Money in Politics, the Economy of America--and Wealth For the Future

 Seventh in a series

There’s money in politics, and there’s money in America—and there’s a lot more of the latter.  And then there’s all the money in the future, of which there’s really a lot more.  So politicians—and those who wish to invest according to political trends—should pay most attention to those political changes that will vector out to big gains in the future.   And that means getting the voters, too, to think about what’s best for them, with longer time horizons.  Let’s dive in.  

Money in Politics 

According to Open Secrets, Americans spent $14.4 billion on the 2020 elections.   That’s for sure a lot of money, and yet to this election participant and observer of more than four decades, the dollar total seems low.  In fact, Open Secrets only counts direct expenditures by Presidential and Congressional candidates.  So what of all the governors and state legislators?  What of all the “soft money” and “dark money”?  And what of the in-kind value of campaign efforts, be it handing out leaflets, calling in to a talk radio station, or posting on Facebook?   Obviously to assign values to all those undertakings would be maddeningly difficult, and the numbers still would be, at best, guesstimates.   But if we had to, let’s come up with a dollar total: let’s double that $14.4 billion and then round it off, upward, to $30 billion.  

Okay, so $30 billion is a big number, and yet here’s something interesting: relative to the economy, it’s still a tiny number.  Consider: The GDP of the U.S. in 2020 totaled about $21 trillion, and so $30 billion is 0.14 percent.  For clarity, that’s one-seventh of one percent.  To put the money-in-politics number a different way, there are more than 250 publicly traded companies in the U.S. boasting a market capitalization greater than $30 billion.   

Once again we can see: while the amount of “money in politics” might seem big, in the scheme of things, it’s rather small.  And that’s a wee bit strange, as the political system exerts much leverage on the U.S. economy—$21 trillion in 2020, and $26 trillion today—as well as the world economy, which, in total, is roughly quadruple the U.S.  Moreover, the world’s total wealth is all the grander; McKinsey & Co. estimates the planetary total to be as high as $1.53 quadrillion.  

Yet if we focus on the nearer term, we might ask ourselves: How much effect has Joe Biden’s victory had on various sectors within the U.S. economy.   For instance, the green sector of the economy, including its ultra-capitalist cutting edge.  How much more is that sector worth—all those solar panels and windmills, all those EV makers, all those software designers rejiggering the power grid, all those consultants and advisers?  We might also venture to ask: What would the sector be worth if Donald Trump had been re-elected?  Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” was a sort of Green New Deal; Trump would never have touched that.  We could go on and on, itemizing the economic impact of every choice Biden made that Trump wouldn’t have made—from abortion to education policy to defense spending—and see sectors that have won, or lost. 

So if the economic impact of politics is so big, why are campaign donations so (relatively) small?  Why haven’t investors upped the ante of campaign spending for the sake of their investments?  We can cite five possible answers: 

First, there are restrictions on campaign donations, in terms of direct contributions to candidates, although, of course, soft money and dark money are pretty much designed to get around those limits.

Second, there’s a certain reticence, even disinterest, about bidding up politico-economic outcomes (not total reticence or disinterest, that’s for sure, but some).

Third, the investor class doesn’t see a pure play on campaign donations.  That is, it’s fine to say that giving to Democrats will boost green energy, but Democratic victories will also bring all the other Democratic policies, from tax increases to more spending to wokeness.  Does every investor/donor want all of that?  Of course not.  A similar critique could be made of the Republicans.   Especially these days, they’re hardly a pure play investor party.  If the GOP wins, you may see tax cuts—we saw a big one in 2017, thanks to party-line votes in the House and Senate—and yet you’ll also see Trump & MAGA, gun de-control, and abortion restrictions.  On a lot of social issues, investors and big donors tend to be more secular, “country club,” or even outright liberal or left, and so they don’t want to fund conservative and right-wing social action that could even extend to the richest sector of the U.S. economy: Big Tech. 

Fourth, we can elaborate on this point about the parties, recalling the previous installment on the unaccountability of politics.  Today the two major parties, Democratic and Republican, have become so barnacled and baroque that they are incapable of delivering a “pure play” on an investment agenda.  (And the other parties are probably no better; they’re just minor.)  In homage to investment legend Peter Lynch, who critiqued corporate “diworseification,” as a play on “diversification,” in his 1989 book One Up on Wall Street, we can apply that concept to politics.  We can say that the parties suffer from revealed diworseification; that is, we’ve discovered that they have their fingers in so many pies that they no longer act coherently or predictably on key polices.  In some sense, this is at should be; the American people are, after all, diverse—which means they are deeply divided. Reflecting that status quo, the parties are simply not configured to get big things done.  That’s the reality today, but it doesn’t mean we have to accept it for the future. 

