The Substance Gap

By Michael Kinsley

Are we through talking about John McCain's pleasant stroll through downtown Baghdad? Have we plumbed every angle of Mitt Romney's hunting experience? What effect will Fred Thompson have on Tommy Thompson, and vice versa? Where again does John Edwards get his haircuts?

Let's face it: this political campaign is suffering from a grist shortage. There just isn't enough good material for the media mills to process. That's why legitimate stories like McCain's Baghdad gaffe and Romney's hunting fib get pored over like the Kennedy assassination. It's why even the most implausible self-declared presidential candidate is not laughed offstage. It's why the ravings of Newt Gingrich are greeted respectfully.

The politicians are not to blame. They are saying things they regret at approximately the same rate as in the past. Just the other day, even after all that we have gone through over Imus, implausible presidential candidate Thompson, former Governor of Wisconsin, told a Jewish group that making money was part of the Jewish tradition. Thank you, Governor. Thanks to all the politicians. Ladies and gentlemen, keep it up.

But it's not enough. The problem isn't the supply of news. The problem is the demand for news. The news maw is expanding exponentially, and the news just can't keep up. It used to be almost a law of nature that a political story would expand to fill the media space available for its exposure. But that was before a couple of recent developments. One is the endless campaign. The day after every presidential election, the media take the pledge. They say, O.K., that's it. People deserve a break. Next time we are not going to let the presidential campaign start full-bore two years before the election. And every cycle the campaign starts earlier. This one has been going on for more than a year, with a year and a half still to go. Every day added to the length of the campaign is a day's worth of political stories that need to be conjured up or older stories that need to be stretched just a bit further, like adding water to the soup.

The other development contributing to the grist shortage is, of course, the Internet in general and blogs in particular. This is clearly the Blog Election: four years ago, blogs were not yet omnipresent, and four years from now, the mainstream media may not be as terrorized by them.

Blogs suck up news the way an Arizona lawn sucks up water. And it's not just blogs. The Internet has given power to everybody. My e-mail brings news that students at Andover, the prep school, are "launching a breakthrough website ... the first-ever student-run publication focused exclusively on the presidential race."

Great. Come on in, kids. Everyone is welcome. Just be prepared: for every half-decent political story from four or eight years ago, we need approximately 17 such stories today.

The grist shortage is pretty clearly responsible for the vastly increased emphasis being given this year to one story in particular: the so-called money primary. The first quarterly campaign-finance reports from the candidates were released recently, but leaks and rumors about how much has been raised by whom have been big news for at least a month. Obama almost tied Hillary! Romney did well by tapping prosperous Mormons! What's good about this material is that it is hard data allowing for objective comparisons among the candidates. It barely matters what the hard data are about. Could be freckles; happens to be dollars.

The ability to raise money has become an independent test of a candidate's prospects, completely apart from money's traditional role as a way to buy things. Candidates raise money not to purchase TV time and hire political consultants. They raise money to prove that they can raise money. All the major candidates have rejected federal subsidies in order to avoid the contribution limits that go with them. This includes McCain, whose name is on McCain-Feingold, the most recent failed attempt to curb money's role in politics. When the press started reporting that his campaign was in trouble, McCain hired a major corporate lobbyist as his finance chairman. The press approved. This showed that he was serious.

All of this parallels a development in the larger economy. For most people, the point of money is that you can buy things with it. But at the top, where people already can buy whatever they want, the purpose of money is keeping score: making sure that you don't slip down in the Forbes 400 list.

I have been waiting for the day when how much money a candidate raised would be a major issue in the campaign itself. I thought this might make campaign finance self-regulating: candidates would refrain from raising too much money for fear it would be held against them. Boy, did I get that one backward.