Today’s TV-dominated elections resemble pre-Thanksgiving sales. Unlike holiday purchases, however, the turkeys we elect can’t be returned. Once they’re sworn in, we’re stuck with the messages they’ve sold us. And the election messages we’re being sold will likely become more corporate in years to come.
Politics is not being confused here with commerce. Politics is a commercial enterprise in the TV age, which has transformed civic activism into sedentary consumerism.
More than 20 years ago, Ralph Whitehead of the University of Massachusetts dubbed the term “New Collar voter” to describe the hybrid citizen whose demographic could not be accurately characterized as either white or blue collar.
Widely missed by the Beltway operatives who took an interest in Whitehead’s analysis was his key finding: that the color of voters’ collars is less significant than the fact that media has transformed them from producers of politics to consumers.
While news coverage still has an impact on voters’ views, there is ample evidence that decisive swing voters are significantly impressed by 30- and 60-second TV commercials, designed more often that not to influence the “independent” voter’s judgment of a candidate’s “character.”
Mainstream pundits generally consider these “independents” more “objective” than those of us who hew to tenets of partisan philosophy. We are deemed “prisoners” of partisanship, despite the fact that the judgments arrived at by voters largely from watching TV commercials are inherently subjective.
The problem with this politics of visual commerce is not simply that we’re stuck with the messages we buy, nor that the politics of persona offer no rationale for coherent governance. It’s that the politics of consumer perception impute to those with superior finances the power to decide elections.
Those financing candidates’ commercials gain advantage in two ways. First, they tend to dominate discourse by purchasing more media (or media outlets) than the candidates and supporters they oppose. Second, the Republican agenda of corporations underwriting campaign commercials – legitimated by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision granting them First Amendment free-speech rights as individuals – is obscured by the viewers’ being induced to focus on a candidate’s “character.”
Consequently swing voters often cast their ballots with only shallow awareness of the political forces at work behind the camera. Republicans and Democrats alike engage in this politics of media purchase. But the fact that corporate money dominates this media circus ensures that many “independents” are being influenced to vote Republican, whether they’re aware of it or not.
The Supreme Court’s decision will, over time, not only give surpassing advantage to a Republican party dominated by corporate money. It will entice Democrats to invite even more corporate money than they have since the discredited Tony Coehlo convinced Dems to dance with corporate finance in the moonlight.
Thus, the politics of media purchase may over time render as understatement Ralph Nader’s quip that “the only difference between the parties is the speed with which they drop to their knees in the presence of corporate money.”