Fifth, regardless of party, the national political system is organized to thwart any “special interest,” no matter how valuable, from getting its way.  That is, votes are filtered through not only the two parties and their diverse candidates, but also through offices at the federal, state, and local level.  In addition, there’s the bureaucracy, which doesn’t always move quickly—and oftentimes doesn’t move at all.  So even the most determined donor could be completely flummoxed, just by our distributed political system. 

For all these reasons, plenty of deep-pocketed individuals and entities have either sat it out, or have canceled each other out.  It’s hard to say that they’ve made a mistake—everything is opportunity cost—and yet at the same time we can insist that they’ve missed an opportunity.  An opportunity that could be huge.  That’s what this whole 13-part series is about: providing a new organizing principle for politics, based on efficiency and effectiveness.  Those are good businesslike virtues, and there’s no reason they can’t be harnessed to the cause of economic and business development, as well as political victory.  

Money in America 

As we have seen the GDP of the U.S. in 2020 was $21 trillion. In November of 2020, about 159 million people voted for president, including 81 million for Joe Biden, and 74 million for Donald Trump.  (For our purposes here, we’re not going to get into allegations about vote fraud.)  So if we were to take a holistic view of money in politics, and money in America, and the potential for political leverage on the economy, we could start by divide that $21 trillion GDP by the 159 million people who voted.   If so, we get a sum of $132,000 per vote.  Once again, we are not saying that each vote is monetizable like that, nor should it be.  And certainly nothing we’re describing here concerns buying or selling votes, or non-votes.  Instead, all we’re doing is illustrating the potential leverage.  

Yet if we’re assigning a dollar number to votes, it can be argued that we need more nuance.  Specifically, we might confine ourselves to “swing” voters, on the theory that “base” voters are fixed.  So if we were to think of swing voters as marginal voters, then we could run our numbers in different ways: first, those who might swing between Democrat and Republican; and second, those who might swing between voting and non-voting.  So now, if we look back at the last dozen presidential elections, 1976 to 2020, we see, first, that the widest “spread” in partisan presidential voting is 21.3 points, that being the difference between the 58.8 percent of the vote gained by Ronald Reagan in 1984, and the 37.5 percent of the vote gained by George H.W. Bush in 1992. (The range of Democratic percentages during this period was narrower.)  And then, second, if we consider the change voter turnout over those same dozen presidential elections, we see that the range was between 51.7 percent of the voting eligible population in 1996 to 66.8 percent in 2020.  With these numbers in mind, we might conclude that the swing vote, defined two ways, is perhaps a quarter of the population, which is around 240 million.  So 60 million voters to think about.  Still a huge number, but more manageable than the total number of voters.  And $21 trillion divided by 60 million is on the order of $350,000 a vote.  Again, that’s not directly monetizable, nor should it be. 

Yet if we think this way, we are reminded that elections have consequences, including for investors.  Moreover, as we get down to 60 million, we start to see numbers that might seem more comprehensible, manageable—and maybe even leverageable.   

Money in the Future 

As we saw earlier, McKinsey & Co. estimates the planetary total of wealth today to be as high as $1.53 quadrillion. And that ginormous “q”number is just wealth at the moment:  Speaking of the near term, if our $26 trillion economy grows at two percent for 20 years, it will be worth $39 trillion in 2043; if it grows by three percent, it will be worth $47 trillion; if it grows by four percent, it will be worth $57 trillion.   So yes, obviously: better policies mean bigger bucks. 

We can add: What’s the future potential of wealth creation, with AI and space exploration and all the other wonders to come, just in the remainder of the 21st century?  Open AI’s Sam Altman suggests that AI could yields a 100-fold increase in wealth.  This is the real money in politics: the money in the future, as it vectors out over the years, decades, even centuries.   If the current political class fails to grasp these potentialities, well, maybe that’s why some new thinking is needed to encourage and bolster sound pro-growth thinking. Indeed, these possible numbers are so huge, potentially, as to defy any sort of quantification; about the only thing we know is that politics—including the politics-by-other-means known as war, could affect those numbers drastically; a bad enough war could reduce the economy, and the human population, to zero.  So we are reminded: investing in sound politics is a good way to encourage the upside, and to fend off the downside.  As the song says, accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.  

