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Tuesday, December 26, 2006
100 percent chance hot air will persist
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the effort to rush the 2008 presidential election before this year’s chosen crop even takes the oath of office, the realization dawns that politics and the weather have far more in common than the blowing winds.
Before 2006 is gone, and 13 months before the Iowa caucus, the nation is awash in reporting and speculation about who may or may not run and, if they do, who voters might prefer and why.
In the Southwest, 70 people — a group said to include “blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, environmentalists and ‘significant Democratic activists’ ” — are pushing to “draft” New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Associated Press reports.
A Democratic political activist in Oregon is attempting to “draft” Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in that state and it is news. Obama is, of course, the darling of much of the political press, which is drooling at the prospect of a Hillary-Obama primary contest. This is, now, a senator who is two years into his first term, but to a media whose political reporters are so over George W. Bush and so ready to find a new celebrity, Obama is the anointed. For now, anyway.
John Edwards, who was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, creates a buzz that is widely reported as a major story for appointing a former Michigan congressman adored by Big Labor as an adviser and “likely” campaign manager.
We are all invited — led, actually — to fantasize about what it all means. Thirteen months before it matters in the least — and almost two years before it matters to the country.
And there are, too, Al Gore and Kerry and the endless will he?/won’t he? speculation into which all of America is induced to join. And that’s just with the Democrats.
So what do politics and the weather have in common? The volume of information dumped on an unsuspecting public.
The public and voters specifically pay attention when they perceive a need to know, often within the last month of a campaign. Before that, it’s mind clutter, not wholly worthless or uninteresting, but information consumed by those who aren’t political junkies in snippets as munchies for the mind.
For years now, television stations have inundated us with commentary and reporting about the weather. The weather is like politics in that we all have a need, or a desire, to know whether it’s cold or rainy keyed to events in our lives.
But at some point a couple of decades ago, the technology became available and affordable to dump out vast stores of information. Stations started competing, hiring specialists who proceeded to turn an ordinary weather event into endless globs of imparted information.
There was a time, of course, when that volume of information, properly timed and delivered, would have been enormously beneficial. To farmers in an agricultural economy, or to a state — like that of my youth — where the poor lived in uninsulated wood-frame houses built on rock pillars, with tin roofs nailed to wood strips, accurate weather information was imperative. The weather drove their lives and fortunes.
Not so today. It matters. But we don’t get the most of it because we need it or desire it, but because stations have in-house a skill and equipment that drives decision-making.
Long before most of America needs or desires to know the players in a contest that doesn’t matter for 13 months, and even before this election year is past, political reporting and commentary rivals the attention given major news stories.
As with weather reporting by television stations, it’s largely because a vast network of political operatives exist to spin stories and to promote their favorites. The machinery therefore exists to generate information not when we need to know it, but when it’s useful to market their candidates.
The competition to be the first to recognize the Obama boomlet, for example, or to offer some revealing insight into Hillary’s thinking, connections or weaknesses, does the rest. Thus the nation is guaranteed that before this year’s elected officials take office and perform their first official act, or make a single decision that affects the rest of us, we are drawn out of the present into the future.
On any number of public policy issues — the war in Iraq, health care financing, Social Security solvency, the consequence of unchecked federal spending — the nation would be well served by being drawn out of the present into the future. But not about the process of politics.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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