A republic of couch potatoes:

...In 1888, President Grover Cleveland, who had survived considerable tarring four years earlier, faced smears and dis-tortions at least the equal of 1988...

...In 1884, the discovery that Graver Cleve-land apparently had fathered an illegitimate child provoked the response that such private failings, then as now the focus of media attention, are not the most important indices of political character, and Cleveland won the election...

...The affective distance between citizens and public life is great and growing...

...Moreover, contemporary voters are more exposed to and dependent on mass media...

...Despite prolonged campaigning, despite vast expenditure of' May be in which, in 1988, the two parties were virtually equal), despite Ae advice of experts and the easing of rules for voter registration, turnout fell-as it has, with the exception of the New Deal years, throughout this century...

...Cleveland, in fact, did not campaign at all, considering huckstering beneath the dignity of his office, and Benjamin Harrison's more active office-seeking was very limited by our standards...

...Even so, it had prece-dents...

...Progressive reformers, advocates of the primary system, were also inclined to celebrate the mass media, just as their successors urged a more responsible two-party system...

...Politics is dramaturgical: It asks us to step beyond the day-to-day, to see the present in the light of the possible, judging practice by theory...

...The ambassador, Mr...

...Information from national campaigns and leaders reached most voters only through local editors, leaders, and opinion makers who interpreted it and passed on its propriety and authenticity...

...Even pure quantities, like results of polls and elections, need to be interpreted in the light of momentum and expectations...

...This "demobi-lization" of the electorate is too profound and too persistent to be explained by the requirement of registration or other bar-riers to voting...

...Especially in a polity as diverse as the United States, political community is not a matter of outward semblance but of inward likeness, common ideas and ideals...

...The success of this strategy was evident in the media re-sponse to this year's presidential and vice-presidential de-bates...

...In the first place, the electronic media give greater force and currency to scurrilities, just as television makes innuendo visible: Blaine's attack on Cleveland's appointments had nothing like the im-pact of a glowering Willie Horton, illustrating Republican claims that Dukakis had been "soft on crime," or of pictures of garbage afloat in Boston harbor...

...The campaign was more than negative...

...In this sense, television almost necessarily distorts politics, since it is forced to visualize and personalize things that are impalpable or objective...

...American de-mocracy needs, and can stand, only so many stanzas of epic poetry...

...Even such limited goals, however, presume policy guided by a ruling principle, that middle term between repression and relativism whose better name is citizenship...

...In one respect, the breaking down of racial barriers to political participation, the process has been pure gain...

...After the first debate, the media pronounced the ex-change a draw, a defensible stance even if a plurality of viewers thought Dukakis had edged Bush...

...Parties and candidates, of course, struggle to control the process of interpretation, bypassing the press whenever possi-ble and controlling photo opportunities through carefully con-trived events...

...Always difficult, that command of rhetoric is harder to cultivate in a society as supersonic as ours, and the electronic media actually undermine the arts of speech and hearing...

...There was a mass press, but the great majority of news-papers were local, the voices and guardians of community...

...Changing channels is as easy as it is because national television has no organic relation to our lives...

...It demands an extended span of attention, the capacity for critical reflection, and that art of hearing that lets us separate meaning from its disguises...

...The "nationalization of the electorate" has been a major political theme of the century, the result of an effort to open politics to individual citizens, freeing them from the control of local elites...

...gatekeepers could not protect us when the fences had been trampled or pulled down...

...It was said that Cleveland was a dogmatic liberal (of the nineteenth-century variety) and the equivalent of a "secular humanist" because he was reported to have said, "I believe in free trade as I believe in the Protestant religion...

...Sackville-West, in-judiciously replied that Cleveland's free trade sympathies made him preferable, and Republicans exultantly portrayed Cleveland as unpatriotic and, especially in Irish wards, as the tool of British imperialism...

...more fearful of giving offense, they cultivate nonpartisanship and a professional neutrality...

...Ironically, the 1988 conference of the Communist party of the Soviet Union featured heated debate, resembling an old-style American party convention as much as the 1988 American conventions called to mind the traditional, totalitarian gather-ings of the Communist party...

...The older media, especially the local press, had a position that permitted them to offer "cue giving"-guidance as well as protection-and evaluation was an integral part of their report-ing...

