Raise money, buy TV ads, repeat
The latest trend in political coverage seems to be ranking the candidates based on how much money they've raised.
Now, I will not pretend for a second that this information isn't vitally important to the outcome of a campaign. It is a story, no question. But more and more it seems to be treated as the story: The candidate with a lot of money is the candidate best positioned to get even more money. The candidate with even more money is in the best position to pay for the kind of advertising that will win votes. The ability to raise money is the ability to get elected. Fundraising becomes a proxy for political skill, positions on issues, get-out-the-vote passion.
Horse-race handicapping has always been the curse of political reporting, but this is a new meta-level of horse-race reporting that makes the head spin. It's similar to what's happened in movie coverage, where the old-fashioned opening-day question of "how good is it?" has long since been eclipsed by the meta-question of "how much did it gross on opening weekend?"
It's bad enough that this focus crowds out coverage of the actual distinctions among the candidates as leaders, legislators and thinkers. It's worse when you force yourself to face squarely the grotesque fact that nearly all the money that's raised goes to TV advertising; in other words, it gets put directly in the pockets of the media corporations who pay for coverage of presidential elections -- and whose coverage, more and more, is dominated by fundraising tallies.
The next time you hear a TV newsperson start telling you something like "such-and-such a candidate has raised nearly $8 million this quarter..." you can finish his sentence for him: "so that next quarter the candidate can hand it over to my bosses and help us meet our profit forecast!"
There is no conspiracy here, just the iron logic of a simple marketplace that has locked in most of the participants. There may be no way out, says the pessimist in me. But if there is, then the hope lies with unorthodox efforts like those the Dean campaign is making in its online organizing.
For now, ironically, the main value in such organizing is to enable an outsider underdog like Dean to tap some new sources of money so he can pay for the same old TV advertising everyone else is going to use. But maybe, just maybe, in the long run, the ability to build a grassroots campaign via the Net will help birth a candidate who is completely unbeholden to the existing cash/media nexus -- and who can help move us forward toward a democracy where dollars don't trump votes.
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