I like Matt's post on the media's odd way of covering policy as if it were a matter of aesthetics. To be sure, Obama did offer a policy speech yesterday which was directly aimed at countering criticisms that he's a lightweight who only talks about his own movement. Obama, because he compulsively talks about the way in which he's going to talk about things, said this pretty explicitly. "Mr. Obama seemed to allude to the criticism of his rivals who suggest that he excels at rhetoric, but falls short on details, by saying at the outset of his remarks that he was going to 'take it down a notch' by giving a speech that he said would be 'a little more detailed, a little longer, with not as many applause lines.'" Message: I'm wonky. But even so, Obama's speech actually had a lot of policy in it! And presumably, the way to figure out if he was talking about policy was not to evaluate whether his speech was longer and more boring than his other speeches, but to examine the actual statements he offered and ask some experts how the proffered solutions might fare. A reporter would, of course, tell you that this was a campaign event, and policy mentioned in campaigns doesn't much matter, it's all done for positioning. But that's a chicken and the egg problem. If reporters covered policy speeches as if they were really important and then didn't forget about them when the candidate entered office, suddenly they'd become really important. If six months after Obama took the White House the New York Times ran an A1 story about how Obama was refusing to push this policy idea his campaign offered up, he'd push the policy idea. And if holding politicians to their policy promises became a predictable thing the media did, then politicians wouldn't make so many hollow promises as they wouldn't want the bad coverage later. But if the media treats policy ideas offered during the campaign as mere positioning and evaluates the policy based on whether the positioning is effective, then the politician will treat policy during the campaign as positioning and forget about it once the positioning is judged sufficient.