In various writings, this author has considered some big-delta, big-alpha ideas, including desalinated water, carbon capture, medical cures, and accelerated space exploration.  Each is a good idea, each would poll well enough by itself, and yet none of them are anywhere near the top of the national agenda.   To be sure, there are plenty of competing issues, and yet it’s the American Way to politick, legally and peacefully, to move an issue up.  So that’s what we should do, bringing new thinking, and new resources, into the equation.   

In fact, it takes an enormous commitment to building a favorable framework for good goals—and we should do that, too.  So there’s a mission right there: get politicians to think about using their power to galvanize economic activity.  There’re whole books to be written about that topic, of course, and this author has one forthcoming, and yet for now let’s focus on voters, as part of this series on improving the political process. 

Blast from the Past 

Back in 1980, Republican presidential candidate John Connally had an interesting proposal: convert corporate tax payments into a dividend program for voters.  The idea was that if taxable corporate profits went up, so would the dividend to the voters, thus giving the voters a direct  stake in the well-being of corporate America—and, by extension the American economy.  (To some extent this is the idea of the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes oil profits to Alaskans, to the tune of several thousand dollars, per resident, each year.) 

Connally’s idea was attacked as "corporatism," and in a literal sense, it was just that.  One of those attackers was the more libertarian Ronald Reagan (for whom this author was proud to work), who defeated Connally, handily, to win the 1980 GOP nomination.  So that was pretty much the beginning and end of the corporate-dividend plan.  

Yet even if the dividend idea has a poor political track record--to my knowledge, nobody at the national level has proposed it since--this Reaganite always thought it was an interesting idea, and thinks even better of it now.  Why?  Because corporatism, freed from sneer quotes, is actually the way of the non-communist world (that is, every country but maybe North Korea and Cuba).  The economy consists of big corporations (which aren't going anywhere) and big government (which also isn't going anywhere).  With those two realities in mind, it's appropriate to think of new ways for corporations and government work together, to form an updated social contract, mindful of new needs.  Such a symbiosis need not come at the expense of individualism or personal freedom.  Instead, it's a simple acknowledgement that free people often prefer to organize themselves as corporate leaders, employees, and shareholders.  Corporatism, seen as the existence and prevalence of large companies (and small- and medium-sized companies) is a proven mechanism for producing wealth.  

So with that in mind, let's always be looking for new ways of bringing people together while not jeopardizing personal freedom.  Is it a bad idea to find new ways to encourage the citizenry to think in terms of the commonweal?  And is it wrong to think that the citizens themselves should benefit when the economy's corporations are doing well?   Is this not the makings of a new kind of stakeholder civics?  No doubt there are other ways to cut people in on the action--the overall economy is, after all, the best and really only guarantor of well-being--and yet it can only help to offer people something immediately tangible (like a check) as well as other things more generally desirable.   One of the strengths of Social Security, for example, is that there'a an actual "account" with one's own name on it.  And while economists might insist that it's all an accounting fiction, Social Security is pretty darn popular.  In that spirit, one can imagine that neo-Connally-esque profit sharing would be similarly popular. 

We’ve been thinking hard about money in plitics, as well as economic growth and politics, and also the future wealth-effect of politics.   In this spirit, let's examine all legal ways to include people in the wealth-generating impact of good policy.  As a way of encouraging them to vote for politicians who advance said positive policies. 

We will be spending the rest of this series pondering this question: How to align votes with good policies?   In fact, in installment six we’ve already considered one mechanism, which is pledges.  That is, if a politicians pledges a good policy, that’s good, and if the voter pledges ti support the politician who commits to good policy, that’s even better.   Because now we’re starting to see the basis of a contract. Not necessarily a legal contract, but rather, a moral and political contract.  

A harmonic convergence of people and politicians, for the sake of the overall economic pie.  There’s big money here.    

Politicians’ Unaccountability: Pledging a Solution

Sixth in a Series 

In past installments, we’ve examined the issues of election legitimacy, campaign inefficiency, voter uncertainty, and media superfluity.  Now let’s look at another problem, politicians’ unaccountability.  That is, how do we get politicians to keep their promises?   How do restore trust?  One answer, as we shall see, is to make promises, in the form of pledges—and then keep them.

