It's Over.
by Michael Schaffer
NOVEMBER 5, 2008 TAGS:
I think I speak for many people when I admit that I have spent considerably more time of late reading public-opinion polls than I have spent engaging in sex. Ditto reading about swing-state get-out-the-vote schemes, watching YouTube streams of brand-new political ads, and searching political blogs for ways to interpret far-flung newspaper accounts of local campaign moves. The 2008 presidential election began almost two years ago, staking out a small piece of real estate somewhere in my brain. In the time since, that terrain has grown and grown, gobbling up space once occupied by literature or music or pretty much anything other than the question of how the candidates were polling among Catholic women in Indiana. By this fall, the campaign — with its daily tracking polls and its internet-fueled outrages and its barrage of 30-second spots — had become a veritable member of the household. It dominated dinner conversation like a cranky uncle, prompted insomniac anxieties like a rowdy teenager, and hogged the remote control like a set-in-his-ways patriarch, refusing to watch anything but Hardball.
I’m surely not the only one, then, who is slightly disconcerted by the fact that it’s over. No statistical tea leaves to analyze, no zigs and zags to predict, no talking heads to explain what’s next: only the dull certainty of electoral results. I still find myself instinctually pointing the browser to pollster.com. But it is like a vestigial limb. After 18 months of campaign theatrics designed to winnow politics-watchers into two passionate tribes ready to give all to the battle, we’re suddenly alone again. You don’t have to have lost the election to feel a little bit like mourning.
Still, in the cold light of the day after Election Day — as Obama sets about establishing his administration, and unhappy GOP party loyalists wait the ever-dwindling amount of time until it becomes acceptable to begin the political wars anew — it’s also worth taking a minute to wonder why we let this time-stealing beast into our lives in the first place.
*
.jpg)
We’ve had elections for more than two centuries. But the obsessive, all-consuming nature of contemporary political fanhood is something else entirely, a product of two distinctly modern trends. On the one hand, elections over the past two decades have tended more and more to boil down to the politics of culture and identity, subjects given to towering personal passions. With the air full of hot-button non-negotiables like how we worship or how we love, the run-up to an election can feel like nothing less than a battle to retain one’s very way of life. Thus an unfavorable poll can ruin our day, and a knowledgeable blog post about why that poll’s methodology is suspect can brighten us right back up. (Good luck generating that excitement over some old-fashioned political difference, like, say, tariff policy.)
The second change is technological. Once cultural politics sucks us into these quadrennial civil wars, modern communications enable us to mine the absolute depths of our interest, offering granular nuggets of information about the tiniest of political developments — and in the process providing partisans with brand-new triggers for campaign-season joy or electoral despair. A generation ago, even the most obsessed political junkie could do little but wait for the morning paper and its handful of reports from the previous day’s campaigning. Nowadays, we peek online at internal campaign memos, read up-to-the-minute news about the candidates’ personnel moves in distant states, consume polls from an eclectic array of pollsters — and seek out interpretations of those polls from an even more eclectic array of bloggers, scholars, and analysts. Expensive, small-circulation newsletters used to provide this sort of information to a select readership of political pros; now ordinary folks get it for free. The only cost, besides the emotional toll, is time.
That cost, though, is dramatic. Especially when you realize that the arcane election news I so obsessively accumulated is suddenly useless. Had I spent the time on other hobbies, I might by now be able to speak Portuguese, or have a new boat in my garage that I built from scratch, or boast the ability to play “Sweet Child O’ Mine” on an electric guitar — things that would still be useful after Election Day. Even if I’d just spent the time reading portions of the newspaper I’ve ignored in favor of campaign news, I might have a deeper long-term understanding of Darfur or credit default swaps or the auto industry’s structural challenges. Instead, consider what I spent an otherwise productive chunk of Sept. 21 reading about: Barack Obama’s decision to close his 11 field offices in North Dakota. First there was the news. Then there was the spin. McCain fans cited it as proof that the Democrat couldn’t win the heartland; Obamaphiles said it was a shrewd allocation of resources. Richocheting between grave worry and sanguine reassurance, I naturally sought to evaluate the party-line regurgitations by checking out several reputable-seeming online commentators, in and out of the Peace Garden State. For all I know, the analyses were all rock-solid. But what does it matter now?
