Using Two Books to Illustrate His Point — the Intelligently Thoughtful Ezra Klein Explains the Meaninglessness of Political Campaigning — Virtually all of Us Vote according to the Partisan Outlooks of the Clans to which We Belong — There Is No Such Thing as “Game Change” — in the John Heilemann and Mark Halperin Sense

08 November 2013

Citation — to Ezra Klein’s well-crafted insight about American politics

Ezra Klein, Do Political Campaigns Even Matter?, Bloomberg (07 November 2013)

In our sensationalized, ever-juicing culture — Truth takes a daily beating

Consequently, I appreciate it when Sanity’s Voice occasionally intrudes. As Ezra Klein’s does with his analysis of two recent books about American politics.

Mr. Klein makes the point that the political dramas — which political campaigns and the media invent on an almost daily basis — do not perceptibly affect election results. There is a lot of show and no substance going on.

The two books that Klein focuses on

The first of these is, Double Down: Game Change 2012, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. It illustrates the edge-of-your-seat entertainment aspect of American political theater.

The second volume, The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election, by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck takes the opposite view. It proves the meaningless of the drama, which the sales-smart Heilemann and Halperin focus on.

Despite stirred tumult, nobody switches sides

Ezra Klein’s analysis goes like this:

Most “game-changers” actually prove to be, in Sides and Vavreck’s term, “game-samers.”

When Obama, addressing public infrastructure’s role in supporting business, said, “You didn’t build that,” the Romney campaign and news media went wild. The polls didn’t budge.

Remember the attack ads portraying Romney as a ruthless boss at Bain Capital LLC, firing blue-collar workers to increase profits? The numbers for the poll question measuring whether voters thought Romney “cares about people like me” stayed flat.

Even Romney’s notorious “47 percent” video failed to have lasting impact on the race.

Campaigns are less successful at persuading undecided voters than they are at encouraging their own partisans to grow more fierce.

He picked one of my favorite illustrations of the “media as inflammatory clown” perspective

Ms. Noonan wrote, on the day before the 2012 presidential election:

We begin with the three words everyone writing about the election must say:

Nobody knows anything. Everyone’s guessing.

As Klein correctly points out:

Noonan and others were simply stumping for the news media’s perennial favorite candidate: excitement.

Actually, Ms. Noonan was doing more than simply amping excitement.

Peggy Noonan — inciter of untruth

Ms. Noonan’s inaccurate pre-election comment well illustrated the Republican Party’s rejection of science, mathematics, and Reality.

Her self-apparently silly message was intended to project hope and votes for the Wall Street Journal’s candidate, the anti-rabble plutocrat, Governor Mitt Romney. If obedient Republican minions did not lose hope, Noonan probably surmised, perhaps they would obediently trot to polls to float Wall Street’s “barge of lucre” against Obama’s obviously flowing slight current.

The moral? — Political campaigns and the media cooperate to help us miss facts and the provable conclusions taken therefrom — both of which a democracy needs to survive

American governing institutions increasingly stoke the inflammatory ignorance that entrenches people in their light-prohibiting bunkers. Reality gets lost in political theater — like an orphan lost in the blizzard we have created from illusions. As Ezra Klein implies, despite the appearance of tumult, nothing noticeably changes.

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