George H.W. Bush Breaks His Pledge  

This author had the experience of working, for seven years—in his political action committee, in his presidential campaign, in his White House—for the modern political figure who is probably most famous for breaking a campaign pledge.  That would be George H.W. Bush, who famously said, while accepting the Republican presidential nomination, “Read my lips.  No new taxes.”  Those sound-bite words were spoken on August 18, 1988, at the Republican convention in New Orleans.  

In fact, candidate Bush had pledged not to raise taxes the year before, and that pledge had helped him to secure the GOP presidential nomination—fending off tax-cutter Jack Kemp and clarifying the difference with tax-raiser Bob Dole—as well as helped him win the presidency against Michael Dukakis, the governor of the Northeastern state dubbed “Taxachusetts.”

Yet once in office, the 41st president was persuaded to break his no-new-taxes pledge by Office of Management and Budget director Richard Darman, who saw himself as the Henry Kissinger of fiscal policy.  Bush was a good man, and overall, a good president, and yet he had never particularly believed in the no-new-taxes pledge; it went against his innate Wall Street-mindedness and his genteel aversion to California Reagan-Kemp-types.  Yet it took Darman’s Svengali skills to bring Bush to abandon his promise.

Alas for the 41st president, Darman’s grand plan, so intricately conceived with help from the DC establishment, was not only cynical mendacity, it was also a failure.  The deficit went up after the 1990 budget deal with pro-tax Democrats, even as Bush’s political standing went down. That plummet was disguised for a while by the surge in patriotic feeling from Operation Desert Storm, and yet by the end of 1991, Bush’s peril was obvious, and in fact, by 1992, Bush’s standing had collapsed.  Having won nearly 54 percent of the popular vote in 1988, he fell to 37 percent of the vote years later; it was the most dramatic slide for an incumbent president in U.S history.  And so Bush became a one-termer, bringing an era of Republican national dominance—seven victories in ten elections—to a close.  

Looking back, we are reminded of the power of a pledge.  At the time, as a mid-level White House domestic policy aide—albeit marginalized from the Darman tax negotiations, which I opposed—I joked that Bush could have done just about anything else, no matter how foolish, on domestic policy and suffered less blowback than he did for breaking the tax pledge.  That is, the pledge was so clear that it was simply obvious that Bush had broken his word in a way that couldn’t be spun.   Even ardent Bush loyalists had to admit he had, er, changed his mind.  And plenty of people who simply assume that a promise is a promise took Bush to be a liar.  That's why pledges, and oaths in general, have power: Regardless of policy wherefores, people like the truth, and they especially don't like to be lied to. 

We should recall that the pledge was more than Bush’s words on the campaign trail, or even at the New Orleans convention.  The pledge was also, in fact, a formal, albeit terse, document, composed by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), the policy group founded by conservative activist Grover Norquist.  ATR and Norquist had brilliantly distilled anti-tax sentiment down to a tightly worded anti-tax pledge.  Bush had signed it in April 1987, as a way of further enunciating his conservative credentials.  

Indeed, the pledge was, and is, so simple and clear that no amount of obfuscation could save a pledge-breaker from the realization that he or she had broken he pledge.  To be sure, not everyone opposes tax increases, or even cares about the tax issue, either way.  And yet for those who do care, the ATR pledge is clarifying. 

The Power of Pledges

In fact, clarity is the friend of the issues-minded voter, but it’s not necessarily the friend of the politician, who often feels that he or she has more to gain from non-clarity.  So the challenge to the issues-minded is to inject reciprocity into the process, so that the implicit-not-explicit “contract” between the electors (the voters) and the elected (the candidates) is upheld.  That is, the voters and the politicians should both keep their promises, and be rewarded, politically.  The voter should get what he or she wants (the position on the pledge, whatever it might be) and the politician should get what he or she wants (election victory, with the presumption that once in office the policy pledge will be kept).  

So we can see that pledge-based politics could be a valuable tool, both for campaigning and governing.  In a sense, pledges are what campaign platforms used to be, but over the decades, platforms have become so bloated and wordy that they have lost their conciseness.  And at the same time, pols have gotten better at being slippery.  So that’s why policy-minded types are thinking more about pithy ATR-type pledges—or at least they should.  Because, after all, Norquist and ATR have changed Republican politics in the past three decades; the GOP is much more firmly the anti-tax party.

