ALL OF US HERE in the vast media-politico-windbaggio-academic complex are feeling blue these days, and have been at least since early March, when it became clear that the presidential campaign had entered a period of quiescence from which it would not emerge for many months. If ever. Within the complex itself, the academics are bluest of all. At the interminably named Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts), the scholars are practically inconsolable. From their perch at the JSCPPPP/JFKSG/HU, researchers have been monitoring “voter behavior” and “voter attitudes” under the auspices of the Vanishing Voter Project. Needless to say, as the political process slumps into a lengthy hibernation, the researchers find the news alarming.
Foremost among its duties, the Project polls; it polls and polls, weekly at least, and sometimes day by day. The purpose of all this information-gathering is to “reinvigorate” the presidential campaign and “improve its structure.” Ultimately, according to its mission statement, the Project hopes to “broaden and deepen citizens’ involvement in the presidential selection process.” It must be a depressing job. In the project’s latest poll, only 24 percent of respondents said they were paying close attention to the presidential campaign, while more than half weren’t paying any attention at all. “Unless something extraordinary happens — such as a major scandal involving Bush or Gore — we can expect public interest to remain low for the next four months,” said Thomas Patterson, co-director of the project. “The question is, [will] the public use this interlude as an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the candidates?”
This question of Dr. Patterson’s is surely rhetorical, since the answer is so obvious: Will voters use the present interval of political inactivity to study up on the proposals and personalities of George W. Bush and Albert Gore? You bet — and when they’re done with that they’ll go back to translating Cicero. Really, though: Even Dr. Patterson must somehow understand that for the next four months (at least) the public will be doing what it always does. I don’t know what that is, but I do know it doesn’t involve politics.
Which should strike many observers, even some who are themselves obsessed with politics, as perfectly normal. But at the Vanishing Voter Project, and indeed among the political class generally, the public’s inattention signifies some terrible malignancy at the heart of contemporary American democracy. This is the premise of the Project. It is why, since the beginning of the year, the researchers have so methodically tracked the sentiments of voters who vote, voters who don’t vote, voters who voted but wish they hadn’t, voters who didn’t but wish they had, and voters who wish that pollsters from the Shorenstein Center would just leave them alone. The political class is a bunch of worriers, and this is doubly true of academics who hang their lab coats at places like the Shorenstein Center. Every election year they worry about (in no particular order) the Decline of Party Discipline, the Role of the 30-second Commercial in Campaigns, the Influence of Negative Advertising, the Shrinking Soundbite on Network News, and, of course, the Turned-off Electorate — now known, at the Center, as the Vanishing Voter.
Why is the voter vanishing? Project researchers think they found the answer a few weeks ago. In a press release headlined “Americans ‘Disgusted’ with Politics,” they painted a picture of a voter not merely indifferent to politics but actively repelled by it. Almost 90 percent of those polled agreed that “most politicians are pretty much willing to say whatever it takes to get elected.” More than 50 percent said “most politicians are not worthy of respect.” And more than 70 percent agreed with the statement: “Politics in America is generally pretty disgusting.”
And so the voter vanishes: He (or she) stays home, gets bored, changes the channel, dozes off as the academics and journalists hover above him, wringing their hands. And it is not merely the academics and journalists who hover and worry — the politicians, too, fret over the supine, grunting figure of the disgusted voter. Each year candidates spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to woo him: Polls are taken, focus groups convened, pleadings are posted weekly to his mailbox, emissaries are sent to knock on his door, advertisements flood the airwaves in hopes that he might find at least one of them amusing, or informative, or persuasive. His every twitch of pleasure or displeasure is recorded, pored over, and cross-tabulated. Not since the days of the Bourbon dauphins has a single category of human being been treated with such solicitude or pampered so comprehensively.
Nothing works. So desperate did the candidates become this year, in fact, that they were moved to do the unthinkable: They actually ran a substantive campaign — collectively, the most substantial campaign in memory. From Bush to Bauer to Bradley, with Gore and Forbes and the others doing likewise, they issued position papers and memoranda on every conceivable subject; their websites bristled with charts and graphs and impact studies. The vast majority of their advertisements were “positive,” if not down-right perky. In various combinations the candidates held a dozen televised debates. The polls told them, you see, that this is what the voters want: substance, positivity, a lot of interaction and exposure. Yet the Vanishing Voter remained displeased. The exception came in a brief infatuation with John McCain, who — revealingly — engaged in the least substantial and least specific campaign of all. McCain did manage to stumble upon a single word, reform, that briefly lifted the Voter from his Barcalounger, though the Voter, like McCain himself, would have been unable to tell you what the word signified. Now McCain is gone, and the Voter resumes his customary position, vanishing in disgust.
Meanwhile, no one ever stops to question whether we should really wish this state of affairs to be otherwise. The goal of the Project — and of countless similar endeavors, lavishly staffed with worriers and sumptuously funded by Pews and Annenbergs and Fords and Rockefellers — is to “broaden and deepen citizens’ involvement.” But why? It is not altogether a bad thing in a republic that people feel remote from public affairs; a widespread preoccupation with politics is a sign of tumult and trouble. Self-government involves a process of self-selection. Politics becomes the responsibility of people who take the trouble to understand it — who understand, for example, that it is not “generally pretty disgusting,” or that politicians, as a rule, will not “say whatever it takes to get elected.” This process of self-selection is not something we should tamper with. With considerable efficiency it weeds out the lazy, the petulant, the disorderly, the ignorant; it weeds out, that is to say, the Vanishing Voter. By all means, the Shorenstein Center should continue to compile its amusing data. But at the same time it could best serve democracy by showing some restraint. Let the Vanishing Voter go about his business. Let him do what he wants to do. Let him vanish.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
