I have a confession to make: When the presidential campaign begins, I not only feel some excitement, as you might expect from someone interested enough in politics to write about it every day, but I also get a feeling you might call relief. For the following 18 months, I know that one of the most challenging parts of my job-finding things to write about on very short notice-will be substantially easier.
One of the big challenges of blogging or writing on a daily basis is being able to look at what's going on in the world and come up with something valuable, or at least interesting, to say about it. And that usually (not always, but usually) requires some new development that adds information, changes something, or reinforces things you've already been thinking, which will allow you to write something (seemingly) fresh about it.
That means that doing daily writing gets easier in campaign season, because it's always changing (in at least some trivial way) and so much of it is public. Sit down at your desk in the morning and a bunch of stuff will have happened since yesterday. There will be a new poll, a candidate will have given a speech on a topic they haven't addressed before, or maybe somebody said something outrageous you can get worked up about. In contrast, the news of what happens when there isn't a campaign on often comes slower and can be harder to find. There might be a fascinating policy initiative in the works over at the Department of Labor, but unless that's your specific beat and you are keyed in to the developments there, you probably won't hear about it until it's officially presented. But the campaign is easy to find.
There's an accompanying danger, which is that if you're writing about the campaign every day you can get bogged down in the trivia of that daily back-and-forth and lose sight of what the whole thing is supposed to be about. The world doesn't actually need the fiftieth article about yesterday's "gaffe," though it might need the first article on a policy topic the next president will confront that hasn't gotten any notice. Jay Smooth is contemplating the temptation to get mired in the horse race part of the story, and he's come to a decision:
Will I take Smooth's "50-50 horse race/human race challenge"? Well...I like the idea, but in a way I feel like I already do that, at least insofar as I try to bring a broader perspective to even the most ephemeral stories. I'm not sure what side of the ledger it falls on when you look at a seemingly trivial matter, step back and try to answer whether it means anything or not, why we get sucked into talking about it, what it would mean if things like that actually have an impact on the race, and so on.
For instance, back in 2008 there was one of these miniature controversies about air pressure in tires, which you've surely forgotten about by now. Gas prices were high, and at one point Barack Obama suggested that keeping your tires properly inflated is a good way to save gas. The McCain campaign hooted in glee, literally passing out tire pressure gauges to mock Obama and sending their candidate to do a photo-op in front of an oil rig. In and of itself, the argument was meaningless, but I wrote a piece about it that I rather liked (titled "I'm Sigmund Freud, and I Approve This Message") pointing out the obvious symbolism of the tire gauge vs. the oil drill, and connecting it to previous campaigns in which Republicans tried to paint Democratic candidates as being insufficiently manly.
Is that horse race or human race? That particular piece wasn't about the policy consequences of the campaign, but I was trying to contextualize the controversy of the moment and say something broader about American politics, which I hope is more useful for readers than just asking whether tomorrow's tracking poll is going to tick up or down. I write about the details of policy quite a bit, but I also do a lot of meta-coverage, which some might argue is no more substantive than ruminating on the latest poll. But it's important to think about how we receive, process, and understand the news in general and the campaign in particular, because it's the informational ocean in which we're all swimming. There's no better time than a campaign, when people are actually paying attention, to examine what the news looks like, what kinds of assumptions are embedded within it, what we're taking from it, and how it might be altering our perspective on the world.
The impulse to just get sucked into the who's-winning-the-morning vortex is something you have to keep checking constantly. Smooth alludes to something I've noted before: one of the reasons there's so much horse race coverage is that if it's your job to write about politics, you almost certainly find the horse race stuff interesting. Campaigns are about tremendously consequential issues, but they're also a dramatic contest between two (or in the case of the primaries, many) antagonists. Most of them are interesting characters, even the ones who might not seem interesting at first (for example, for some strange reason I find Mitt Romney utterly fascinating).
Of course, it isn't a journalist or commentator's job just to talk about what they find interesting; they're also supposed to be informing the public. But just as there are multiple varieties of drivel, there are many meaningful ways you can analyze the ongoing campaign. Lengthy analyses of the candidates' policy proposals are absolutely vital, but they're not the only valuable kind of coverage.
