On the face of it this NYT piece was merely a lighthearted look at how frivolous presidential campaigning has become. Given a moment's thought, however, it's the frivolousness that turns a light heart heavy. Are voters really idiots, or do leading contenders for the nation's top job simply regard them as such? One of the two must be true, and either way, it speaks poorly for any semblance of an engaged, enlightened democracy.
The article noted this p.r. trend on a definite upswing:
"Stealing a page from the Soviet playbook, the current crop of presidential candidates has taken to eliminating whole chapters of their histories.... There are always unpleasant facts, episodes or viewpoints that run counter to the public self a candidate is marketing. But one of the striking features of the 2008 campaigns is the pungency of the various elephants in the various rooms. Candidates are strenuously de-emphasizing or ignoring completely experiences that are defining and, in many cases, extremely well known."
Such as ...
"Senator John McCain ... almost never brings up campaign finance overhaul, perhaps his signature achievement in the Senate."
Mitt Romney "boasts that he was 'the Republican governor who turned around a Democratic state' and 'vetoed hundreds of spending appropriations.' But you would never know where.
"Still unspoken, for the most part is Mr. Giuliani’s delicate family situation. His campaign Web site includes nothing about his children, with whom he reportedly has strained relations.
"Didn’t John Edwards once run for vice president? Mr. Edwards, a Democrat and former senator from North Carolina, tends to erase his stint as What’s His Name’s running mate in 2004."
And "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's turbulent final years as first lady? While Mrs. Clinton, a New York Democrat, frequently invokes husband Bill on the stump, she has managed to avoid any mention of his impeachment and the unpleasantness leading to it."
Now as for Mrs. Clinton, she would have as much an obligation to campaign on her husband's impeachment and its related "unpleasantness" as Abraham Lincoln would have had in mentioning the fact that he once slept with a prostitute and thereafter lived in fear of syphilis and having spread it. Indeed, Hillary would have even less of an obligation than Abe, since she was hardly the one responsible for the unpleasantries. So that notation seems like a rather cheap shot.
But as for the others? Edwards was some sort of covert vice-presidential candidate? Giuliani's kids get "airbrushed," Stalin-style? Romney will confess the state he governed, but only when rubber hosed? And McCain obliterates "his signature achievement in the Senate" through fretful neglect?
All, of course, are the product of stage-managed timidity -- a politician's natural abhorrence of offending so much as one delicate voter with so much as one offending word, like "Massachusetts" -- itself a product of kowtowing to poll-driven, focus-grouped advisers who seem to believe voters' brains have yet to evolve from the Lower Paleolithic Age. But what does that say about these candidates who regularly declare the need for, and their possession of, intrepid forthrightness in this nervous age of national drift?
On the other hand, perhaps the advisers are right. Perhaps the great majority of voters drag their knuckles to the polls. Perhaps if Rudy never mentions his kids the electorate will never know he can't even keep his family together, let alone the country; and perhaps the electorate will idealize Edwards for having labored only as a soup-kitchen volunteer since 2004.
Either way, the accelerating trend of selective omissions from presidential resumes and voters' apparent acceptance of it doesn't bode well for a vigorously inclusive "national debate" this year and next. And if the least forthright candidate wins, it'll bode even less well for 2012 and beyond. Then we can chalk up the further advance of plastic democracy.