...Yet media decision makers know that, while the power of the media as a whole is overawing, any single medium is vulnerable, its position still more precarious because media domination invites resentment...

...His former opponent, James G. Blaine, charged that Cleveland had appointed to office 137 convicted criminals, including two murderers, seven forgers, and several brothel keepers...

...It symbolizes the decline of speech that George Bush, admiring the refrain, made "Don't Worry, Be Happy "into a campaign song, either ignoring the words or trusting that American voters would not notice their very contrary lesson...

...This media bashing takes the form of asking for fair play or balanced treatment, but its real aim is to insulate a candidate-or a president-from criticism, Teflon-coating its beneficiaries...

...But television newsmen showed no reluctance to declare that Bush had won the second pres-idential debate...

...In 1988, the fraction of adult Americans who went to the polls was almost 20 percent lower than it was in 1960, when racial discrimination still kept masses of black Americans off the electoral rolls...

...Even John Chancel-lor's astonishing claim that Dan Quayle had done well, despite Lloyd Bentsen's one-sided victory, might be explained as a too-rigid refusal to take sides...

...Public life, increasingly, is mirroring the media's art...

...In 1988, the media spoke to more and more citizens directly, without intermediaries...

...Above all else, television is a visual medium, confined to what can be seen and hence to externalities...

...by blurring fantasy and reality so pervasively, television weakens reality's force and fantasy's charm...

...In the media's version of deliberation, citizens Ijave no voices...

...Contemporary politics calls for the more prosaic effort to protect and rebuild locality, association, and party, the links between private individuals and public goods...

...For both Republicans and Democrats, the election of 1988 indicates the need for a new civility, and for the kinds of word and deed necessary to affirm the dignity of self-government...

...In 1988' by con-trast, while Gary Hart's derelictions shattered his candidacy, voters did not appear to notice that, after all his years in the Senate, Hart was endorsed by only one incumbent Democratic senator...

...When they vote for president, voters must evaluate candidates, whose characters they know only super-ficially, for an office in which character is crucial...

...Traditional politics, like older forms of entertainment, drew citizens into public places...

...In those settings, private concerns are naturally uppermost, mak-ing it harder than usual-and it is always difficult-to appeal to public goods and goals...

...When events suit the medium, as in television's coverage of the southern civil rights movement, it speaks with unique power, but more often it is apt to be misleading, silly (Dukakis's tank ride), or mischievous...

...Law and technology have combined to create a centralized presidential politics dominated by national media and party committees...

...Great politics, like great theater, requires a special space, a precinct for its particu-lar sort of fantasy, from which we reemerge into everyday life...

...Cleveland was forced to deny the rumor that the president beat and abused her...

...a local newspaper or radio station is part of, and often indispensable to, the day-to-day life of a community, but there is no reason why I should prefer ABC to NBC or CBS...

...one cannot' 'talk back'' to a television set, and citizens can assert their dignity only by refusing to listen...

...In this implicit teaching, "real politics" is covert, a business for professionals that can be approached only through inside in-formation supplied by the media...

...In 1888, American politics was still dense with associa-tions, and for both parties, the presidential candidate was only the chief figure in a campaign made up of a myriad of local campaigns in states and wards...

...the media bring politics to individuals in private retreats...

...It was a year when civility "took it on the chin,'' one in which, on talk shows as in politics, nastiness "became a commodity" (Lena Williams, New York Times, December 18, 1988...

...The electronic media are more anxious to "resonate...

...The 1988 debates were question-and-answer sessions in which no comment could run longer than two minutes...

...More recently, Frank Skeffington, Edwin O'Connor's fiction-al mayor, spoke of politics as America's "greatest spectator sport," in which performers could, at least, rely on a critical mass of knowledgeable fans, but Skeffington was already sounding "the last hurrah...

...We lack the peer review that, in earlier years, was provided by party leaders and opinion makers.who controlled nominations and guided campaigns...

...So classical political theory, speech, not sight, is the most political of the faculties because it is in and through speech that we discover the bound-aries and terms of political community...

...At the most fundamental level, politics is about invisible things...

...Judgment by peers is yielding to an audition by the media, and private proprieties may now outweigh public vir-tues...

