Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency

2. Getting It “Ju . . . st Right!”

58 Two Getting It “Ju . . . st Right!” Many people think about the difference between the 2003–2004 presidential campaign and that of 2007–2008 in terms of the centrality of the Internet, the number of voters of various demographic groups who cast ballots on Election Day, and so forth. One of the important comparisons, however, not to be overlooked if one is focused on how Message politics works in America, is what we can term the “Goldilocks Principle of Message -ing.” There is a “ju . . . st right!” use of Message, neither too much— especially of the negative kind—nor too little—especially of one’s own positive kind, the communicative weakness or absence of which renders one extremely vulnerable to the other candidates’ inevitable barrage of the negative. So, notwithstanding its apparent effectiveness in shaping the results of the election in 2004 (for President George W. Bush was, in fact, reelected ), the powerful Republican Message machine ascribed to the genius of KarlRoveseemed,inretrospect,tocalltheveryenterpriseofMessage-ing into a kind of official disrepute among the media connoisseurs and much of the public—if, paradoxically, it was still clandestinely admired for its decisive success. Hence, one of the important stances in the 2008 election cycle was to seem to be above, beyond, or in some way independent of Message. And interestingly the two figures who would emerge as the respective candidates of the major parties in 2008 very much embraced an “anti-Message” or “post-Message” Message, at least in their parties’ Getting It “Ju . . . st Right!” | 59 primary campaigns and somewhat beyond. As a demonstration of what wemighttermreversiontotheinstitutionalnorm,however,wemustnote that in the final phases of the 2008 campaigns, Message, and in particular negative Message attempting to define the opponent, was once again in full force. Here we compare these two electoral cycles in more detail in respect of telling moments of “too much,” “too little,” and “ju . . . st right” Message. From an ideological point of view, to be sure, our own political institutionsarecenteredonourmasselectoralprocess ,whichhumsawayinhigh gear at the presidential level an incredible two years or more before that recurrentendpointonthefirstTuesdayofNovembereveryfouryears.Yet electoral politics at the center of mass democracy is not all of politics by any means. In fact, to judge by participation rates, electoral politics may have definitively become a decreasingly central realm of how the totality of politics operates, in this country as elsewhere. (Even lowering the U.S. voting age has not helped in increasing participation, older people voting at greater rates per population than younger ones—perhaps indicating that the “Chicago Way” of counting votes from cemetery addresses is the only reliable way to increase voter participation!) Those enfranchised in the United States seem, alas, increasingly to recognize—just read the daily “Letters to the Editor” columns or responses to online articles in the major web news outlets such as AOL/ Huffington Post—that other forms of politics may ultimately be more significant overall in the total political process. They point, for example, totheusefulrentaloflegislativebranchrepresentationthroughcampaign contributions and other benefits of corporate “political speech” recently legitimized by the Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision. To many of the disaffected among actually voting humans, then, politics has just become business carried on by other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz (or are we thinking of Calvin Coolidge?). Politics in such a model is just a business some people engage in, tolerated and legitimated by an otherwise decidedly indifferent public, who mind—and who tend to—their ownbusiness, knowing that there’s an official top businessin the state and national capitals that works just like theirs but, alas, not necessarily to theiradvantage.1The2010insurrectionsfromtheRightoftheRepublican 60 | Creatures of Politics Party, however ersatz in their being professionally molded into “The Tea Party”(asmostanalystsnote),andthosefromtheLeftoftheDemocratic Party, “Occupy[ing] Wall Street” and other loci of high finance across downtown America in late 2011 and beyond, are ultimately protests wellingupoutofthesenseofbeingsuckeredbythepurveyorsofparticipatory politicscentraltorecent-vintageMessage.Itwouldseemthatthecontrast between Message in 2004 and that in 2008 was an early indicator that the political professionals were already sensing a change in how Message must work—if it was to work—in political retailing. Notwithstanding, electoral politics still continues to be the most interesting part of our political process. It is public spectacle in what we call the public sphere, sometimes indeed to distract from the other (real?) businessthatseemsactuallytobeathandamongthoseinso-calledpublic service.Howdoeselectoralpoliticsseemtoworkincontemporarytimes? On a regular cyclic basis, the voting—and even the non-voting—public in the United States is mass-mobilized to participation in...