Embracing the Mess: Reflections on Campaign 2000

Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good for Us. By Roderick P. Hart. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000; pp. xvii + 307. $29.95.

The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections. By Martin Plissner. New York: Free Press, 1999; pp. vii + 244. $25.00.

Election Polls, the News Media, and Democracy. Edited by Paul J. Lavrakas and Michael W. Traugott. New York: Chatham House Publishers, 2000; pp. xv + 352. $29.95.

Everything You Think You Know About Politics . . . And Why You're Wrong. By Kathleen Hall Jamieson. New York: Basic Books, 2000; pp. xxiv + 287. $15.00.

Republic of Denial: Press, Politics and Public Life. By Michael Janeway. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999; pp. 216. $22.50.

In the final moments of the 1995 film The American President, the title character utters a powerful and prescient observation about the nature of U.S. democracy: "Everybody knows America isn't easy," President Andrew Shepherd declares. "America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight." ¹ Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's fictional president might have been speaking about Campaign 2000. From its beginnings in Iowa to its lengthy Florida denouement to the final decisive decree by the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., the 2000 campaign certainly was not easy, and it defiantly demanded advanced citizenship from the entire nation.

Passions continue to flare and feelings are still raw about this election--an election more contentious and more divisive than most in recent memory. The vitriolic protests during President George W. Bush's inauguration evidence the intensity of emotion about this campaign. Whole portions of the population still feel disenfranchised by the election procedures and the ultimate outcome. Large numbers of U.S. citizens believe the presidency was stolen by the Bush campaign's efforts at intimidation during the Florida recount, particularly in Miami-Dade County. And many think that Bush's ascendancy to the presidency only occurred because of the reckless and partisan intervention of a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, undermining any claims he might have to presidential legitimacy. ²

Conversely, countless Americans trust that George W. Bush will rescue the nation from what they see as the moral degradation of the Clinton years--an eight-year moral lapse that came to its culmination with a flurry of scandals over questionable last-minute presidential pardons. These citizens believe that Bush will unite us all because of his remarkable abilities to bridge partisan divides and forge reasonable compromise. Those Americans find fault with an election system that dragged on for weeks, with recount after recount, where chads--whether hanging, dimpled, or pregnant--became more important than the rules and procedures prescribed by election law. For these citizens, any problems with voting rest in the all-too-human flaws of individual voters and vote counters, not in systemic troubles that speak to fundamental questions of unfairness and injustice.

Put simply, Campaign 2000 polarized an already divided nation along many different fault lines. Such divisions make understanding and reflecting on this event difficult. Our approach in this review is to comment on selected aspects of the 2000 campaign by applying varied political analyses from leading political commentators and scholars who all, in one form or another, emphasize the communicative nature of political campaigns. The books under consideration in this review offer discrete perspectives on contemporary U.S. politics, and we use them as our springboard to reflect on the 2000 campaign and the communicative/rhetorical practices that characterized that campaign. In the process, we also assess their capacity to fully explain and illuminate politics as practiced in the United States.

Ultimately, our reading of these divergent analyses and our assessment of Campaign 2000 lead to the conclusion that those who analyze and dissect U.S. politics are increasingly unwilling to embrace the mess...