The Media and the American Bipolarchy

We're down to two-way races in both major parties now. John Edwards has quit the Democratic race, making it a plain two-person campaign, while Rudy Giuliani's retreat from the Republican campaign leaves McCain facing Romney with Huckabee as McCain's extra piece on the board and Paul as an interloper trying to play his own irrelevant game. Giuliani is being treated as one of the great blunderers of modern political history, while Edwards seems more like a victim of circumstance, but their fortunes are really quite similar. Both men tried to shape their own campaign narratives, only to see them overshadowed and finally obliterated by the narrative constructed by the media.

Giuliani hoped to render Iowa and New Hampshire irrelevant, convinced that his celebrity would win him votes across the country. He presumably hoped for no clear front-runner to emerge from the first weeks of voting; he needed the media to say "deadlock" before he charged in to rout the competition. It didn't happen that way, and this wasn't all the former-mayor's fault. He did the right thing by attending the debates, keeping himself in the public eye. But when Huckabee won Iowa, the media said, "Front-Runner!" and when McCain won New Hampshire the media said "Front-Runner!" and when Romney won Michigan and Nevada the media said "Front-Runner!" Despite the reality of the situation, as far as the media were concerned there was never not a front-runner, and the front-runner was never Giuliani. The media may have had an interest in a long, competitive campaign, but each component of the media also has a selfish interest in scooping the rest by picking a winner. As a result, none were really interested in the Giuliani narrative, which required a void where the front-runner should be for him to fill in. Once Giuliani failed to fit the media narrative, he was doomed.

Edwards is a simpler story because he didn't try a risky strategy. He went out and competed and got honestly trounced every time. But this had to be in part because the media had constructed a polarizing narrative for the Democratic campaign that inevitably ruled out anyone but Clinton and Obama. Here also, all the media entities were quick to cry "Front-Runner!" whenever Clinton or Obama gained an advantage, which left Edwards further and further behind in most minds until the perception that he didn't have a chance trumped the reality of the situation. In this case the media might not be so much to blame because Clinton and Obama would probably have polarized Democrats in any case, but it'd be naive to say that the media did nothing to shape Edwards's fate.

This commentary has more to do with the media than the Bipolarchy itself, but the moral of the story for both men, in my opinion, is that they might have been better off today had they run as independents instead of seeking major party nominations. Doing so would have made more sense for Giuliani if he really did believe that Iowa and New Hampshire didn't matter and really wanted to reach the whole nation directly. In Edwards's case the media built a narrative around the Democratic race that excluded him, regardless of his merits. Thanks in part to the media, the Democratic party itself became a bipolarchy, putting Edwards in the position of a "hopeless" third party within his own party. In any event, for each man it was the media, not the majority of party primary voters, who pronounced the death sentence.

Realists can say that had Giuliani or Edwards run as independents, the media would have immediately ignored them. I'm not so sure. One man was the Mayor of 9-11, and the other was nearly elected Vice-President four years ago. Such people can't be so easily marginalized, or so I'd like to think. I'd also like to think that, the more viable personalities choose to stand outside the American Bipolarchy, the more the media would have to acknowledge that the Bipolarchy was crumbling. The Bipolarchy depends to a great extent on the media (and the two parties' ability to pay them) for its sense of exclusive legitimacy, but the media need not feel any reciprocal dependency. They can take anybody's money, as the system stands today, and they can tell a year's political story in any way that pays. If they thought they could prosper by preaching (or better, predicting) that the two-party system was falling apart, they would do it. This isn't to say that the media alone or any handful or rich insurgents could end the Bipolarchy, which also feeds on brand-name loyalty among the masses, but it'd certainly make a difference if the media said it could be done instead of saying it can't. People like Giuliani, given his standing a year ago, or Edwards, given his standing after 2004, might have given the media more reason to say that it can be done than Mike Bloomberg ever will this year. The fact that neither dared probably reflects the same lack of imagination, or maybe the same cowardice, that leads them now to leave the political stage.