*
.jpg)
There was a time when undecided voters tended to be better informed than those lemmings who march in lockstep with one party. In recent elections, though, the 10 or so percent of voters who tell pollsters that they’re undecided are unlikely to follow the campaign closely, and are similarly unlikely to even move in the same circles as highly informed party devotees. It makes for a fascinating dynamic among partisans: We’re all pundits now. In other words, we’re not even talking about what we believe as citizens of a democracy — the sort of noble endeavor that might justify the investment of time. Rather, we’re talking about how other people may vote in an election where we’ve already made up our minds. Thus my nightly obsessing about elections isn’t Aristotelian civic duty; it’s an amateur-hour version of The McLaughlin Group. Fun, maybe; virtuous, maybe not.
The weekend Joe Biden was tapped as Obama’s running mate, I found myself at a Northern California wedding where the proportions of both McCain supporters and undecided voters were vanishingly small. But, as everyone had made up their minds about the election, no one talked about whether they actually liked the Delaware senator. Instead, it was all wonky speculation — often accompanied by impressive citations of polling data pulled off BlackBerries — about how the undecided would react. Good choice, bad choice, indifferent choice: The only thing that mattered about the Biden news was its impact the big question, what was going to happen on Nov. 4.
Ultimately, that’s about the only question we wanted to answer as we sat through all those episodes of Morning Joe, all those streaming clips of angry Republican rallies, all those reports about staff shake-ups or pre-debate strategies: divining the future. That future arrived Tuesday. Just as it would have if I’d spent the last year memorizing the King James Bible. Just as it would have if I hadn’t gotten worried about shuttered field offices, or indulged my curiosity about whether former McCain insider Mark Murphy would rejoin the campaign, or read all that online mockery about New York Times columnist William Kristol’s ever-changing recommendations to GOP strategists. Now that it’s all over, I can’t escape thinking that my mood today would be just the same as if I’d managed to spend those hundreds and hundreds of hours doing something, like, worthwhile.
Political junkies are probably best compared — in their impassioned tribalism, in their constant anxieties, in their lingering pains — to sports fans. The football season ends in the Super Bowl. The general election season ends on Election Day. But the difference is that football at least has games, with objectively agreed-upon results. General election news, by contrast, feels a bit like a Super Bowl pregame show that lasts the entire season. Along the way, coaches offer optimistic bromides, and locker-room reporters offer last-minute injury reports, and analysts offer predictions, and other analysts wonder whether the first batch of analysts are hacks who bet with their hearts or geniuses who bet with their heads. So much passion and wisdom and technology are dedicated to sussing out what’s going to happen. And then something does, whether you sat through all the advance chatter or not.
The other place contemporary politics is like sports is in this classic piece of postgame wisdom: There’s always next time. I’m just hoping that when next time rolls around, I spend less of it in paranoid worry and more of it, say, learning to make veal demi-glace. But I’m not betting on that. Did you hear how Sarah Palin’s polling among Iowa evangelicals?
I’m surely not the only one, then, who is slightly disconcerted by the fact that it’s over. No statistical tea leaves to analyze, no zigs and zags to predict, no talking heads to explain what’s next: only the dull certainty of electoral results. I still find myself instinctually pointing the browser to pollster.com. But it is like a vestigial limb. After 18 months of campaign theatrics designed to winnow politics-watchers into two passionate tribes ready to give all to the battle, we’re suddenly alone again. You don’t have to have lost the election to feel a little bit like mourning.
Still, in the cold light of the day after Election Day — as Obama sets about establishing his administration, and unhappy GOP party loyalists wait the ever-dwindling amount of time until it becomes acceptable to begin the political wars anew — it’s also worth taking a minute to wonder why we let this time-stealing beast into our lives in the first place.
*
We’ve had elections for more than two centuries. But the obsessive, all-consuming nature of contemporary political fanhood is something else entirely, a product of two distinctly modern trends. On the one hand, elections over the past two decades have tended more and more to boil down to the politics of culture and identity, subjects given to towering personal passions. With the air full of hot-button non-negotiables like how we worship or how we love, the run-up to an election can feel like nothing less than a battle to retain one’s very way of life. Thus an unfavorable poll can ruin our day, and a knowledgeable blog post about why that poll’s methodology is suspect can brighten us right back up. (Good luck generating that excitement over some old-fashioned political difference, like, say, tariff policy.)
The second change is technological. Once cultural politics sucks us into these quadrennial civil wars, modern communications enable us to mine the absolute depths of our interest, offering granular nuggets of information about the tiniest of political developments — and in the process providing partisans with brand-new triggers for campaign-season joy or electoral despair. A generation ago, even the most obsessed political junkie could do little but wait for the morning paper and its handful of reports from the previous day’s campaigning. Nowadays, we peek online at internal campaign memos, read up-to-the-minute news about the candidates’ personnel moves in distant states, consume polls from an eclectic array of pollsters — and seek out interpretations of those polls from an even more eclectic array of bloggers, scholars, and analysts. Expensive, small-circulation newsletters used to provide this sort of information to a select readership of political pros; now ordinary folks get it for free. The only cost, besides the emotional toll, is time.
