I have not been commenting on the U.S. presidential campaign very much. As an opinionated blogger, this is a cause for introspection. I am intensely interested in the issues, and I believe that the outcome is extremely important. Yet I haven’t had much to say. How could that be?

Today I was helped in my understanding by watching a lecture on C-SPAN 3 about President Woodrow Wilson. The lecture was given by historian and author John Milton Cooper. [1] Wilson was the first president to face a radio microphone, at a the time when the mode of campaigning was in transition. According to Prof. Cooper, the dominant mode prior to 1890 was for candidates to attempt to educate the public about the issues and the candidate’s stand on them. Starting in the 1890’s, the mode started to change to marketing the candidates virtues. The advent of radio during the Wilson era hastened that transition.

Prof. Cooper didn’t go into the differences between education and marketing modalities, but we can figure that out for ourselves. An educational approach is a necessarily lengthy exposition of issues with a step-by-step examination of arguments relevant to the issues that lead to the candidates stance. A marketing approach directly asserts that the candidate’s approach to an issue is the best one. In the days when people had time to listen to long speeches or read long expositions, the educational approach was reasonable. In an era of valuable radio time with competition for peoples’ time from entertainment by radio, phonographs, and movies the short-form marketing approach gained appeal. Education gives facts and reasons, marketing claims the results to be obtained.

The world has continued to move in the direction that favors the marketing approach. Politics has continued to move down the priority list for most people, and candidates have responded with ever-simpler messages. One might suppose that the press would provide a counter influence, demanding more thorough treatment of complex issues. That has not happened. The press lives in the world of sound bites, and they know that if they spend more than thirty seconds on any issue, their audience is likely to change channels to find something fresh.

As an example, consider the issue of offshore drilling. I wrote a blog piece entitled Drilling Is Not About the Price of Oil, It is About Trade Deficits that takes the issue one level deeper than either the Obama or McCain campaign has pressed it. My analysis is trivial: if we produce a trillion dollars of oil domestically, that means we have to send a trillion dollars less overseas. I think everyone agrees that trade deficits are bad, and domestic oil has no more carbon than foreign oil. So, are there environmental consequences that are worse than a trillion dollars of trade deficit?

Why have neither the candidates nor the press discussed the issue at that level? The answer, I believe, is that such a discussion would take more than thirty seconds. A news program like Meet the Press must cover every issue of the campaign in a total of twenty minutes, so how could they possibly dwell on offshore drilling for more than thirty seconds? A candidate may get forty-five minutes to make a speech covering every issue. That’s not going to allow a discussion of offshore drilling that might take five minutes.

Another example of pressing an issue is given in The Problem with Taxing the Rich is That They may Leave Candidates could be challenged as to why they think that increasing taxes will or will not increase revenues. It would be fair to pose that challenge quantitatively, not just qualitatively. Senator Obama, “What do you think is the upper limit on taxing the rich, after which revenues will fall?” Senator McCain, “Why are you sure that an incremental increase in the upper bracket will not increase revenues?” Fair questions, but no one wants to take the time to listen to the answers, so they are not asked.

The net effect is that we are reduced to sound bite democracy. My limited ability to comment upon the campaign derives from my wanting to stick a fork into something, but nothing but thin soup is offered up. What most pundits do is to attempt to expand a candidate’s ideology into something of substance, then analyze the substance that they have created in the expansion. The ideology is only offered as sound bites, so there is plenty of room to expand as the pundit likes, both pro and con. This is unsatisfactory.

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1. John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001