Canceling the Incumbents

It's been less than a week and already the results of last Tuesday's elections have been spun into the sort of black and white talk show goo that lets us all pretend that voters are predictable and politics easily analyzed. To those pundits who make their living pronouncing on trends so ephemeral only the commentators can see them, the truth is clear: This year's political theme is anti-incumbency. (I know, you thought that was last year's theme, but generalizations this useful have a way of hanging around.)

Dinkins and Florio, term limits in Maine and New York City--these are all supposedly signs that we as an electorate have become, in the words of a New York Times headline, "cranky." Unwilling to give the poor incumbents a fair shake, we fickle voters have apparently "fire[d] everyone in sight" and are irrationally expecting the impossible from our elected officials.

Aside from the fact that this is a thesis largely based on a few East Coast races (and a good thing, too, since a broader national look would reveal an awful lot of incumbents still in office), such sudden concern for office-holders would be touching if it weren't so disingenuous.

In its analysis yesterday of all this crankiness, The New York Times led off with a quote from a professor of marketing who compared "voting to shopping for something you don't particularly want to buy, like toilet paper."

"Where customer satisfaction is not high, you see a lot of switching," said the professor. "I'll buy one I haven't tried recently."

And while spin doctors and their cousins the political commentators may deplore such capriciousness, they are directly responsible for it.

Deciding to sell candidates like so much shampoo has its consequences. For years, the voters have been told that each aspirant to political office has all the answers, that pressing dilemmas can be solved quickly, cheaply and without raising taxes. Small wonder, then, that voters would grow impatient with elected officials who insist that the solutions are neither quick nor cheap nor easy.

If voters seem to be engaging in the electoral equivalent of channel surfing, it may be because politicians have become indistinguishable from sitcom characters: Sure, these problems are tough, but don't worry, things will work out just fine by the end of the show.

Theo Huxtable flunked a math test because he was partying? A talking-to from his dad will help him set his priorities straight. The deficit is spiraling out of control? A talking-to from Ross Perot will help us set our priorities straight.

Politicians and television shows are even judged by the same standards. Are their ratings up or down? How loyal is their following? Which demographic group do they appeal to the most?

It's even become difficult to distinguish the language that surrounds politics and TV. Consider the following quote from Time magazine earlier this year:

"He was always the longest shot in [this] horse-race... He brought too little experience and too much ego. His competition was too entrenched, his audience too ill-defined, his...sensibility too dated."

Ross Perot? Tsongas?

Wrong, The author is referring to Chevy Chase.

Just as television producers try to "program" a particular time-slot to maximize viewership, political handlers have long been trying to package their candidates in a similar way.

In an exhaustive, if somewhat over-wrought, look at the career of Clinton advisor David Gergen, Michael Kelly's New York Times Magazine cover story last week documented how the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign revolutionized the way candidates were presented.

"Voter approval for a Presidential candidate, [Nixon speechwriter and German mentor Ray] Price argued, is not about reality but is a 'product of the particular chemistry between the voter and the image of the candidate...It's not the man we have to change, but rather the received impression [of him].'"

In other words--the important thing is not to make the show better but to change the set.

In a week when the Vice President of the United States announced he would appear on a cable talk show to debate a Texas billionaire about trade policy, it would be easy to see all this as proof that political culture has degenerated beyond recognition.

Yet those Cassandras who whine about the dignity of the presidency are also missing the point. Public exposure of any kind is good for democracy. If Larry King isn't exactly the most qualified moderator, at least a debate on the substance of NAFTA is taking place. It wasn't so long ago that national policy was made in utmost secrecy. A well lit studio may not seem like progress, but it beats the hell out of a smoke-filled room.

But what pollsters, commentators and handlers are learning is that you can't turn politics into a television show without expecting any negative repercussions. Politicians, like sitcoms, can be canceled.

Lori E. Smith '93-'94 is associate editorial chair of the Crimson. She finally has a TV.