2007 was by far the noisiest year in recent memory, for me. A majority of that noise issued from the various candidates and pretenders to the position of the President of the United States of America. A gaggle of these folks have caused a lot of unnecessary hubbub with their talk of perhaps, maybe joining the race, the formation of their exploratory committees, their withdrawal from exploration of the idea of joining the race and their hypothetical policies if they were possibly thinking of exploring the idea of getting into the race. It all got to be too much and as November rolled around I welcomed the thought that it'd soon be over, before of course remembering that it was only 2007.
At first I thought I had the "voter fatigue" that they are always talking about in the media, but how could I so early in the election cycle. And how is it that the election cycle has oozed out of 2008 and back into 2007? This set me thinking about the issue - the main issue as I saw it - the inflation of the election cycle. Many people have written about this particular issue, and the general consensus is that it's just too dang long. Firstly, it promotes voter fatigue (known, occasionally, by it's other name voter apathy); secondly, it's a waste of money. No news there, right?
Where there is news however, is the News. Yes, the politicians' war on democracy is ongoing, but really we could all just decide not to pay them any mind. That's a little difficult when the news outlets are blowing the politicians' hot air into every corner of the nation. I certainly don't mean to absolve the pols of their responsibility in this, but it strikes me that without the cable news (if you want to call it news) there would be less of a sense of how it all just drags on and on. Discussions of slivers of policy differences between prospective candidates in the same wing of the same party, so-called "gaffes" that one candidate has made, outrageous appeals to emotion; all of these are cast in front of an uninterested public. Which begs the second question: in a media environment supposedly regulated by the market, how can this be what outlets choose to cover? This is particularly vexing since in the United States about ~70% of eligible voters are registered to vote, and of those registered, on average a little more than 50% actually vote.
Setting aside the reasons for this low turn-out (perhaps not the lowest in the developed world, but suspiciously low for a country actively trying to spread democracy at gunpoint in the Middle East), let's ask a simpler question: why would a media outlet spend so much in resources to cover a story that such a low percentage of the population apparently cares about? Why hire people to nitpick through everything a candidate says if, in th elong run, the candidate will never really be called to account for his or her statements? It's a lot of sound and fury which signifies nothing, if I might paraphrase a much better writer. One would think that the market - the vaunted Deus ex machina that cures every ill - would correct for that when there is such a low interest in the political process. If there truly is interest in the process, then are we seeing a voyeuristic interest in politics - as if it were something that were happening to someone else? I can't figure it out, but if anyone knows please go ahead and clear it up for me or call your local round the clock news channel with an explanation.