POLITICS
How to Have Fun in Politics
By Stump Connolly
This January, the bookstores of America will be filled with opportunities for you to buy Talk’s Cheap, Let’s Race! an account of my year as an uninvited blogger on the presidential campaign trail.
Why, you may ask, would anyone want to read it? My modest answer is because it’s fun. Politics is fun. It’s fun to run for the presidency. It’s fun covering the campaign. It’s fun to be a part of the whole crazy scene. That explains, perhaps more than any other factor, why the campaign season gets longer every four years and attracts an ever larger corps of volunteers, field workers, organizers, pollsters, pundits, reporters and other camp followers.
I don’t claim that if you read this book you’ll discover why George Bush won over John Kerry. People cast their ballots for all kinds of reasons. But there were plenty of clues along the road that Kerry wasn’t the best of candidates and, if you read my book, you’ll know what I knew as it happened. Indeed, that is the key to understanding politics. What happens as it happens matters. But its importance recedes quickly in today’s voracious news cycle that demands something else happen that matters more.
Watching the campaign this year means watching the media as much as you watch the candidates. There are just plain more of them, seasoned pros and rank amateurs, filling column inches in newspapers – yes they still matter – blogging their daily thoughts on the Internet, and talking up the campaign on the nightly news.
They’ve been hard at it for almost a year now. But as I’ve noted before (see chapter one), the media has a way of declaring winners before the first ballot is ever cast.
How do we know so much about the candidates this year so early in the season? We know because there have been a record number of early debates. Some have been frothy newsertainment sponsored by the likes of CNN and YouTube. Others offered occasional glimpses into a candidate’s weaknesses. With eight and nine contestants giving rapid-fire 60 second answers, none have been particularly enlightening.
We know about these candidates because they are traveling with a huge entourage of reporters in tow. Four years ago, Howard Dean built an early lead in Iowa riding around in an SUV with a state trooper and one reporter in the backseat. This year, reporters vie for seats on tour buses that accompany candidates to town meetings where the press corps out numbers the participants.
Finally, we know about these candidates because the media isn’t waiting for anybody to vote. Why should they when they can conduct their own telephone polls every other day –– and analyze them to death on the Sunday talk shows? We know who is doing better with women, who appeals to independents, who is perceived as tougher, more experienced, more trustworthy and most desired as a babysitter for your kids. What we don’t know is who is going to win.
We also don’t know what is going to go wrong. Call it The Maybes of politics. Maybe a frontrunner will break down in tears in New Hampshire. Maybe a photographer will catch somebody with a bimbo in a cigarette boat. Maybe a dirty bomb will go off at an all-candidate forum and our only remaining choices will be Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich? The Maybes fuel the romance of politics, but they don’t happen until they happen.
Don’t expect to hear much about issues or qualifications in this race –– unless, of course, you turn out at a candidate rally and listen to the speeches. At this point, it’s all about Storylines.
For Barack Obama, it’s his ability to change the dynamic in Washington. For Hillary Clinton, it’s her experience in getting things done. For John Edwards, his determination to give a voice to the voiceless. On the Republican side, it’s Mitt Romney, business acumen. Rudy Guiliani, terror fighter. John McCain, straight talker. Mike Huckabee, Christian conservative. And Fred Thompson, good actor.
Iowa is where the story begins. It’s where the candidates use all this media attention to hone their persona – and sell it to the voters. But don’t get caught up thinking Iowa is important.
The winners on the Republican and Democratic side will probably walk away with 14 to 16 delegates apiece (out of the 2,516 Republican and 4,417 Democratic delegates who will attend the conventions.) The Iowa caucus system is arcane, so arcane the TV news anchors won’t even report vote totals. Only “winner percentages” (based on an algorithm supplied by party leaders) will make it into the graphics. And none of the leading contenders who lose are likely to say, “Gee, I lost Iowa, time to fold my tent.”
This, of course, won’t keep the pundits from filling the Election Night airwaves with prognostications on who has momentum going into New Hampshire (where the lucky winner is likely to pick up eight or nine more).
Momentum is the one aspect of politics that the media controls. First they create it by pontificating on the meaning of the election results, then they confirm it by polling the audience that was listening to them. Momentum is the funny money of presidential campaigns: hard to measure but easy to counterfeit. It is made up in equal parts of spin, happenstance and punditry.
The more experienced political reporters may hold back their momentous predictions until after New Hampshire. It is hard, after all, to measure forward progress along a line that has only a single point. If someone wins both Iowa and New Hampshire – two in a row! –– that’s a juggernaut, isn’t it? Not exactly.
After New Hampshire, the campaign trail widens. Primaries in Michigan, Florida and South Carolina and the Nevada caucuses dot the January calendar. Right on their heel comes Super Duper Tuesday (Feb 5) when 22 states go to the polls –– including New York, California, Illinois, Georgia, Arizona, Alabama, Tennessee, Connecticut, Colorado, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
The talk about the importance of momentum will subside only to be replaced by discussions of money. Even with war chests of $50 to $75 million, no candidate can compete everywhere; so now the media, as well as the campaign managers, can play campaign strategist.
Where can the cash be most efficiently spent to bring out the base? Where can it surreptitiously be spent to steal delegates in the other guy’s backyard? (Remember, all Democratic primaries and key Republican ones divide delegations among contenders by the percentage of the vote they receive. So if, for instance, Clinton wins New York but Obama is a close second, they have essentially split the state delegation.)
This part of the race –– what might be called the first lap –– ends when everybody wakes up February 6 and realizes that 57% of the Democratic delegates and 55% of the Republicans have now been apportioned.
Either one candidate runs the table in this early going or both parties are going to have a big mess on their hands. Unless all the losers concede, there may not be enough balls left in play to assure anyone left in the race of a convention majority. That’s when the race goes from fun to funner.
If you have an opinion on all this, you are welcome to set up your own blog and fire away with the other online pundits. But the fun in politics isn’t having an opinion on what’s going to happen. The fun is being there to see how it happens, and to meet along the way the people who make it happen.
The volunteers and staff who turn the gears of the campaign machinery are often far more interesting than the candidates who mouth the words that come out. What they think, what they do, and how they do it is what my book is really about. So, of course, I urge you to buy it.
If you can’t find it at a bookstore, go to Amazon.com, Booksense.com or another online retailers. If you like it so much you want to be a Stumpster yourself, check out our website store at www.stumpconnolly.com to get your very own T-shirts, mugs, hats, campaign journals and baby drool cloths.
If you live in or near Chicago, you can also take advantage of a rare opportunity to meet the author and buy the book by attending my release party Monday, December 3, from 5 – 8 PM at the Billy Goat Tavern. 430 N. Michigan – Lower Level.
See you on the tarmac.
