Election reporting

Since TV isn’t worth much as a source of information about the elections, I turn to the newspapers. But what sorts of stories do I find there?

Spokesman for Party X says recent events put Party Y’s election strategy in jeopardy. (In other news, a defense attorney says his client is innocent! ) Pundits who couldn’t tell an evangelical from a Moslem opine about the influence of the Haggard (who?) scandal on the evangelical turnout.

I’m not a party member, much less a party strategist. The word “electable” never enters my conversations. Nor am I a political junkie desperate to hear word, however speculative, of any disasters afflicting my political enemies.

Reports about party strategies may be, in some attenuated sense, news, but they aren’t political discourse. If politics were a game without consequences, like chess, focusing on the strategies would make sense. But it turns out that it matters who gets elected; so we should pay a little attention to what the candidates have done and what they say they’ll do. And maybe hand them a few more real-world questions to answer: new funds aren’t going to magically appear, so what can the county sheriff do differently—realistically?

And some of this examination does happen (the League of Women Voters tries to put some real-world questions out there, for instance), but in the paper the stories comparing candidates are on page 5 of the local section and the strategy stories go on page 1 or 3 of the front section.

I'll be voting, having tried to figure out who's who beforehand. I always go vote. Maybe its quixotic--some elections are pretty much foregone conclusions (I already know who's going to win the US Congressional seat from this district)--but I'll vote anyway.