Presidential Campaign Quality Incentives and Reform

Americans hate politics, and a hardy band of good government advocates would like to do something about it. Admittedly, this is not fresh news. Indeed, it may no longer even be a particularly welcome subject for discussion. The 2002 campaign finance reform legislation, for example, the latest achievement of a longstanding reform tradition, played to a largely indifferent national audience. For many, the ills of politics and how to fix them have been rehashed too often to be interesting. Others, noting that political reforms rarely actually fix anything, have simply abandoned hope. To them, unsatisfying politics, like air pollution, is something we just have live with. Taken all together, so many have become convinced that they have heard it all before that it is getting hard to write on this topic without sounding hackneyed. So why am I adding another book to the stack? Because the very durability of this much-worked issue shows that something is stuck. Important business remains unfinished. A stubborn, hard-to-resolve contradiction vexes our politics. This, and not some naive idealism, is what keeps the issue alive. It won't be laid to rest until we figure out why the kind of electoral politics that most Americans want--principled policy debates that clarify what is truly at stake in every national election, followed by high rates of voter participation--seems perpetually beyond their reach. The sources of our frustration can be elaborated as follows. THE PROBLEM What generations of experts, critics, and ordinary people have wanted is elections structured to give voters clear choices among policies as well as candidates, so that they can better understand and protect their interests, as representative democracy intends. This requires that candidates stick to the important issues facing the nation, avoiding both diversionary topics and off-putting campaign styles. It requires the print and broadcast journalists who cover and report the election to pressure the candidates in interviews and press conferences to stay focused on what really matters, and then to write and talk more about their qualifications and issue positions than about their campaign strategies. And it presumes that there are attentive citizens who, while preparing themselves to vote "smart," are also willing to punish departures from the public interest script at the polls, seeing to it that a political process that is supposed to protect their interests actually does so. What we usually get instead, of course, is vastly different from any of this. Candidates do what it takes to win, which often means avoiding or distorting controversial high-priority issues, inflaming and exploiting divisive "hot button" issues, pandering to target voters, and digging up or manufacturing dirt on opponents for use in attack ads. Network television news executives, driven by sagging ratings, offer less and less campaign coverage during prime time and fill that reduced airtime with overhyped accounts of the campaign wars that mention issues only when they are being used as weapons in the fight for power. Journalist David Broder, a longstanding critic ofstatus quopolitics, adds to this picture by slamming "politicians who buy popularity with tax cuts and special-interest subsidies, while postponing action on important public needs," and journalists "who put profits and ratings above their obligation to provide substantive information and analysis of public issues."* Meanwhile, those eligible to vote, who increasingly find this spectacle irrelevant to anything they care about, are moving past anger to indifference, as more and more of them simply tune the whole thing out. THE PARADOX Clearly, the reality is very different from the wish. It is so different, in fact, that we should wonder why aspirations so out of touch with reality retain any power over the popular imagination at all. Why do so many critics clinBuchanan, Bruce is the author of 'Presidential Campaign Quality Incentives and Reform', published 2003 under ISBN 9780131841406 and ISBN 0131841408.