We can add a possible refinement on the tax pledge, and other pledges: if the pledge is seen as going both ways, to the voter and to the candidate, it could help both sides of the political transaction.  If the pol takes the pledge on an issue the voter cares about (such as taxes), the voter could pledge to vote for that candidate, or at least another candidate who has taken the same pledge.   So that’s a way of enshrining trust. 

Will this happen?   It already has happened; how much more is up to the people and the pols.  But we can see that if the pledge were expressed in those terms; it could be powerful.  Such pledging might not be the stuff of a binding legal contract, but it could be a moral contract, or even, who knows, down the road somewhere, a blockchain-y smart contract.   

Some will wonder: Could the ATR pledge model be extended to other issues?   Some might argue that the tax issue is relatively straight-forward, in terms of a yea or nay vote, and yet as we know, nothing in politics, including fiscal politics, is simple.   For instance, Norquist himself has been asked about closing loopholes—does that count as a tax increase that violates the pledge?  Norquist’s answer has been that closing loopholes is okay, so long as there’s at least an equal cut in taxes or tax rates somewhere else. That’s a perfectly good response, and yet we can see how uncertainty, even controversy, can slip into the mix as to what is, and is not, a tax increase. 

So what of other issues, foreign and domestic?  Without hashing through all the hypotheticals, we can just say that it’s a challenge to pledge-penners.  For the sake of their issue, their goal should be precision.  Because we should keep in mind that politicians have often sought to perfect the art of letting things—especially unpopular things—happen without their “fingerprints.”  That is, the process is set up to be “automatic,” or on “auto pilot,” such that, say, a tax increase happens even without anyone visibly voting for it.  An example of this is “bracket creep” in income tax rates, as voters are pushed into higher payments due to inflation.   And if that’s possible about taxes, imagine what’s possible about foreign policy.   

The Hypothecation Solution

In fact, on many issues, the opinions of the voters don’t seem to matter.  Back in 2014, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that voters have essentially zero impact on policy: “The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level.”  Sure, they can vote for whomever they wish, but policy, Gilens and Page argued, isn’t affected by the outcome of an election.  Indeed, in times of polarization, if each side knocks the other out, we could see the onset of a sort of negative Nash equilibrium. 

So what’s the way out?  One answer, as we have seen, is pledges.  But there’s another answer from the policy world.  As always, it’s best to identify, if we can, something promising that has already worked—and build on that. 

Here we can introduce a useful concept: hypothecation, also known as ring-fencing.  “Hypothecated” is a two-dollar word for dedicated: the idea of hypothecated taxes is that revenue is specifically dedicated to a certain goal, such as a sales tax that’s exclusively dedicated to schools or parks.  Such taxes are common at the state and local level, where such taxes—even tax increases—prove often to be reliably popular.  That is, voters might feel good about paying a special sales tax, for example, to build a park or a school or a new sewer system.  In fact, the closer the citizen is to a problem, the more likely he or she will be sympathetic to arguments that more taxes could solve the problem.   

We can note that popular federal programs often follow the same model of hypothecation.   The Social Security system, for example, began in the 1930s amidst lots of stern talk about a sacrosanct “account,” into which the payroll taxes of future recipients were deposited.  This account was always something of an accounting fiction, and yet the idea that the citizen, upon retirement, is merely drawing on “his” or “her” account is a powerful notion to this day—and helps explain why Social Security is so popular.  To the extent that hypothecation implies ownership, or at least a property right, well, that’s powerful.  

Another example of alleged federal hypothecation is the highway trust fund (HTF), financed by a “user fee” of gasoline taxes.  In fact, DC lawmakers have long dipped into—some would say looted—the HTF.  And that’s how trust is eroded.  So that’s likely one reason why people don’t much like the federal government.  According to one survey, just 28 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of the federal government; by contrast, the more often truly hypothecated state and local governments enjoy higher approval, 57 percent and 63 percent, respectively.  

We can add that if politics were a series of pledges, that would be a limit on demagogues—they would, at least to some extent, find themselves constrained by their pledges.  So maybe the feds should give dedication another try—and mean it this time.   To be sure, there’s a counter-argument: that elected officials should do what they think best.  The eminent British conservative Edmund Burke made exactly this argument in the 18th century.  He lost.  That hardly settles the matter, but for our purposes, we can say that it would be good if politicians kept their pledges.  