...Preoccupied with holding their audience, television pro-grammers shun anything that might bore us (the Republican argument, this year, against more than two presidential de-bates), a logic that tends toward the lowest common public denominator...

...Of course, a displeased viewer can also change chan-nels, but this " receiver control" is almost entirely negative, given the media's tendency toward a homogenized message...

...by pushing debate and decision offstage, it makes citizens even more dependent on the media to search what is said in public for clues to the real deliberations behind the scenes...

...Pretty thin at best...

...political life must find room for our diversities and our privacies, just as prudence must acknowledge the impact of technology and economic change...

...A political society can be symbolized-for example, by the flag, George Bush's talisman in 1988-but it cannot be seen...

...senator in Montana received about the same percentage of the vote as their party's nominee for president...

...America cannot be an ancient Gieekpolis or a homogeneous community...

...Similarly, both national conventions were transparently staged to avoid any appearance of conflict and to project optimism, harmony, and concern for "family values...

...Sight is our quickest sense, but it is also superficial, and the media's discontinuity of image and affect encourages emotional de-tachment, adaption rather than commitment...

...Inherently, the electronic media emphasize the private, self-protective, and individualistic side of American culture at the expense of citizenship and public life...

...In campaigns, as in voting, congressional and local elections are sharply distinct from the presidential con-test, so much so that it seemed anomalous, on election night, when candidates for governor and U.S...

...Almost the only pleasure of which an American has any idea," Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "is to take part in govern-ment and to discuss the part he has taken," and even women "listen to political harangues after their household labors...

...At the same time, the media are great concentrations of power, remote and distant "private governments" that decide who will speak to us and on what terms...

...A politics of the visible comes naturally to, and teaches us to be, a world of strangers...

...Even at its best, however, television reporting (and in-creasingly, all reporting) shies away from evaluating the sub-stance, or even the accuracy, of what is said in campaigns preferring to discuss the strategy and process of campaigning...

...Packaging," however, only redefines the role of the media...

...in 1960, Kennedy and Nixon began their debates with eight-minute opening statements...

...Portrayed as trivial or superficial, political events become lifeless and shallow, arguments for cynicism and indifference...

...In Cleveland's day, the press could still be described, in the terms Tocqueville used earlier, as a form of political associa-tion...

...Nevertheless, there is something new and alarming about the incivilities of the presidential campaign in 1988...

...Be that as it may, citizens are dependent on mass media for news and for the interpretation needed to make sense out of the bewildering ravelments of contemporary life...

...In 1988, for example, the Dukakis campaign, after beginning with relatively frequent press conferences, followed the Republicans' example in shielding the candidate from the press...

...Such distinctions hone and heighten experience...

...But poli-tical speech-and, especially, listening to poli-tical speech-is a skill and pleasure that must be learned...

...George Bush virtually began his campaign with a contrived face-off with Dan Rather, and he continued to fault the media's coverage of the election...

...Taken as a whole, these comments suggest that if the media did not approach Republican candidates "on bended knee''-Mark Hertsgaard's description of the Reagan years-they did bend over backward...

...A REPUBLIC OF COUCH POTATOES THE MEDIA SHRIVEL THE ELECTORATE WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS The election of 1988 sent an urgent signal that something is wrong with the political soul of American democracy...

...Nominally neutral, this emphasis on stratagems effectively tells citizens that the public side of politics-and, especially, those questions being argued-is of secondary importance...

...But in the 1980s, the figure has declined to ten seconds for all public figures...

...Better than the Democrats, the Republicans have understood that this desperate neutrality makes it easy to neutralize the media...

...In 1988, public speech seemed to be degenerating into shouted incivility, the tough talk of play-ground squabbles, at best a preface to politics...

...In the 1970s, the average "sound bite" allowed a public figure was fifteen to twenty seconds, and the president was given as much as a minute...

...Fairly consistently, Republican candidates criticize the media, appealing to the public's fear of hidden persuaders and joining its resentment of media power...

...It has become increasingly clear, however, that the grand design of the re-form tradition has failed...

...In Todd Gitlin's axiom, "As politics grows more professional, voting declines...

...Most notoriously, Matt Quay, the Republican boss of Penn-sylvania, engineered a scheme by which a Republican sup-porter, posing as a former British subject, wrote to the British ambassador asking which candidate would best advance Britain's interest...