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Every four years, through their answers to post-election surveys and their failure to show up at the polls, Americans protest our shallow and even offensive campaigns for president. Yet nothing changes from one election to the next, because the media, the candidates, the pollsters, and the consultants are codependent in the idea that elections are exercises in manipulating voters, and in giving us negative campaigns, bland and scripted lines, and meaningless debates. We will not reform our politics and get meaningful participation by the American people until we come to realize that presidential elections turn on how well an administration has governed the country, not on how well candidates have performed in the campaign.
The study of history shows that a pragmatic American electorate chooses a president according to the performance of the party holding the White House as measured by the consequential events and episodes of a term - economic boom and bust, foreign policy successes and failures, social unrest, scandal, and policy innovation. If the nation fares well during the term of the incumbent party, that party wins another four years in office; otherwise, the challenging party prevails. Nothing that a candidate has said or done during a campaign, when the public discounts everything as political, has changed his prospects at the polls. Debates, advertising, television appearances, news coverage, and campaign strategies - the usual grist for the pundit, ry mills - count for virtually nothing on Election Day. The only issues that matter are the ones for which the results are already in before the campaign begins. Thus, the fate of an incumbent party is largely in its own hands; there is little that the challenging party can do to influence the outcome of a presidential election. Even the celebrated campaigner, President Bill Clinton, won reelection in 1996 because the nation, under his watch, was tranquil, prosperous, and at peace.
If candidates and the media could come to understand that governing, not campaigning, counts in presidential elections, we could have a new kind of presidential politics. Candidates could abandon attack ads and instead articulate forthrightly and concretely what Americans should be accomplishing during the next four years. Aspirants for the presidency could bring the public back into presidential elections by using...