To understand what not to take seriously about presidential politics, all you had to do was watch the brilliant parody of a vacuous an airheaded television correspondent as portrayed by Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America” last Tuesday.
Interviewing Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina the day he formally announced his candidacy, Sawyer pretended to be playing it straight by asking Edwards about his standing in the latest public opinion polls.
It had to be satire. Anyone with an iota of political sophistication knows that polls are precisely what should not be taken seriously. Not yet, anyway.
It isn’t that the polls are wrong. It’s that they often measure a public opinion that does not exist. We know this, as it happens, from the polls that are not wrong and that show more Democrats are undecided than are for the “front-runners.” Besides, one of those “front-runners,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, isn’t a front-runner; he’s just well-known, having been on the ticket three years ago. The other “front-runner,” former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, is the real McCoy, but perhaps only for the nonce.
But then, all poll results are only for the nonce. A few months ago, polls said President Bush was invincible. Today, they say he is, well, vincible.
History informs us that many voters–especially in New Hampshire, which holds the first primary Jan. 27–change their minds days before they vote, sometimes hours before they vote. A couple of guys named Bush who lost New Hampshire primaries that they thought they were going to win in 1980 and 2000 would probably agree that the time to start taking New Hampshire polls seriously is . . . oh, maybe Jan. 21.
That would be the day after the day after the Iowa caucuses, the results of which will have a decided (though not, as two guys named Bush could attest, decisive) influence on New Hampshire voters. Their verdict, in turn, will have a decided (and possibly decisive) influence on everybody else. It is one country, and what happens in Des Moines and Concord influences Chicago and Albuquerque.
This is why something else not to be taken seriously is the talk, already begun, that the Democrats will split the early contests, with one winning Iowa, another New Hampshire, still another South Carolina the next week, and yet a fourth some of the other primaries that day. Such a result would deprive anyone of winning a majority of the delegates until late in the process, perhaps even concluding in a genuinely contested Democratic National Convention in Boston next summer.
What fun! It’s a political reporter’s nirvana, which is why some of them speculate in print about the possibility.
As they say in some precincts of New York (primary date March 2), fuhgeddaboudit. There is no reason to think the early contests will not winnow the field to two contenders, a front-runner and somebody else, who will fight it out for a few more weeks.
Except that the winnowing seems to have already begun, which is why all those other Democrats are ganging up on Dean. Do take this seriously: Everything is happening faster this time. Maybe it’s something peculiar about the politics of this year–lingering bitterness from the 2000 election, the war in Iraq, the economy. Or maybe it’s just that the culture constantly rushes all processes, raising the disquieting possibility that the 2016 campaign will begin before the 2012 election.
Looking for somebody
Either way, the “Anyone but (the front-runner)” movement that historically formed right after the New Hampshire primary is under way. Because of Dean’s surprising surge–which may or may not have abated last week thanks to his mistakes and former Gen. Wesley Clark’s candidacy–the other Democrats had to do something to prevent him from wrapping up the nomination before Thanksgiving.
The difference is that this “Anybody-but-Dean” movement hasn’t coalesced around a single “Anybody.” Only Dean has excited voters. So nobody is Anybody. By the time somebody does become Anybody, he may already be a nobody.
It isn’t only Dean’s opponents ganging up on Dean. The political reporters are too. They usually wait until a candidate has won a primary, often because they have gushed about what a wonderful fellow he is, before they discover that he is actually a cad.
The lesson here is political reporters should not be taken seriously either, especially when they engage in the flip-flop flap.
Reporters love to catch politicians using different words on Thursday to make the same point they did on Monday, or altering their position on some issue. Such behavior is scorned as a “flip-flop” and seen as a sure sign that the candidate is flighty, if not downright dishonest.
And if, by switching positions, the candidate enhances his appeal to some interest group, he is not only flighty or dishonest, he is–horror of horrors–pandering, telling people what they want to hear so they will vote for him. Edwards, for instance, voted for a trade agreement with China in 2000, but against a similar agreement with Singapore and Chile this year. Dean favored the North American Free Trade Agreement when it was adopted but now wants to change it. The possibility that either candidate might have changed his mind, perhaps in response to changed circumstances, is too nuanced and is given no credence.
There is, of course, another term for telling people that you will pursue their preferred policies to win their support. That term is “democracy,” a system that rests on the assumption that officials ought to do what their constituents want, at least most of the time. But in the ethereal realm inhabited by some political activists and commentators, such behavior is acceptable only when “the people” are treated as an amorphous mass, not approached in their separate realms as, say, workers, farmers or business owners.
In the actual United States of America, actual citizens have always banded together according to profession, region, industry, ethnicity and philosophy to put pressure on politicians, who in turn have always appealed to them group by group. That’s how American democracy has always worked. It isn’t perfect, but it is not a failure.
Divide and conquer?
The last thing the wise citizen should not take seriously in considering this campaign is ideology. Most candidates are not ideologues. Neither are most voters. But the political world seems overwhelmed by an obsession to divide candidates and voters into ideological slots.
Thus the prevailing portrayal of Dean, who governed like an Eisenhower Republican for 11 years, as a candidate of “the left.” That description is derided as “absolutely incorrect” by William Doyle, the Republican who has been in the Vermont State Senate longer than anyone. By contrast, Missouri’s Rep. Richard Gephardt, whose views on most issues are clearly to Dean’s left, is one of the “moderates.” As they say in some precincts of New York, go figure.
Five will get you 10 that any day now, some TV anchor will ask one of the candidates about being too liberal, or too conservative, to win. These anchor-folks are such wry wits.
