Short-Circuiting the Primaries

Arnold did it first. By a total accident of the recall process in California, he managed to skip the Republican primary process. He would never have gotten the nod from the dead-right enders who control the party there anyway. He didn’t plan it that way, but he has shown the way.

The hard right controls the Republican Party and thus the primaries. So if you want to run for State or Federal office, you’ve got to appease them by kow-towing to their anti-libertarian, private-life intrusive, foreign-adventristic, big-government spending policies.

The hard left controls the Democratic Party and thus the primaries. So if you want to run for State or Federal office, you’ve got to appease them by kow-towing to their anti-libertarian, private life libertinian, isolationist, big-government regulatory policies.

In other words, there is no middle ground in public discourse anymore. You can’t be a social liberal (let people ruin their own lives), mildly regulatory (no corporate cheating or energy market manipulations allowed), balanced budget, foreign multilateralist…. basically any mix that lands you in the middle, where the sensible, silent majority of Americans actually are.

Arnold accidentally showed a new way: Skip over the landmines…the debates you get caught in, the primaries you squander money and get forced to pander to extremists. Sell yourself directly to the people without getting hung up in the “filter.”

The unintended consequence of coining a telling term will now come back to haunt the Bushies who thought it up. The media is a filter. But so are the Byzantine ways parties chose their candidates.

Where primaries and debates once helped us form opinions and participate in choosing candidates, now they force candidates to take black and white positions in an all gray world. To talk of things better left unsaid (like how all the resources in a society must be rationed, and how certain foreign players must be dealt with in decidedly undemocratic black-ops ways). The stuff that politics is made of, in other words, that makes politics not the same as morality…or even ethics. The law, for example, is about what is legal, not about what is just (maybe that’s why lady justice wears that blindfold).

Point is, now we have two Democratic challengers, Lieberman and Clarke, skipping the Iowa caucuses to save their money and time for states where they can win, like New Hampshire and South Carolina. They would have lost anyway, and no one likes a loser.

So they follow in the accidental strategic footsteps of Arnold, who skipped a bunch of chaotic debates and launched an ad campaign, vs. a political one. And won a governorship both by appealing directly to the people and promoting himself in the most appealing possible light.

Put simply, politicians are learning that it’s best to bypass not just the filter of “the media” but also the filter of “the party.”

Will this be good or bad for American? I haven’t the slightest. In some measure it is the result of the change in technology. Everyone can be reached directly with a message now. The only reason now for the filters is that they are “preferred” by the audience (like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, an ad gimmick). In other words, I believe ABC and choose to watch it first rather than just Googling some issue and reading a blogger vs. Ted Koppel. But that can change in a heartbeat.

Politics, like “legit” media, is now being what the experts call disintermediated (getting rid of the middle man). I vote for candidates from a major party now because they’ve promoted themselves and are on the ballot. But we are moving to a time when the Internet and other forms of direct marketing will enable anyone with a modest base of support to run for any office. And this change may prove unstoppable. (Watch for a move to end the Electoral College as a sign that the end of representative democracy is near.)

What is the consequence of this more direct form of democracy? Well Arnold is governor of California now. And Howard Dean has raised more money than his party-supported rivals and President Bush is skipping over the media filter to report the news from Iraq and the economy as he sees it.

Thing about direct democracy is that it can swing a bit more extremely. That’s what happens when you get to be the judge. (The French revolution does spring to mind, but I’ll hope for a kinder, gentler impact this time.)

However it unfolds, though, the trend seems clear. We are going to find out what a world without “filters,” so longed for both by politicians and firebrands, will actually look like. May I be the first to wish us all good luck? ¶ 8:25 AM