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The Eternal Campaign Interferes with the Peoples’ Business
Americans – at least the media and the political partisans – are infatuated with the presidential election. Check any news source and you’re likely to get copious coverage of the latest poll results, some alleged indiscretion from a candidate’s past or detailed analysis of policy positions that will almost certainly never become law.
More timely matters get ignored. Saturation coverage has been going on since the last election ended. The buzz around 2020 was already heating up when Rep. John Delaney of Maryland announced his candidacy in July 2017 — 1,194 days before the election. The “breaking news alerts,” endless panel discussions and campaign ads have been omnipresent ever since.
Other democracies have more reasonable timelines. France allows only two weeks of campaigning before the first round of voting. In Japan, campaigns last just 12 days by law, while in the UK, campaigns generally take five to six weeks. Australia’s longest campaign ever was 11 weeks long; Canada’s was 74 days.
Americans like their campaigns. They get caught up in the personal stories, the horse race only one can win, the dramatic twists of fate. By contrast, the details of governing — what the candidates actually do if successful — seem boring.
Trending to perpetual campaigns creates winners and losers. Obviously, political consultants and vendors are happy to have episodic employment converted to virtually full-time. The media, especially television, benefit not only from the billions in advertising revenue but also the never-ending news stories that are easy to write and popular with viewers.
But there are huge downsides to excessive campaigning. For one, years-long campaigns are the principal reason that running for high office is so hideously expensive. Candidates’ success hinges on their ability to raise prodigious amounts of money. Those who drop out commonly cite a lack of continued funding for the ongoing campaign as the major reason.
Common wisdom is that important matters rarely get addressed in election years. But what if every year is an election year? The peoples’ legitimate business, like the national debt, is always in deferral mode. Virtually everything that happens in the political world is analyzed through the filter of the campaign and how it could possibly affect the election.
Worse, a hyper-partisan campaign with an incumbent both highly despised and much loved makes rational debate almost impossible. It’s no secret, for example, that Democrats are alarmed about the improvement in economic growth under Trump. They are all but openly rooting for America to suffer economic decline, at least through this year. Working with the president on economic initiatives is unthinkable.
Policies traditionally regarded as commonsensical by presidents of both parties, like work requirements for able-bodied welfare recipients and the public charge rule for incoming immigrants, become campaign fodder. Democrats accuse the president of extreme cruelty to fire up his base, while Republicans claim Democrats oppose the policies only because of anti-Trump bias. Even the Supreme Court gets caught in the crossfire.
Foreign policy also suffers during a hyper-partisan, protracted campaign season. Partisanship in fact no longer “stops at the waters edge.” To the contrary, political opponents criticize virtually all the president’s initiatives, even ones they would normally support, like troop withdrawals from a desultory war and killing a terrorist leader who was planning yet more attacks.
Foreign leaders like Xi of China, Kim of North Korea, and the Iranian mullahs are well aware of the domestic opposition to Trump’s aggressive stances on trade and nuclear disarmament. The president not only has a weakened negotiating position from being undermined, the other leaders understand they may be able to wait him out until the next election.
Proponents claim that lengthy campaigns give voters ample time to learn about the candidates and make informed choices. Yet six in ten Americans report being exhausted by the process. In the end, we have large gaps in our information anyway, like Obama’s education records and Trump’s tax returns.
In the end, the (lack of) results speak for themselves. Voter participation rates lag those in other countries. And think about it. Can Americans credibly claim that our last four presidents were selected in a process that efficiently selects for high-quality leadership? We can do better.
Published in Elections, Politics
I’d be interested to hear from Ricochet’s members overseas what they have learned in regard to such laws. There are tradeoffs, I expect.
Great article. Most of our elections are supposed to be about representatives of our districts and states. The media loves the long national campaigns and turns them into abstract national phenomena without much real content. Let’s face it, local stuff is boring for most of us but it’s where governance is supposed to take place, if it must, which more often than not it shouldn’t.
So what’s your remedy? Ban campaigning outside of narrow time windows? Sorry, but I like my First Amendment rights, include candidate advocacy at any time. Politicians are mostly useless regardless how much time spent campaigning.
Oh, and I’m convinced that our last presidential campaign season yield the overall best president since Calvin Coolidge. I think your final paragraph needs some adjustment.
I’ll second that notion.
I agree with that, my remedy would be to shorten the primary season. How about a law that no state may hold a primary prior to Labor Day?
Okay, that’d be a positive change.
I don’t watch TV execpt for live sports. The last thing I want to see is during games are political ads (next to last are ED ads). It would be nice if every TV came with a filter that blocked political ads.
With apologies,
A 1/4 success rate can’t be considered “efficient”.
Meh. Compared to what? The string of statists who preceded Reagan?
I prefer to consider the efficiency with which we learn the details of candidates backgrounds. It is a lot tougher to hide past indiscretions in the modern era. Things that we should have known about some of the “respectable” presidents of the 20th century. Those presidents’ allies in the media couldn’t get away with those cover-ups today–alternate sources see to that.