Will the real Presidential candidates please stand up?

[T_i_B]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jedediah_purdy/2007/12/will_the_real_candidates_please_stand_up.html

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Antonio Gramsci didn't mean his formula to refer to Iowa voters, but it does. The latest Iowa polls, showing Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee first among likely caucus-goers, marks a small victory for the will. While the Illinois senator and the former Arkansas governor are far apart in their views, they have some things in common. Both tend to address voters as adults. Both sometimes express nuanced views that suggest an actual human personality at work. And each is, in his field, the unofficial candidate of political naïveté. For months, Iowa Republicans have been telling reporters that they like Huckabee, but they don't think he's going to win the nomination. For Democrats, the situation is the reverse, with the same result: reporters, echoing the myth that Hillary Clinton's nomination is inevitable, have been telling them that Obama can't win the primaries. Recently, Iowans have realised that such prophecies are either self-fulfilling or false. Their parties' nominations are decided by voters like them, and no one else.

What's striking is that this should be so hard to realise. American politics, like some other important parts of national life, has become a speculative market. Rather than judge the underlying quality of the candidate, voters try to anticipate how others will choose. Like other speculative markets, the electoral version creates boom campaigns, powered by the wish to back a winner, and busts, driven by fear of sinking with a loser.

A few things contribute to this weird situation. One is the honourable impulse of primary voters to be stewards of their party, supporting candidates they think will have a good chance in the general election. Even this can produce perverse results, like selection of lame trimmers with good resumes, such as John Kerry. (Logic: I am not that excited about him, but with these qualifications, surely someone will be.) Another is that voters, with busy lives, economise on information and make their choices based on a tiny fraction of the words and images that campaigns produce. The guy who looks like a winner, whatever that means, can loom pretty large compared to the guy with the haircut and the woman the other guys hate.

A less forgivable cause is a closed circuit between voters and political reporters, in which both sides do their very best not to seem jejune. What's jejune? Liking a candidate because you admire and believe her. What's sophisticated? Liking a candidate because you think others believe he's a master of the game, trained, poised and funded. (Given the current shape of the Democratic race, the genders in these examples should probably be flipped.) The smart money - that irritating phrase of a speculative economy - is all about tactics and strategies built from tactics. Conviction is reserved for naïve throngs out there somewhere, who are the targets of all those tactics. Political discussion that runs on these premises can hardly help being self-referential and, at once, smug and insecure.