOTE FOR HIM.

We hear a lot of sound bites about how voting is a right, or a privilege or a responsibility--but just like the politicians' sound bites leave out all of the unpleasant or complicated or conflicting details, the voting sound bites leave out a critical fact: the right (or responsibility) to vote carries with it a responsibility to make educated decisions. A vote that's a guess is worse than no vote at all.

Here are a few of the other posts on this topic so far.

http://capitalels.blogspot.com/2007/11/its-not-ron-paul-and-its-not-hillary.html

http://blog.techfun.org/political-gossip-clouds-the-issues


If you'd like to participate, simply create your own blog post with the title "The Biggest Obstacle to Electing the Right President" and:

-email the link to either libdrone at gmail dot com or TLSanders at gmail dot com
-post the link in the political debate group at the link at the top of this page
-leave your link in a comment to this post

This Isn't My Post

A few days ago, I read a post on the CapitaL eLs blog asking whether Ron Paul would get "zapped by the WOD third rail". I thought it was a great question, because I think that in today's culture political candidates face a very real problem with tough issues. A complex answer doesn't make a good sound bite, and a thirty-second sound bite pulled from a three minute answer is likely to be misleading and perhaps damaging to the overall cause. So what's a candidate to do?

That's the issue I was expecting the post to confront, and it did--briefly. But the bulk of the post was about the wisdom and ethics of the war on drugs itself, and that seemed out of place to me. If we were going to discuss the possibility that a political candidate in the United States could honestly discuss the real complexities of the issue and perhaps venture to point out--even tentatively--that the war on drugs isn't really working, then the last thing we needed was to allow any distractors in that discussion that might evoke emotional responses just like the ones that made this such a touchy issue for politicians.

At least, that was my take. The author of the original post suggested (fairly, I think), that I'd mentally written an entirely different post by the same name. He said he'd be interested in reading it, and the more I thought about it the more I became convinced that he was right, and that I'd mentally constructed an entire post based on what I THOUGHT a post with his title would say, or should say. So here it is:

Ladies and gentlemen, we've got problems. We've got a monster national debt, a huge percentage of home loans are in foreclosure, our prisons are overflowing, quite a few foreign governments...um...well...hate our guts, we're engaged in a war that most Americans don't support. News flash: No one is going to fix that in four years. If we elect a guy who says he's going to, he's a liar--and we've seen how well that works out. If we elect a guy who tells the truth...oh, but that couldn't happen, could it?

I don't think it could. And here's why. It's very easy to yell, "Be tough on crime!" and that's a concept that people can easily take hold of and nod in agreement--maybe even applaud. That's four words. The truth is that our prisons are overflowing, and building more is a serious economic investment. The truth is that for some classes of crimes, prison does more to increase the rate of recidivism than it does to prevent crime. The truth is that our justice system has been increasingly shown to have convicted, imprisoned and even killed innocent men over the past few decades--and the only reason it goes back only that far is that we don't have the evidence or incentive necessary to look at the rest. I've only just begun...and yet I've far exceeded the amount of time a candidate has to make an effective point. He's tough on crime or he's not. Period. There's no space in an election year to say, "Not all crime is created equal, and neither are all criminals." There's no leeway to ask hard questions like, "Do we spend millions of dollars building new prisons, or do we let people out LONG before the end of their sentences?" TOUGH ON CRIME: Yes or No.

The War on Drugs is definitely one of those issues--complex, multi-faceted, troublesome. There's no easy answer. If a candidate says there is, he is either a liar or a fool. And yet, if a candidate says there isn't, we won't hear the rest of his message and we won't elect him. That seems to limit us to only two possibilities: elect a liar or elect a fool.