Presidential Campaigns: the New Show About Nothing (or Why You Have to Be Something to Win Iowa)

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has a new article posted that discusses the media circus and made for TV dramas that Presidential Campaigns have become. This is only going to be magnified with larger states like California, New Jersey, New York, and Florida moving up in the primary season.

Like Seinfeld, the presidential campaign is essentially a "show about nothing," a prolonged prime-time character-driven drama crafted around a series of fake conflicts that always get resolved by the end of the program, in this case November 2008. Marcia and Greg make driving-test bet in segment one; Marcia imagines instructor in underwear in middle segments; Marcia and Greg's bet ends in a tie, family loves each other again. In the old days the presidential show's writers tended to use actual political issues (Georgie and Hube argue about Vietnam!) as the starting points for their dramatic conflicts -- a natural artistic strategy, given that the subject matter was a real election in a giant country teeming with ugly social and economic problems -- but in the last few cycles the networks seem to have figured out that you can shoot even a whole season of a presidential race without including any of the boring political shit.

Instead, you can cover the whole race using the time-tested Aaron Spelling method of creating TV dramas: You pack a rich and magical dream-landscape with a group of easily-recognizable psychological archetypes and spend a dozen episodes or so letting them smash into each other in bikinis and sports cars (if the show is set in California) or spurs and hoop-dresses (if it's a Western).

The campaign is the same deal. Instead of making a Malibu beach soap out of a prude, a slut, a 98-pound weakling and a leading man, you do a political drama with a hothead (McCain), an Eddie Haskell (Romney), an underdog (Obama) and a wicked witch (Hillary), all doing turns manning tractors and cow-milking chairs on a digitally-enhanced farm set that looks so much like Iowa, you'd swear it was the real thing. (For the second straight season, incidentally, Dennis Kucinich will play the Harry Bently-Dwayne Schneider-Kramer "nutty neighbor" character, getting a wolf whistle and three seconds of pre-recorded "enthusiastic applause" every time he walks through the apartment door. I've been on Dennis to wear a handyman costume next year to make his character really fly.)

Taibbi, though he probably didn't have this as one of his goals, gives the exact reason why Iowa should be first in the nation. Candidates can't go through the motions when campaigning in Iowa and candidates can't by their way to victory by buying TV ads and stopping in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and Davenport every couple of weeks. As I wrote last week, us Iowans are stubborn folks.

We expect to shake the candidate's hands (preferably in someone's living room or a coffee shop and not in a large arena) and aren't afriad to ask the tough questions. We will continue this ritual until we find a candidate worthwhile to support, even if it takes seeing each candidate six times.

To win Iowa, a candidate has to be about something, no matter how hard the media tries to portray the national race differently.