Ah, optimism. As Michael Kinsley points out in today’s Los Angeles Times, it’s “pretty insufficient as either a campaign promise or a governing principle,” a meaningless measure of qualification for high office. But optimism, it turns out, is infectious.
Need proof? Have a look at how the campaigns feed storylines about who’s the more optimistic candidate — and how the press, unthinkingly playing its role in an empty rhetorical debate, laps it up.
Both candidates have made quote-unquote optimism a talking point and an integral part of their stump speeches. The Bush team is running ads to portray the president as the sunny caretaker of morning in America, most recently through radio spots tailored to different states. One trumpets improving economic indicators and says that “Here in Nevada, things are looking up, too.” But what does Kerry have to say? “He’s still pessimistic,” the ad says, “on a misery tour talking about the days of malaise and the Great Depression.”
That link between Kerry and malaise (and, more subtly, Jimmy Carter) is popping up quite a bit lately. The White House Bulletin last week announced that Republican Party Chair Ed Gillespie was calling “on Congress to counter Kerry’s ‘malaise tour.'” One of the Bush team’s anti-Kerry ads is titled “Pessimism,” a storyline that the Washington Times was all to happy to pass along, with an article headlined “Bush Campaign Dons Optimistic Mantle; Says Kerry resorts to ‘Politics of Pessimism’ as Economy Improves.” Wire Service UPI was more direct, stating simply, “Bush is Optimistic About the U.S. Economy.” And the Associated Press, on June 15, had Bush knocking Kerry as looking for “something to be pessimistic about” in the first paragraph of its story and then asserting his own optimism in the second.
Of course, as Kinsley writes, “it’s a bit of a cheat” to make this distinction, since an incumbent wants to suggest that things are going well, and the challenger hopes people will believe they could be better, particularly with him in office. So, assuming that the American people blindly embrace optimism, Kerry’s at a disadvantage in the rhetorical back-and-forth. As such, he’s had to play defense, using “the word ‘dream’ seven times at an outdoor rally in Denver,” according to the Boston Globe. But Democrats are also trying to turn the tables. One of the Kerry campaign’s many dispatches, for example, was entitled “Americans Are Too Optimistic to Settle for George Bush’s Economy.” Sadly for Kerry, the press hasn’t really bitten on his line. Instead of pointing out the absurdity of the debate, the press is feeding off Bush’s paid media, in effect reinforcing the notion that Bush is sunny and Kerry is gloomy. Such coverage suggests Kerry is a pessimist for doing what all challengers do — saying that the country isn’t as good as it could be.
What should the press corps be doing instead? Kinsley gives us a good model: it begins with pointing out that this entire debate is ultimately meaningless. Alas, Kinsley’s piece appeared on the Op-Ed page, not inside the stories about the optimism rhetoric themselves, so the impact of the message is diminished. Unless beat reporters start refusing to play their parts in the kabuki theatre of manufactured conflict, the Bush team will, with the help of the press, paint Kerry as something out of the imagination of Edward Gorey.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.