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The Presidential Sweepstakes 2004

2004; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 86; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/003172170408600205

1940-6487

Denis P. Doyle,

American Political and Social Dynamics

For the sixth time in 24 years, Mr. Doyle has enabled the Kappan to publish the education programs of the major Presidential candidates. Here, he shares with readers his views on Campaign 2004. AS THE OLD bromide has it, pleasure is all mine. A political scientist by training and a campaign junkie by temperament, find no task to be more fun (and genuinely nerve-wracking) than the one the Kappan has set for me every four years for the past 24. It gives me the chance to formally pursue the Presidential campaign and the candidates' education advisors, whom get to know -- if only slightly -- over the several months before the deadline for the October issue. This, of course, is the point in time when my nerves begin to be wracked. True, give the campaigns ample lead time; true, the writing task is not that difficult; true, faithfully hector the education advisors; and true, they promise in good faith to meet the deadline, August 1. And every four years they miss it. (This time by relatively little: one candidate's essay arrived August 2 and the other August 4. leave it to the reader to guess which one was the later of the two.) Wrestling the copy over the finish line is the only nerve-wracking part of the process; the rest of it is pure fun. The assignment gives me a good excuse to watch (or listen to) the conventions, something I've done without fail since 1952. As a Berkeley radical, picketed the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles and was in Chicago (where worked for Delegate Leo Ryan) in 1968. had the wit or luck, as the case may be, to return to Sacramento before the violence broke out; watched it on television from the safety of my home. know it is de rigueur to lament the passing of the old conventions -- in which decisions were really made -- but still like conventions, banal as they are reputed to be. Like many of my colleagues, was livid when the three major networks gave up televising gavel-to-gavel convention coverage. But have learned that they were doing me a favor: to my delight, have discovered C-SPAN, a new form of television, with no intermediary, no talking heads to analyze and interpret for me. Just me and the speakers, thank you very much -- actually a great improvement over network coverage. And even if the decisions about standard-bearers have been made in advance, a convention is still high theater, providing an opportunity unlike any other to watch the American political process unfold. More to the point, perhaps, the modern convention is a perfect metaphor for the modern age, in which reality and image tend to overlap. The difference between reality and image blurs because beneath the surface of the otherwise amorphous convention, one shape begins to emerge: IT (information technology). Even more important than television itself and the ubiquitous cell phones and laptop computers in evidence is the Web. Though low-tech types like me (I still carry a fountain pen) haven't a clue as to how it works, the fact that it works means that the Web has come to define the modern campaign in ways only dimly imagined even four years ago. It is at once a source of information (some of it of doubtful veracity), a communication vehicle par excellence, and an apparently inexhaustible source of money. Indeed, the Web (together with the credit card) appears to be the greatest political fund-raising tool ever invented (a dimension of the Web that was not immediately apparent to the casual observer). The first inkling that the Web was connected to a pot of political gold was the unexpected vigor of the candidacy of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. Long before his I have a scream speech, Dean was cutting a wide swath with Web-enabled organizing and fund raising on a hitherto unimaginable scale. It was simply breathtaking. Coming from nowhere, Dean touched a nerve that the professional pundits and politicians were not aware existed. …