Put Out a Contract on These Campaigns

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterGood lord. This one can’t end soon enough, and I’m tempted to say “badly enough’. There really should be penalties and pain for political campaigns as time and attention-sucking and uninvolving as the one we’re enduring right now.

I freely confess to jaded-induced boredom. I’ve seen too many campaigns. I really should slink away to the Yukon with a faithful dog, a store of hardtack and jerky and let this ceaseless barrage of boilerplate bluster and by-the-numbers attack advertising run its course, which of course would mean killing off the last critical synapses in the last sentient voter walking the land. When (or if) I re-emerged the world might resemble the aftermath of some zombie plague, with the brain-eaters being political consultants and messaging experts.

We all know it’s bad, as in dull, monotonous, predictable and off-putting. Need a fresh example? How about GOP Senate candidate Mike McFadden devoting one day to announcing his “contract with Minnesota” and then another day to signing it? Inspiring stuff. Imaginative, too. Another “contract”. The latest in a 20-plus year run of “contracts” thrown up by imagination-free political candidates who don’t dare, and/or are advised not to dare ever saying anything that might engage the mental machinery of what I refer to as the “actively informed voter.”

Obviously, if you’re one of those people you fully understand that these campaigns, which thanks to the epic flow of money unleashed by Citizens United never actually end any longer, are targeted on a sliver of the population that rarely exceeds 15%. These would be your “persuadable voters”, the folks who, put another way, mostly ignore political/government function, get a lot of their news from headlines they see walking past the few newspaper racks still remaining, overhear at the plant or see on some cable channel in the dentist’s office. That’s who all the money is being spent on. And who knows, a couple of them might even be persuaded to vote … against the other guy.

Meanwhile, it is worse than a Newton Minow “wasteland” for everyone else. If you care enough to follow these processes daily, instead of just for a couple weeks every other year, you’ve come to accept that there’s nothing here for you. You’ve heard every attack thousands of times, seen every grainy video of lock-stepping “ultra-liberals” and lapse into narcolepsy at the hint of yet another “debate”. Essentially you made your mind up months (if not years) ago and are enduring this siege of unrelenting blandness as you might a stand-up comic suitable for your mother’s nursing home.

Obviously, if this were Kentucky or even Iowa, or as Joe has been following, South Dakota, it might a little different. There’d at least be a pulse. But here in Minnesota there’s never been any serious doubt that either Al Franken or Mark Dayton was going to be reelected. If there was it vanished with the nominations of Mike McFadden and Jeff Johnson, two guys with all the inspirational ability of a couple corporate trainers who forgot their PowerPoint.

So what to do? Well nothing, if like Franken your handlers, advisers and kitchen cabinet have wrung every last ounce of wit and risk out of you. (Dayton will always and only do what Dayton wants to do.)

But in (my) ideal world here’s something I’d like some genuinely “courageous” candidate “fighting” for the middle-class and “hard working” Americans everywhere to give a try.

Screw these ritualized debates, which long ago degenerated into a trench warfare of pre-digested catch phrases and attack slogans hurled back and forth like mustard gas.

I’d like to see a (formerly) witty, daring guy like Franken agree to a serious of “thesis candidate” interviews with bona fide experts on a series of issues. Tell the League of Women Voters to go find three acknowledged experts each on economics, public ethics, communications, whatever and you’ll agree to sit, by yourself, not with your opponent, and be cross-examined by them for 90 minutes. No horse-race obsessed professional journalists allowed. Instead, a conversation rewarding actual brainpower, intellectual resourcefulness and humility.

To be revealed: What you do and don’t know about the reality of what you’re selling to the persuadables on primetime TV, in between episodes of “Honey Boo Boo” and Thursday Night Football.

Suicide for the fool who agrees to such a concept? I’m not so sure. If Franken agreed to do it, what’s the predicament for McFadden?

Bottom line question: Does any politician dare talk to adults like adults? I’ve decided the answer is “no.”

Hmmm … must check Expedia for packages to Whitehorse.

9 thoughts on “Put Out a Contract on These Campaigns

  1. The candidate v. experts grilling idea is interesting. I’d sure love to see MN candidates go into more depth than the debates and ads allow.

    The SD Senate race has caught my fancy in large part because it is spectacularly wierd. You have a Democrat running around a deep red state courageously advocating a Medicare For All option and buying airtime to sing folk songs about corporate greed, and doddering Indie candidate reading poetry about why he thinks Obama needs a friend and a Republican claiming extreme South Dakotaness whilst his ads air stock photos of Parisians. That’s some good shit.

    Meanwhile, a personalityless Franken drones on about small ball legisatlive accomplishments, while the CEO investment banker McFadden explains that his off-spring like him.

    The odds are that strong SD is going to stay red, but at least their politics had a pulse this year.

    • Hey, I’m all for loving myself some weird. (I have a Michele Bachmann doll.) But I’m forever amazed at how little we ever truly know about the people we elect to high government office. Maybe it doesn’t matter all that much if they hold our values, but in every day life I tend to invest my confidence in people who I have a pretty good idea know what they’re talking about.

  2. Maybe the governor’s race is a bit dull, but here in MN 8th district the race for representative is sort of a white knuckle affair–at least for me. Our DFL candidate Rick Nolan is being challenged by the Tea Party’s ultra-wealthy Stuart Mills (of Fleet Farm fame) and the Green Party’s Skip Sandman, who cannot possibly win but who has 11% of the votes (according to the last poll), most of which are coming from Nolan’s side. Thus there is a good chance the Koch-backed Mills will win, which is a frightening prospect, as he is a callow youth with a shallow understanding of governance, to put it as kindly as possible. I would take a boring election over this any day.

    • Yeah, and I think Mills is going to win, and very likely in a replay of the Peter Hutchinson-blocks-Mike Hatch-to-give-us-Tim Pawlenty disaster. I had a lot of “hip” progressives who followed their conscience and voted for Hutchinson. Eight years of Pawlenty did as much damage to state finances and local government effectiveness as anyone I can remember.

  3. I think the candidate vs. “expert” is interesting and would make for good intellectual discussion but who is going pay for it?

    • Well, the beauty of our Internets age is that we don’t need a commercial TV station to bring legitimacy to something like this. Any college or civic organization could host it, and anyone capable of running a camcorder could shoot it.

  4. Re: “Who is going to pay for it?”

    Maybe the public policy schools at the Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota strike a joint agreement to form expert panels to review each others’ politicians? Maybe the League of Women Voters finances it?

    The U of M is so financially dependent on the support of MN pols, there would be a conflict of interest (either real or perceived) problem if you had U of M experts reviewing MN pols.

    • That would be sweet. Damn, I’d love to get on a panel grilling Scott Walker. I’d have concoct some pretense of “expert”, but I’d figure it out.

  5. I sure hope Franken wins, but I haven’t been impressed with his campaign.

    His credentialing ads sleepily drone on about incremental changes he has made, which even bore a wonk like me. Meanwhile his attack ads seem to overstep in characterizing his opponents’ business practices — such as here and here.

    When you’re running against a millionaire CEO investment banker who wants to dismantle reforms that have brought Minnesota the highest rate of health insurance in its history and supports still more tax cuts for himself and his country club chums, you don’t need to overstep about his business practices.

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