[This is the second installment of my series The Wired Election, employing insights gained from HBO television series The Wire to interpret 2016 Presidential election campaign events, persons and states of affair. The cheese stands alone.]
Like many of my fellow web-citizens, I found myself doing a number of dramatic double-takes on Wednesday morning as I watched “news”-casters review the first Democratic Presidential debate of the previous evening. Almost unanimously and across the board, pundits unequivocally declared former Secretary of State and frontrunner Hillary Clinton the obvious #DemDebate winner. This, despite all evidence to the contrary as provided by almost every available metric for measuring viewers’ responses. There are serious problems with thinking about these debates in terms of “winners” and “losers”– I’ll get to that below– but the spin-cycled evaluations put forward by our Fourth Estate (the press), which is all but indistinguishable from the Second Estate (the aristocracy) these days, was truly dizzying.
Did they even watch the same debate I watched?
Let’s be clear: Senator Bernie Sanders was the strongest participant in and contributor to Tuesday night’s debate. By a country mile. The content of Sanders’ campaign leading up to #DemDebate all but set the agenda for that evening’s discussion, he remained consistently on point throughout, he offered thoughtful, at times even nuanced, replies to tough criticisms of his more controversial positions, and he presented his position through careful, considered arguments, rather than sloganeering sound-bites. All four of the other candidates, including and especially Clinton, were playing prevent defense.
Quality political debates ought not be structured as a series of soliloquies, as ours have been for at least the last 30+ years. They ought not be primarily personality-driven, as they perhaps always have been but even more so since the advent of television. I’m wiling to look past our preference for charismatic personae or truths-stated-simply, but not our deliberate disregard of sophistry and casuistry, both of which were on shameless display during Tuesday night’s debate. And I’m even less inclined to excuse the lazy elision of pundits and experts, sophists and judges, informed citizens and (m)ad men. The business, and quite often the livelihood, of the former of these is always to make the weaker argument seem stronger.
Persons don’t win or lose debates. Positions do. My intro Philosophy students understand that. Bernie Sanders understands that. What is eminently encouraging is that, by all available metrics, the people who watched the #DemDebate Tuesday night understood that. The rest of the candidates clearly do not.
So how in the world do we account for the pundits’ conclusion, pace vox populi, that Clinton “won”? As the wisest sage from The Wire (Lester Freemon) would tell us: FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Here is a list of the top donors to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The combined contributions of the first three on the list is roughly $1M. All of Clinton’s top 20 donors are either big banks, media conglomerates, Ivy League universities or law firms. Here is a list of Senator Bernie Sanders’ top donors. The combined contributions of the first three on the list is less than $50,000. The overwhelming majority of Sanders’ campaign funds have come from individuals donating less than $300.
The pundits’ evaluation that Clinton “won” the Democratic debate wasn’t the considered judgment of political experts. It was a BOUGHT AND PAID FOR opinion, delivered by bought and paid for yes-men and -women, distributed via bought and paid for media outlets, in what everyone is ever so slowly realizing is a bought and paid for election.
Here’s the lesson American voters should heed, now more than ever before, courtesy of Lester Freemon: FOLLOW THE MONEY. If you go after the drugs, you’re going to get drug addicts and drug dealers. So too, if you go after candidates’ emails, or their scandals, or their particular yes/no votes on particular issues, you’re always going to end up with imperfect moral and political agents acting imperfectly. But if you FOLLOW THE MONEY, you get to the inner workings of the machine, the structure in which candidates appear as the specific kind of moral and political agents they are, engaged in the specific kind of moral and political projects they engage. You get to the puppeteers, whose hands you’ll never find by looking up a candidate’s ass because moneymen and -women act remotely, indirectly, speculatively, like financial drone-operators, They have clean hands, full heart, and they don’t lose.
Follow the money, voters. You probably won’t be surprised where you end up.