Getting Out The Vote- Old Style
Hot diggety, the Primaries are in full cry! That means we are hurtling into another overwrought political season.
Usually this would be the season of the spin doctor, the image twister and the flack-meister; the month when the principle of self-government through intelligent discussion of matters of public policy is reduced to the sound-bite, the photo-op and the hot-button slogan.
I don't think the founding fathers believed public opinion should be "molded." It's pretty clear, from the fact that the First Amendment guaranteed freedom of speech, press and assembly, that they at least hoped public opinion would shape itself through open debate and discussion. The idea was that many people talking to one another would achieve the consensus that became the Public's opinion.
This is actually what happened during the American Revolution, when Committees of Correspondence, political debates in churches and meeting houses, and the tracts and broadsides that fell from dozens of independent presses, defined, clarified and consolidated a young nation's understanding of itself.
It's different today.
During a modern political campaign we are so bombarded with political "infomercials," and we are so swamped by "talk (just talk) radio," and the oh-so-careful reports of manicured anchor persons that we never notice that no public debate has actually taken place at all.
Public opinion has been molded.....
And it all starts with the candidate. He or she may have a program, and arguments supporting it, but nothing will happen unless she gets elected. So, before any discussion of issues, funds are raised and a "campaign guy" is hired.
The first thing the campaign guy does is to hire a pollster.The pollster's job is to find out what the "important issues" are. What he is looking for are the two or three aspects of current affairs that we "feel" strongly about. He wants to know what pulls our chains, or gives us the sweats. This is called looking for the hot buttons. He really doesn't care what we think, or our reasons for thinking it.
For that matter he doesn't care what the candidate thinks either, because for the purposes of the campaign the candidate won't think anything at all until he finds out what the electorate feels.
Once he's got the hot buttons the campaign guy can have the "speech person" write one speech...to be given, with slight variations, on all occasions. "The Speech" will mention all our "concerns," press the identified hot buttons, and soothingly call for "imaginative and courageous new solutions."
The campaign guy will insist that "The Speech" be as free as possible of anything that will try the voter's ability to follow an argument. This is good, he believes, since the voter, by this time in our century, has had so little practice in following an argument that he can't...the big dummy.
And Then There’s Something Entirely Different…
The Howard Dean campaign has earned a lot of press coverage for its imaginative use of the internet. It continues to be the case that no other campaign is doing this as well, but few observers have commented on the fact that the internet was only the tool that allowed the Dean campaign to treat voters as intelligent participants in the electoral debate and not just as big dummies to be manipulated.
The energy that boils out of the Dean web site and the Dean Blog is not the energy of "voting blocs" but the energy of thousands of individuals who are rediscovering the democratic process. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m damned glad it’s here.
9:31:58 AM 
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