That cost, though, is dramatic. Especially when you realize that the arcane election news I so obsessively accumulated is suddenly useless. Had I spent the time on other hobbies, I might by now be able to speak Portuguese, or have a new boat in my garage that I built from scratch, or boast the ability to play “Sweet Child O’ Mine” on an electric guitar — things that would still be useful after Election Day. Even if I’d just spent the time reading portions of the newspaper I’ve ignored in favor of campaign news, I might have a deeper long-term understanding of Darfur or credit default swaps or the auto industry’s structural challenges. Instead, consider what I spent an otherwise productive chunk of Sept. 21 reading about: Barack Obama’s decision to close his 11 field offices in North Dakota. First there was the news. Then there was the spin. McCain fans cited it as proof that the Democrat couldn’t win the heartland; Obamaphiles said it was a shrewd allocation of resources. Richocheting between grave worry and sanguine reassurance, I naturally sought to evaluate the party-line regurgitations by checking out several reputable-seeming online commentators, in and out of the Peace Garden State. For all I know, the analyses were all rock-solid. But what does it matter now?
*
There was a time when undecided voters tended to be better informed than those lemmings who march in lockstep with one party. In recent elections, though, the 10 or so percent of voters who tell pollsters that they’re undecided are unlikely to follow the campaign closely, and are similarly unlikely to even move in the same circles as highly informed party devotees. It makes for a fascinating dynamic among partisans: We’re all pundits now. In other words, we’re not even talking about what we believe as citizens of a democracy — the sort of noble endeavor that might justify the investment of time. Rather, we’re talking about how other people may vote in an election where we’ve already made up our minds. Thus my nightly obsessing about elections isn’t Aristotelian civic duty; it’s an amateur-hour version of The McLaughlin Group. Fun, maybe; virtuous, maybe not.
The weekend Joe Biden was tapped as Obama’s running mate, I found myself at a Northern California wedding where the proportions of both McCain supporters and undecided voters were vanishingly small. But, as everyone had made up their minds about the election, no one talked about whether they actually liked the Delaware senator. Instead, it was all wonky speculation — often accompanied by impressive citations of polling data pulled off BlackBerries — about how the undecided would react. Good choice, bad choice, indifferent choice: The only thing that mattered about the Biden news was its impact the big question, what was going to happen on Nov. 4.
Ultimately, that’s about the only question we wanted to answer as we sat through all those episodes of Morning Joe, all those streaming clips of angry Republican rallies, all those reports about staff shake-ups or pre-debate strategies: divining the future. That future arrived Tuesday. Just as it would have if I’d spent the last year memorizing the King James Bible. Just as it would have if I hadn’t gotten worried about shuttered field offices, or indulged my curiosity about whether former McCain insider Mark Murphy would rejoin the campaign, or read all that online mockery about New York Times columnist William Kristol’s ever-changing recommendations to GOP strategists. Now that it’s all over, I can’t escape thinking that my mood today would be just the same as if I’d managed to spend those hundreds and hundreds of hours doing something, like, worthwhile.
Political junkies are probably best compared — in their impassioned tribalism, in their constant anxieties, in their lingering pains — to sports fans. The football season ends in the Super Bowl. The general election season ends on Election Day. But the difference is that football at least has games, with objectively agreed-upon results. General election news, by contrast, feels a bit like a Super Bowl pregame show that lasts the entire season. Along the way, coaches offer optimistic bromides, and locker-room reporters offer last-minute injury reports, and analysts offer predictions, and other analysts wonder whether the first batch of analysts are hacks who bet with their hearts or geniuses who bet with their heads. So much passion and wisdom and technology are dedicated to sussing out what’s going to happen. And then something does, whether you sat through all the advance chatter or not.
The other place contemporary politics is like sports is in this classic piece of postgame wisdom: There’s always next time. I’m just hoping that when next time rolls around, I spend less of it in paranoid worry and more of it, say, learning to make veal demi-glace. But I’m not betting on that. Did you hear how Sarah Palin’s polling among Iowa evangelicals?
RELATED CONTENT
TO ADD A COMMENT, PLEASE FIRST SIGN IN OR REGISTER.
