I don't normally watch political talk shows on Sunday morning. This morning, though, my wife had turned on the TV and walked out of the room, and I came in to fold the laundry and wound up watching a little bit of Face the Nation. In ten minutes, I learned all about why U.S. politics are so fucked up.
First I saw two candidates for Congress, one Democrat and one Republican, who were both asked about recent surveys showing little confidence in either major party. Rather than answer the question, each candidate gave a short canned speech laden with the buzzwords that each party is trying to claim. Thus, the Democrat said things like "education," "environment," and "economy"--she didn't discuss any of these things, mind you, she merely said the words. Then the Republican said it was important to keep America strong and to protect the safety of Americans--again, without giving any substance to those words. In short, when asked to discuss the problem, they exemplified its cause.
And the problem is not that they are stupid, or even that they are uncharacteristically dishonest. Politics in America are terrible for the same reason that radio in America is terrible.
See, at one point, radio broadcast licenses became extremely profitable. Consequently, they became extremely expensive. Enterprises large and small decided to enter the radio business and they borrowed tremendous amounts of money to do so. This in turn meant that radio stations consistently needed to generate a lot of cash to service the debt.
This led to the rise of the consultants. They found that most radio listeners only listen for a little while at a time, and they want to hear something they recognize right away. The consultants do research, they expose focus groups to ten-second-long snippets of new songs to find out which ones will do well, and then they prepare playlists. The consultants guarantee minimum ratings, so long as the stations stick to the playlists. The stations stick to the playlists, and they get the ratings, so they keep the advertisers happy, and they keep current on their debt service. Everybody's happy, including the people who listen to the radio stations they like.
Well, almost everyone. A lot of us have given up on radio because it sucks. But radio executives don't have to care about us, and even if they wanted to, the fact is that it'd be instant professional suicide to flirt with bankruptcy by ignoring the consultants.
Politicians have consultants, too. They choose the themes, make campaign ads (which explains the remarkable uniformity in ads across the U.S.), and generally turn candidates into sock puppets. In any tightly contested race, the stakes are too high for the candidates to risk doing anything else. (And money's too tight to waste on discussing issues in the races that aren't tightly contested.)
The grim part is that most candidates who try anything different really will lose--just as most radio stations that depart from the standard formats and playlists really will lose a lot of listeners, getting their executives fired. (If you are going to disagree with me on this, be prepared to explain why I can't pick up WFMU's signal on my home stereo.) The American people tell pollsters that they want serious discussion of the issues, but that's just what they think they're supposed to say. The truth is that they change the channel and vote for whoever runs the nastiest negative ads.
I can't think of any easy solution. Part of the problem is that most of the people who deal with ideas for a living have, in fact, only bad ideas, so most Americans tune them out when they start discussing them. Nonetheless, our news outlets feel compelled to have talk shows, but even these have all become a lot like the WWF, because that's all that people will watch.
At least I can put a CD player in my car.
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