To state the matter positively, once politicians are inspired with a message, they can be very articulate and persuasive.  For instance, Abraham Lincoln.  In the middle of the 19th century, the arguments for and against slavery were fast and furious.  And yet in 1858, Lincoln summed up the abolitionist argument in a few crisp words: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”  There in a snap: The anti-slavery argument, 14 words.  By comparison, the ATR tax pledge, at 55 words, is a slog. 

But whether it’s 14 words, 55 words, or even longer the key goal is to boil down the policy point to its comprehensible essential: as a pledge.  If that can be done, voters and elected officials alike will be able to benefit.  And the country, too, will benefit. 

Next: Money in Politics 

Media Superfluity: Campaigns Don’t Need It

Fifth in a series 

Self Awareness

In the previous installments of we’ve considered various components of today’s practical politics, including election legitimacy, campaign inefficiency, voter uncertainty.  But there’s one element that’s barely come up: the media.  And there’s a reason for that: Namely, that the media don’t have that much to do with actually winning or losing elections.  Don’t get me wrong: I fully understand that the media drenches everything, that this is the information age, and that everyone in politics is obsessed with spin, narrative, news cycle, and so on.   

And yet as we can demonstrate, the media don’t really help win election campaigns.  So by this reckoning, the media are superfluous.  To which the immediate response could be, Of course the media don’t help win election campaigns.  That’s not its job! And that’s a fair enough point, but it is our job win campaigns.  So let’s pursue the point: Why shouldn’t the media helped us win?  And if the current media don’t wish to help, okay.  In which case, we probably need new media. 

That is, a media that is consciously aware of the need to help our campaign.  And if that’s not “media” as we think of it now—if it seems more like advertising, or p.r.—so be it.  Our goal is to win, not to bow down to old visions and modes.  So if we need some sort of new start-up, so be it.  Yes, it’s the information age, but nobody said what kind of information it has to be, or who has to produce it.  Campaigns can put forth their own information, aiming to help their candidate(s) win. 

In the meantime, the extant media is perfectly free to do what it does.   Even as, of course, the business model for much of it is faltering, amidst the glut of information in this, yes, information age.   

The key point here is for campaigns to realize that the media are superfluous, and, in fact, often harmful.  How so?  Because the media tend to accentuate the negative.  That is, reporters and pundits and social-media mavens are, more often than not, critics.  Some might think of themselves as friendly critics—and a very few might even define themselves as cheerleaders—and yet very of them see themselves as actually part of any campaign.   Indeed, on the right, the negativity is especially noticeable; the cutting edge of conservative media is, for the most part, profoundly hostile to Republican leadership.  There’s simply not much media space for a right-wing journalist who says, “Go, Republicans!”  Not much space and, in fact, much derision.  

And of course, there’s no great need for a campaign to have them around, because the campaign is about winning elections, not about spewing content.  That’s right: campaigns are about getting the most votes.  That’s what’s intrinsic to a campaign, or at least it should be.  By contrast, media coverage is extrinsic (even if the egos of the candidates and campaign domos thrill to coverage).  

In the meantime, the sooner campaigns and parties wake up, the better.   And one can, in fact, see stirrings.  For instance, after a Fox News-hosted debate among the Republican presidential hopefuls, veteran anti-tax activist Grover Norquist wrote for The Daily Caller on August 27, “The debate ill-served the Republican party (and the nation) by failing to focus like a laser on the one important question: Which candidate is most likely to win a general election against Joe Biden or whoever the central committee of the Democrat party chooses when/if polls show Biden cannot win.”  In a later comment to me, he added that the media—at least the media that purports to speak for and to the right “needs to be a self-aware participant in politics.” 

There’s a phrase to ponder: self-aware.  As in, consciously seek out the advancement of the Republican Party and conservative goals overall.  But is that journalism?  It would depend on who you ask.  Most “journalists” would probably say “no.”  Okay, fine, then they have made themselves extrinsic to the functioning of campaigns.   So long as campaigns understand that, everyone can be happy.   (Although again, the business model of most journalism is failing.) 

In the meantime, others in the media are starting to fill the void.   For instance, on October 4, The New York Times considered the impact of Steven Bannon and his “War Room” internet show: “He is a vital part of a feedback loop of red-meat media hits and social media posts, online fund-raising and unfettered preaching.”  There we have it: Bannon as an activist, helping Republicans—at least the ones he likes.  But is Bannon a journalist?  Not by most people’s definition, that’s for sure.  For those who like him, Bannon might be called an “activist,” or an “advocate,” or perhaps even a “player.” Or if they don’t like him, they might call Bannon a “rabble rouser,” a “demagogue”—and it gets worse from there.  And yet it seems fair to say that if Bannon visibly sets out to move the needle on intra-Republican politics, he can.  (Whether he can actually help Republicans defeat Democrats is iffier.) 

