A couple of days ago, I wrote a little bit about the choice of emphasis on person, or emphasis on policy, when evaluating presidential candidates. I prefer to emphasize policy in national elections, but I respect people who hold the opposite view.
What does it mean, though, to emphasize policy? What information should you be seeking out?
Information is here defined as any and all media about political candidates and about their policies: speeches, writings, news reports, polls, wisecracks, sound bites, voter's guides, debates, interviews, outtakes, scandals, opinion pieces, blog articles, blog comments …. even real-life discussions you engage in with other people, by email or face to face. (Like commenter Cathie's potentially friendship-destroying email debate.)
All of this stuff is stuff you make a choice to consume, or not to consume, to engage in or disengage from, by the way. So…. When should you choose to engage, and when to quit? The answer to that depends on how you'll use the information. Like it or not, you consume political info for one of three purposes:
- To decide how to vote.
- To repackage it so that it can be used to influence other people's decisions.
- To make you feel good.
Let's take these one at a time.
1. Deciding how to vote.
If you, like me, prefer to emphasize policy, then a huge amount of bandwidth spent on the campaign season is completely irrelevant to your vote. Negative campaigner or insufficiently aggressive? More or less experienced? Smart or stupid? Was he kidding when he said that, or serious? Kids in trouble? Cheating on his wife? Military veteran? Supported by weirdos or by reasonable people? Religious? America-hater? Shady friends? Man of the people, or backwoods dummy? Polished specimen or out-of-touch elitist? Too old, too young? "Liberal" or "conservative?" Same as the last one? Too radically different?
None of that matters for your vote, if policy's your thing. What does matter is what he's supported in the past and what he says he'll support now, combined with what power he'll likely have to push his pet projects. Plus, maybe, which interest groups endorse him. You can probably gather all the information you need in a single web searching session; it will not change much from week to week. So, if you are a policy person, don't fool yourself: If you're reading about personal qualities, it's not because you are trying to be an informed voter.
The nice thing about this: Paradoxically, the more important the issues are to you, the less you need to watch the political news! So you can skip it. No need to feel guilty about it.
On the other hand, new information constantly spools in that might change the evaluation of "what kind of person" is this candidate. Depending on what personal qualities you value, this could require a lot of homework. If you're stuck on something like race or gender or military service or age or political experience, it may not matter; but if you're determined to choose the candidate who's the most "trustworthy" or "warm" or "eloquent" or "concerned," you will be stuck watching a lot of interviews with Katie Couric.
2. Repackaging information to influence others' votes.
OK, policy voter, so we've established that most of the news out there is likely irrelevant to your vote. But wait! Maybe you still have a good reason to consume it. Maybe you can use it to influence other people. And maybe those people are "person voters."
This leads to an obvious and perhaps painful question: who do you think you are going to influence, anyway? And how are you likely to influence them?
Answer me that, and that ought to tell you what information you have business consuming. Maybe you don't care whether such-and-such-a-candidate is a good speaker or not… but your best friend is all about the appearance of smart vs. stupid. So maybe emailing her the latest video of your opponent's misspeaking, with the subject line "Sooooo scary that this person might actually become President!!!!!" will change HER vote. That's rational, I suppose. A little bit disingenuous, since you're actually scared of the person's opinions on the banking bill or on abortion laws, but rational nonetheless.
But… Are you not going to repeat this to anyone? Are you only going to repeat this to people who already agree with you? Then that's not what this info is for. Face it, it has just one purpose:
3. To make you feel good.
Face it, policy voters: We choose to consume a lot of this stuff purely because it makes us feel good. Why else read up about the stupid stuff the other guy said, or the deer-in-the-headlights look of that candidate when faced with a certain tough question, or the shady way that marriage ended, or the church he used to belong to, all that stuff? It's not going to change your vote, right?
All it's going to do — assuming it appears to confirm what you've already decided — is soothe your troubled emotions. Hey, it's hard to vote against that apparently nice, smart, qualified person just because he has some really bad ideas. Or it's hard to vote for that really unlikable person just because he has the right views on the most important issues.
So you consume stuff, on purpose, that makes you like your guy more and like the other guy less. Stuff that makes you feel you're in the right crowd. Stuff that makes you feel angry-with-a-helping-of-righteous. Maybe stuff that sounds smart, so you can repeat it and sound smart too.
I'm not saying it's wrong to do this. But let's be clear about it. Why do you consume the information you consume? Why do you repeat what you repeat?
It may tell you something about what kind of person you are.
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