Everyone knows the upside of elections. They settle policy disputes, provide mandates to political parties and give voters the opportunity to have a part in those decisions.
All that is a given, but it is still a fact that the election cycle has produced many effects that are, well, simply maddening.
Here we are less than two months out from the election and a huge percentage of the media coverage is directed toward the one task for which the media have absolutely no qualifications: the prediction of the future.
It is hard enough to accurately state what has happened in a given situation. It is harder still to describe events that are ongoing or otherwise incomplete. Predicting the future, well, that is best left to witches and wizards.
Yet the media persist, speculating endlessly about the effects the personality and policies of President Bush will have on local contests or forecasting the exact makeup of the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives the day after the election. Will the Democrats pick up 12 seats in the House, or will it be 13?
If this torrent of guesswork isn’t enough to drive the average reader and viewer to distraction, a little complaining about how divisive the election has become should do the job.
Every time a candidate raises an issue, especially an issue on which there is manifest disagreement, he or she is accused of trying to “divide the voters.” This is insanity on a mass scale. Elections are, by definition, divisive. People don’t agree on much of anything, including abortion, gay rights, tax policy, the war in Iraq, or, for that matter, on whether professional football is ultimately a good thing.
If there is a time to drag out the meter to measure “divisiveness,” it is surely after the election, not before it.
As long as the debates remain nonviolent, the worry that the American people will be divided (of course they will) can be safely set aside.
The two complaints above are closely related to another one, and that is the excessive use of public opinion polls to fashion the political debate. This is not a new complaint, of course, but there are fresh reasons to raise it.
Monday’s Rocky Mountain News contained a poll that supposedly showed that almost two-thirds of Colorado voters want illegal immigrants to be given what has been called a path to citizenship. The story would have us believe that while immigration is the top issue for most voters, all they really want out of it is to let the millions who are here illegally become citizens. This is completely counterintuitive. People generally become concerned about an issue because the political system has failed to do something. For example, if crime is up, people want more arrests and more prisons. The idea that immigration became an urgent matter simply so more illegal immigrants could become citizens is nonsense.
So what’s wrong with the poll? And what’s wrong with the timing? The last question answers itself. It is clearly intended to alter the shape of the political discussion for the next couple of months. As to the first question, the answer is equally simple. The questions presented don’t fairly reflect the issue that is before the voters. Respondents had only three choices, each arguably impossible to implement. The first was a mass deportation of all illegal immigrants, as if anyone has seriously proposed that option. The second referred to a vague program in which they could stay and work but later have to go home. Exactly how they would be made to go home and how it would differ from mass deportation wasn’t explained. Finally, there was this artfully worded choice: “Allow illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. … and eventually become U.S. citizens, but only if they meet certain requirements such as paying taxes and learning English.”
Guess which of the three could be labeled the “right choice.”
What would the result have been if there were only two choices, amnesty or better enforcement?
That construction would be instantly criticized as being designed to produce a predictable result. The same, alas, can be said of the News poll.
It would be foolish to use the remaining lines in this column to call on the news media to stop the practices listed above. They won’t stop because, like any addict, they can’t. What can happen is that voters may simply pay little less attention to them. They should.
Al Knight of Fairplay (alknight@mindspring.com) is a former member of The Post’s editorial-page staff. His column appears on Wednesdays.
