There are a lot of reasons this not only makes sense, but could actually happen – or so I have deliriously persuaded myself in the aftermath of that New Hampshire debate. Foremost among them is the stepped-up rate of the campaign due to what is called front loading. This has to do with the way the primary and caucus dates have been bunched together and made so unusually early for this election. The whole 1996 front-loading issue was written about at length some time ago in those articles in the paper you skipped, and was laboriously explained on televised panel discussions during which you fell asleep or said querulously to your mate, “Isn’t there something else on?” But front loading happened, and as a result by the end of March someone will likely have prevailed in the Republican contest, and the polls will have called a winner in the general election, and the rest of us will have nothing to do but grouse.
There are other goads to speed up besides the political calendar. A principal one is the MTVization of public argument, the flashcard approach to politics. I can’t remember what the duration was said to be the last time someone told me what the expected concentration span was of an audience these days, but the figure three seconds sticks in my mind. In my own experience of these things it is almost but not quite long enough to see and register the image before it’s gone and replaced by another. I suppose I would have to say mercifully gone in much of the election-year greasing and screeching we have already seen, but that’s almost beside the point. The point is that this whole contest started too early, speeded up to a kind of Donald Duck-soundtrack garble and cannot conceivably be sustained for another eight months. The public won’t stand for it. It will at a minimum demand a rematch, then maybe another – who knows? – maybe three out of five.
That the candidates, both the Republican stable and the Democratic incumbent, have risen to the challenge is indisputable. Flip-flops and persona makeovers that used to take weeks and months to bring off (always allowing time for a little denial and shamefacedness on the part of the candidate, which has pretty much been dispensed with now) these days happen at the rate of about one every news cycle. The lucky candidate can go from yes to no and back to yes and then to no again, and likewise from left to center to right and round and round, with a dispatch and devil-may-care aplomb that would have been the envy of politicians in the old days. Nor do they seem to be saving much for the later stretches of the campaign, either, especially the dirty stuff. They are already deeply engaged in attacking each other for attacking each other, in a manner we used to have to wait until the last days of a campaign to enjoy, and I remind you it is only February. I need hardly add that they have also already spent as much on all this as it would take to, say, buy Japan and Mexico instead of just complaining about them.
So far as we voters are concerned, I don’t think we could possibly stay tuned to this particular mud wrestle for more than the front-loading-allotted month or so more. And there is a genuine question as to whether we might not actually start to flag a bit by the time the second or third rematch came along, even with, God willing, some new contenders. But I observe that help is on the way for us too in these overburdened political times. As always I was struck by the scientific monitoring of selected groups of undecided voters during the debate in New Hampshire last week. You have seen those charts with the different-colored, animated squiggles showing the agreement and disagreement of individuals with what a candidate is saying at the moment he is saying it. Liked this (squiggle), didn’t like that (squiggle), and so forth. I find it hard to believe that this is as far as the techniques are going to go. Surely it won’t be all that long before we have gone from polling places to mail-in ballots to something akin to political intensive-care units in which the voter will simply lie there and be monitored on the machine as to his approval or disapproval – a method that will eliminate the possibility of verbal untruthfulness in the electorate, though not, of course, in the folks it gets to vote for.
You say this brave new world is never going to come about. I say it already has or almost has. If I ask if there are other things about the candidates that you think you should know in addition to the stuff they have said about themselves and each other, you will probably say yes. But if I ask whether you think in this particular campaign procedure you will find out those things, I bet you won’t be so sure. The real prospect before us is more of this public-relations, show-biz wrangling and trimming and repositioning and smearing and slurring and chest-thumping until the choices are made. That’s only a short while away, but the president will have been re-triangulated, leftized, rightified and centered a few times by then, and his would-be Republican supplanters will have made every improbable, contradictory claim for themselves you could have imagined and then some. What is hard for me to imagine is what comes then. Month after month of the same? Will anybody be listening?
My fantasy admittedly is just that – a fantasy. Still, in the snows and head colds of February it can be a comfort. You can turn off the tube and let your mind play over the exquisite possibility that at some moment, which I see as the first really lovely, bud-and-blossom day of spring, this particular cycle comes to its conclusion. Someone “wins” and someone “loses,” and the nation says, as one, “Well, that one is over and done with. Let’s start again – from scratch.”