The Old Models

Interestingly, the roots of political journalism in America are, well, Bannon-esque.  That is, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most journalistic outlets (newspapers) were frankly partisan in their outlook, oftentimes subsidized by one kind of partisan or another.  That is, they came into existence as pamphlets of a kind; pushing a party line or label.  (Former NBC News and Fox News reporter-anchor Eric Burns ably chronicled this history in his 2007 book, Infamous Scribblers:  The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism.)  

Yet by the end of the 19th century, newspapers had mostly changed.  They might still have favored one party or the other, but their business model shifted to mass circulation, often in hot competition with other newspapers.  In this environment, what mattered was being entertaining, informing—and, one way or another, compelling.   In the 20th century, these changing news values were augmented by two new factors; first, the progressive era, which put a new and high-minded premium on information and uplift; and second, with the coming of electronic media, the federal government stepped in to assure some sort of fair and careful take on the news (the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” began to take shape in 1941). 

So as TV came to dominate media, these newer values came to dominate as well.  The media might have been left-of-center, and yet it was for the most part at least somewhat veiled and subtle.   Instead, what was most obvious was the growing “glamour” of TV news.  That is, the news was made flashy and the reporters, at least some of them, became stars, big-name celebrities.  This was a point made by Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Ron Powers in his well-titled book from 1978, The Newscasters: The News Business as Show Business.  As he wrote, “Anchormen, weathermen, and reporters all, each represented a radical discontinuity with journalistic tradition. Each was a curious hybrid of personal magnetism, looks, showmanship and—in some cases—newsman. Each, to the degree that he was successful, was a bigger audience ‘draw’ than the news he reported or read.” 

To anyone of a certain age, this is familiar: National TV anchors such as Diane Sawyer, Jessica Savitch, and Arthur Kent became, well, sex symbols.   And the same was true for local TV news, where hotties came to abound.  In his book, Powers continued, “But the usurpation of television news reached a far deeper level than that of anchormen's personalities. It attained the status of a covert and insidious reversal of the very journalistic process itself. Instead of striving to impart information to the viewers, the salesmen-managers of television stations were engaged in a tacit conspiracy to extract information from the viewers—information that would serve the managers in their efforts to maximize audience size and thereby establish their respective newscasts as the top-dollar advertising draw in the market.”

We’re starting to see, here, that the news—including news-as-entertainment and news-as-titillation—was becoming a profit center.  And the pursuit of profitability further mutated the news, as the quest for ratings resulted in bidding wars for talent.  More from Powers: “What did people want (not need, but want) under the rubric of ‘news’?  What pleased them most? Amused them? Gratified them, charmed them, or provided them with the sort of vicarious cheap thrills that kept them mesmerized during prime-time entertainment? What colors did they like?  What faces, voices?  Conversely, what did viewers not want to know? What sort of news displeased them, threatened them, bored them, impelled them to switch away from a disturbing confrontation with harsh reality and into the lulling glades of television torpor?” 

Was the news still liberal?  Sure.  But idea that the news should be entertaining came first.   So even after the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the news stayed focused on entertainment, including star power.   

So can see: The media had come a long way since the time when newspaper were seen as arguments for, even propaganda for, one party or the other.  That is, by the late 20th century, the media had become its own power center, and a huge power center at that—some would say, in fact, that media was as powerful, or even more powerful, than anything else.  Perhaps so, and yet whatever its power rating, that’s not the same thing as aiding campaigns. 

The coming of cable news changed this dynamic somewhat.  That is, Fox went right and MSNBC went left, each taking a piece of the increasingly fragmented media market.  And yet neither Fox nor MSNBC saw itself as a mouthpiece for the Republican or Democratic parties.  In fact, the anchors were more typically ideological than the parties and the party leadership; talking heads preferred to make sharper and edgier points than the mainstreams of either party.   Once again, the press/media should be free to conduct itself any way it wishes, but we’re seeing that the Fourth Estate isn’t necessarily helping candidates and their campaigns.  Different function, different missions, different impacts.  

