It’s an election cycle alright, and it never stops. I have no idea what the people on Fox have to say because I don’t have cable, and for that I am grateful. The people on PBS – who I consider a few ranks above the rest of it – are bad enough.
Every Friday night, the two columnists sit down with Jim Lehrer and analyze, vote by vote, strategy by strategy, what various elected officials are up to and cram it into the context, if you will, of the next, or current, election cycle. And then feign surprise – and often disappointment – that Washington is no longer the way it was back in the good old days when the lions sat down and drank and smoked cigars together after punching each other in the head over at the corporate headquarters – allegedly – of democracy. Why is it not like that anymore? Why has compromise become a bad word? Or, in the tone of astonishment that only Jim Lehrer can deliver, Why are they acting like that? Every week they wonder and ponder and pontificate, and every week I think to myself: You, for starters. And Facebook. And Twitter. If your next election cycle begins before you’ve made your acceptance speech for the election cycle you just endured, it seems to me that our elected leaders do what any halfway sensible person would do: They run. For election.
Gwen Ifill is one of the best journalists on television, in my opinion, and even she is deplorable when it comes to ensuring her own job security not by creating stories she can report exactly, but something along those lines. Every Friday night she sits down with a group of reporters – some of whom I think are worth listening to, many of whom I think reflect poorly on her and on PBS as a whole – and rehashes two or three major stories, sprinkling each with brilliant insights about how everything from the congressmen’s crotch shot to the situation in Libya will impact the next … election cycle.
It occurred to me on Friday night that the main effect of this new (to me) and improved way of covering the news is that it degrades electoral politics to the level of reality television. They needed someone to counter Barak Obama’s initial popularity and there, lo and behold, was Sarah Palin. Then we had to have a little conflict in that story – it was, after all, getting “down to the wire” back in 2009, a year before the midterm elections, three years before the 2012 presidential election – so suddenly a woman running for office in Delaware who had had some sort of brush with witchcraft made headlines around the world. So too did a woman in Nevada who, in spite of the fact that she was running for a seat in the United States Senate, refused to meet with reporters. And a woman in California, who in spite of her status as corporate heroine and record-breaking campaign spender, failed to even come close to her competitor even though the race was promoted – and I do mean promoted – by the television analysts as quite close, which, once the novelty of an Internet empress deciding she was meant to govern California wore off, it simply was not.
A couple of months ago, with nearly a year and a half to go (by my calendar anyhow) before the 2012 election, Gwen Ifill seemed relieved that the Republican race was “finally” taking shape. It was as if she’d been on the verge of getting worried that nobody would run.
And on Friday night, while dissecting the impending showdown between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, Gwen Ifill and her guests had a few aw-shucks laughs over how much they “love election years.” And all I could summon by way of response was: I used to love them, too.
