Go ahead, ignore the horse race

To a long-time practitioner and now a student of journalism, watching the national media cover the presidential race is both amusing and infuriating.

By the time you read this, the circus will have left Iowa and headed for New Hampshire. So, instead of getting deluged with stories about a (very) temporarily politically significant Midwestern state, we’ll be deluged with stories about a (very) temporarily politically significant New England state. It’s going to be a bit like the movie “Groundhog Day,” although considerably less entertaining.

What’s funny is that the reporters who are now filling air time on the campaign trail obviously know the story is a dog. They strain so hard to explain its significance, when in fact, it has relatively little. That was revealed in the very structure of the stories about Iowa. They’d always start with a series of disclaimers, like the population is heavily conservative and evangelical, a small minority of voters actually show up at the caucuses, blah, blah, blah. And then they’d segue into horse-race coverage, probably the most infuriating thing the national political media does.

And the one thing that, in theory, everyone agrees is useless. As the name implies, horse-race coverage is pretty much every story you see between the start of the campaigns and the national conventions. It’s all about who is ahead of whom at any given time. It’s the sort of story that nobody cares about, except for people on the inside of the campaigns. And after every election, there’s a great deal of breast-beating among national political journalists. They hold about six months’ worth of convocations to discuss the topic, “Do We Do Too Much Horse-Race Coverage of Politics?” The answer is always, “Yes we do and we’ll do better next time.” And then, the next time, everybody does the exact same thing.

This is no defense of that, but if they were honest, the national media types would say they do the horse-race thing because there is no other story to do. Yes, they could do stories about the issues, but those kind of stories make for lousy, talking-head television. Horse-race stories at least have some action in them, if only metaphorically. And if the election this time is about the economy, how many different ways can you say the economy sucks?

This year has been a particularly fertile one for the useless horse-race story, what with the collection of clowns, lunatics and hustlers vying for the Republican nomination. The constant turnover in who’s doing better than whom among the Republicans has made horse-race coverage almost a logical choice, useless though it is.

And if you watch it closely – I know, why do something so painful? – the coverage has had some amusing sidelights. It’s been funny, for example, to watch the national political media totally ignore Ron Paul’s success so far.

Now, there really are some defensible reasons for that. The reason Paul is succeeding has less to do with his positions, some of which are reasonable and some of which are pretty twisted, than it has to do with the motivations of his followers. Libertarians are the Amway salesmen of politics; they LOVE the product and they want you to love it too. Hey, he’s not a racist, and anyway, even if he was he doesn’t like war or laws against pot.

Actually, Paul’s backers, and libertarians in general, carry a faint aroma of nuttiness. In that sense, they remind me of a less extreme version of the people who touted Lyndon LaRouche back in the 1980s. If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember the LaRouchies. A couple of them won statewide office in Illinois and the national media picked up on the story. The media started to Take Them Seriously.

At the time, I was covering politics for a daily newspaper in southwestern Minnesota. The farm economy was in the dumper in a big way and the LaRouchies were coming out of the woodwork. I always found interviewing them a fascinating experience. For about the first 10 minutes of any interview, they’d sound reasonable. After that, though, their eyeballs would start pointing in opposite directions, they’d begin foaming at the mouth and, by the end of the interview, not only were they wearing tinfoil hats, they were trying to talk me into wearing one too. The end of the rational part of the conversation was generally signaled by use of the phrase “Jewish bankers.”

Libertarians, as repellent as some of their philosophical positions are, aren’t quite that crazy, but as I said, there’s a faint whiff of the kind of tortured basic philosophy that made LaRouchies so amusing before they got tiresome. A world run on libertarian principles would be an ugly, unpleasant place, but that isn’t likely to happen (and if it did, we’d all be too stoned to care).

Here’s a bold prediction: Come November, the winner of the presidential election is either going to be Obama or his Republican challenger. There will be other people on the ballot, but one of those two guys is going to win. Given that everybody knows that, the current battle royale among those clowns, lunatics and hustlers is nothing more than a sideshow. But it’s being covered like the main circus, because the main circus doesn’t even get to town for a few months yet.

So, basically, your sanity is being held hostage to the news cycle. Gotta fill that airtime. Personally, I’d rather watch infomercials, but I’m not the one making the coverage decisions.

So here’s some advice from an old pro, heretical though it may be: Just don’t watch it. Spend your time thinking about where you stand on the issues and decide which candidate, on balance, best represents your feelings. Then go play catch with your kids and work that overtime you have to do to make ends meet. You won’t be missing much.