Indeed, it can be argued that cable news, and niched ideological media overall, actually hurts the parties.  That is, mainlining cable news makes most elections—that is, elections other than the presidency—boring.  If the big contest, the one that gets the national attention, is the presidential election, then elections for lesser offices must matte less.  Even an attuned voter might not know the names of the candidates, especially as one moves down the ballot. 

Even worse, national campaigns, including media razzle-dazzle, might generate more heat that is actually needed.  That is, to turn a turbine, water must rise to 212 degrees Fahrenheit to make steam—and then it’s best to stop there, heat-wise.  Any more heat doesn’t turn the turbine any faster, it just causes trouble for the system.  This, by the way, is a big problem with nuclear reactors; the temperature of the radioactive core is a couple thousand degrees, and so disposing of that excess heat is a systemic challenge that can break down and melt down.  In political terms, too much heat can distort party primaries, rewarding extremists who are less likely to be electable in a general election.  And our goal, of course, is to win the election with a rational, or at least amenable, pro-Framework candidate.  For all these reasons, it behooves us to disintermediate the media from our GOTV operation.  People, journalists, and pundits can do as they please, but our campaign wishes to build a tight relationship with actual voters; voters are the signal, the media are the noise.  The pursuit of that clear-channel signal means direct candidate-to-voter contact. Which, of course, is cheaper than TV advertising. 

OODA 

Lots of things seem like good ideas in one era and like not-such-good-ideas in another era.   And yet it’s oftentimes hard to see when some idea or practice or machine passes from optimum to sub-optimum.  After all, the wave of the future doesn’t come with a label. 

The challenge, in assessing events, is to achieve some degree of ecstasis.  That’s the ancient Greek word that refers to the capacity to stand outside oneself.  (And yes, ecstasis is the root of the word “ecstasy,” which has taken on different meanings than what Plato or Aristotle had in mind.) 

So as a healthy exercise in self-assessment, one needs to step outside oneself.  We might think on the question posed by Peter Drucker in his book from seven decades ago, The Effective Executive: “If we weren’t doing this now, would we start?”  That is, is what we’re doing, whatever it is, such a good idea that we should keep doing it?   To apply this Druckerian wisdom, we could ask ourselves: “If the media as it is today didn’t exist, would campaigns want to invent it?”  More likely, campaigns would say to themselves, “Surely there’s a better way!”   And so let’s start thinking of that better way.  

To further illustrate the point about thinking anew, we might follow the mental tactic developed by the U.S. Air Force to help pilots decide on a course of action in real time: The OODA Loop.  That is, Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.  The idea being that each new moment in flying forces the pilot to consider the situation in the air, especially if it involves aerial combat.  Am I in the right place?  Am I at a disadvantage?  Is my opponent at a disadvantage.  Only a constant process of evaluation can maximize the pilot’s chances of survival, let alone victory.   To be sure, it’s exhausting to be looking around all the time, questioning everything, but it’s the only way to survive. 

So with Drucker and OODA in mind—and we considered Ockham’s Razor in the previous installment—let’s consider campaigns’ relationship with the media.  What’s the goal here?  The media, including the news media, have its goal: To entertain, including making the news entertaining.  That’s all fine and good, but the goal of the campaign is different: The campaign wants to win elections.  If the media can help that goal, fine.  If the media can’t help, or if it hurts, then campaigns need to keep thinking.    

This is not a slap at our friends in the Fourth Estate.  It’s just an observation that as we focus on the core transaction of a campaign—the fundamental unit is the vote—we realize that we don’t need to focus on non-core transitions.  The voter’s relationship with our candidate matters to us.  The voter’s relationship to the media does not matter.

To restate that a bit, we can say that the voter’s non-granular relationship to the media does not matter.   Pols can win an election without media, but they can’t win it without the most votes. If pols have the votes, they don’t need the media.  Of course, some will insist that the media are vital to the electoral process.  After all, they are delivering news, affecting opinion, carrying advertising.  And yes, the media do all those gerunding things—delivering, affecting, carrying—and yet that doesn’t make them vital to a campaign.  After all, it’s perfectly possibly to consume a lot of media and not vote—or to vote for the wrong party or candidate. You don’t need media any more to win elections. You just need to win elections.  

So what if the media did want to help?  Then it would be, as Grover Norquist suggests, a self-aware media.  And that would be great for campaigns.  A media that actually helps candidates win.  

Next: Politicians' Unaccountability