Don't Bore Us With The Facts, Please!

August 30, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Of Campaigns and Breakfast Cereals
By BOB HERBERT

Most national issues today are so complicated, so difficult to understand and have opinions on, that they either intimidate or, more often, bore the average voter."

So wrote Harry Treleaven, an advertising man who took a leave of absence in the mid-1960's to work on the Texas Congressional campaign of 42-year-old George Herbert Walker Bush. Mr. Treleaven was not upset by the fact that voters were turned off by the complexity of important political issues. After all, he was in advertising. The goal was to sell product, not explore issues.

Mr. Treleaven became a key figure in Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. Joe McGinniss, in his best-selling book about that campaign, "The Selling of the President,'' said of Mr. Treleaven:

"There was no issue when it came to selling Ford automobiles; there were only the product, the competition and the advertising. He saw no reason why politics should be any different."

Mr. Treleaven died in 1998, but the path-breaking cynicism of his type of politics hangs like a shroud over this year's presidential campaign.

You want complicated issues? Start with Iraq - a war with no clearly defined goal, not even the remotest timetable for victory, and no exit strategy whatsoever. The ad men (and women) will reduce this monumental tragedy to crisp, poll-tested campaign sound bites.

Or consider the economy. We're in a new world of work in which good jobs at good pay with good benefits are ever more hard to find. Despite the administration's insistence that the economy is strong and getting stronger, there is no light at the end of this dismal tunnel. Job growth is anemic. The middle class is being relentlessly squeezed. And the Census Bureau tells us that in 2003, for the third year in a row, the number of Americans who are poor increased.

As David Leonhardt wrote in The Times on Friday, "The economy's troubles, which first affected high-income families even more than the middle class and poor, have recently hurt families at the bottom and in the middle significantly more than those at the top."

These are issues that should be ruthlessly explored, but the politicians, their handlers and much of the media have taken their cues from Harry Treleaven. You don't want to bore the readers or viewers or voters with anything too complicated. A well-rehearsed comment or two will suffice, followed by the jokes on Leno and Letterman, and then it's on to the "real world" of Paris and Kobe and whatever.

This week's Republican convention in New York is a rigidly scripted theatrical event that will garner a grand total of three hours of live coverage on network television - a reprise of the Democrats' rigidly scripted extravaganza in Boston last month. Anyone who drifts off message will be viewed as a nut.

So we won't get anything but pap about Iraq. We'll be told about the miraculous economic healing powers of the Bush tax cuts. We'll be told that the era of George Bush II has been a rousing success for America.

Serious voters who would like to hear a discussion (from the leaders of both parties) about why we are in Iraq and when and how we might get out of there will be disappointed. So will voters interested in exploring ideas about the leadership role of the United States in the post-9/11 world, which is at least as important as the role thrust upon the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II.

More scary stories are emerging about global warming, and our dependence on foreign oil is undermining our security like never before. But these topics, too, are complex, and therefore, according to the advertising folks and media gurus, too difficult and boring for general consumption.

In other words, we're a nation of nitwits, and a presidential campaign at a critical moment in world history will be spoon-fed to us like an ad for Wheaties.

Raymond Price, a speechwriter for Nixon in the 1968 campaign, was as contemptuous of substance in politics as Treleaven. "It's not what's there that counts," he wrote, "it's what's projected." In Price's view, "Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort to understand what we're talking about."

Voters could revolt against this kind of humiliating treatment. But that would happen only if the Treleavens and Prices of the world were wrong.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company