In the meantime, what a learning experience this election is proving to be. Who doesn't now know about the significance of "the suburban woman," or the "Walmart mom," or what a "four-point swing" is, or an "outlier poll," or a campaign "prebuttal" (a preemptive response to arguments not yet made), or how to judge Gallup's handiwork? Who couldn't go on and on about campaign 2012? Which, in fact, is just what's happening.
An Election That Outgrew Us All
Still, amid all the hoopla, money, and analysis, what exactly is it? I mean this thing we still call an "election," in which our temperatures are taken every 30 seconds, in which we are told that we have more or less voted every day for months on end, in which to keep up with events you need to read daily columns by a man who lives only to make sense of this morning's batch of polls.
What does it mean when the election season never ends, when 2016 is already gestating in the oversized body of 2012? What does it mean when a candidate must spend a startling proportion of his time glad-handing the wealthiest Americans just to keep the pump primed, the campaign rolling along? What does it mean that a "corporate strategist" -- a woman working for clients who want something from the White House -- prepares one of the candidates for the debates and helps plot his campaign strategy? What does it mean when the other's advisors are a walking, talking directory of lobbyists? What does it mean when you already know that the $2.5 billion presidential election of 2012 will be the $3.5 billion election of 2016?
What is to be made of a phenomenon that seems to be outgrowing us all, and every explanation we have for what it is? Yes, thanks only in part to the Supreme Court, this is distinctly a 1% election, but that hardly encompasses it. Yes, corporations and lobbyists are pouring their everything into it, but that can't really explain it all either. Yes, it's a profit center for media owners, but no one would claim that catches the essence of it. Yes, it's an entertainment spectacle, but is that really how you'd define it? And certainly it's an everything-the-market-can-bear version of an election campaign, but does that encompass it either?
It's certainly not your grandparents' election, and you may not understand it any better than I do. But if you've been worried about Big Government, why haven't you been worrying about Big Election, too?
The fact is: sometimes things outgrow all of us, even those who think they control them.
And here, to me, is the strangest thing: for all the trillions of words devoted to campaign 2012, no one even bothers to discuss its size. Americans may be willing to argue copiously about whether New York's Mayor Bloomberg should control the supersizing of soft drinks in his city, but not a peep is heard when it comes to the supersizing of the run for the presidency.
Under the circumstances, the slogan of ABC News seems either touchingly or mockingly silly: "Your Voice, Your Vote." Whatever this thing may be, it certainly has ever less to do with your individual voice or your individual vote. As Big Election becomes a way of life, democracy -- small "d" -- increasingly seems like a term from a lost time. If this is democracy, it's on steroids and on the Comedy Channel. It's our own Democratic Mockpocalypse.
I'd be the last person to claim I understand it. Still, I do know one thing: whatever it is, we're evidently going to pass right through this endless political season without stopping to take stock of our supersized political world.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, his history of the Cold War, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
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Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt
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