Inevitable

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Tired

As Sean Quinn over at FiveThirtyEight acknowledges, we're all tired. While he and his photographer drove all over the country making electoral reports, all we did was knock on a few doors and stand like a statue at a polling place. But it's not the physical nature of the election that has us all tuckered out, though I am suffering from a decided lack of sleep.

It's the end of a long election season, and an end that was dramatic in its results and symbolism but almost completely without drama in its progression during the evening, especially after the first few battlegrounds were called for Obama. Last night as I was scanning election results on my office computer and checking out the campus broadcast of CNN, I was struck by how little happened after Pennsylvania and Ohio were called. So little in fact, that I actually got some work done while waiting. At ten, I looked more closely at the Florida and Virginia numbers and realized that with urban areas in Virginia reporting a little more slowly than rural areas and Obama building a larger lead in Florida, that the networks seemed to be deliberately slow feeding us results.

I called Miles in Virginia and suggested as much, and that a call of the election would happen at 11. It did.

Those I talked to today were unanimous in their recognition of the evening as historic and the quality of both McCain's concession and Obama's acceptance. But they were also surprised how quickly and easily the election seemed to go during the night itself.

We had rewritten our expectations of what elections were supposed to be--we saw them as inherent lingering dramas, a contention boosted by the length of our this campaign but especially our experiences in 2000 and 2004.  In other words, we made the signified of the election signifier as a stable instability instead of its more likely interpretation of unpredictable. Or in English, we thought the drama of election night would match the drama of the last year. It didn't.

--J.S.

Meta-debate

What's so interesting about both the debates and the campaign is its meta-ness and performantive aspects. We know from history that content and visual performance do not always agree--the crucial debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, where television viewers thought Kennedy won and radio listeners thought Nixon did is the most prominent example. But with the growth of so many forms of criticism and the addition of so many pundits on television and on the Internet is that performance--and its resulting commentary--have become especially prominent.

Focusing on performance in some ways more accurately mimics the way we often choose our political candidates; certainly some voters focus as much on personality and demeanor as they do on issues.*

While the media focus on performance has increased over the last few election cycles, a new somewhat mitigating factor has also arisen.

Metaness.

By metaness I mean a focus on the process of commentary as well as the commentary itself, Metaness is often a form of transparency in that we understand the process by which information reaches us. If we are open about the way media cover candidates, we are more likely to get at a truth than by simply listening, watching, or reading straight journalism. Check out this video from Time.com--it's all about how the story is being told rather than the issues of the candidates. Political Internet journalism and blogs tend to be at the forefront of this, but I've noticed the post-debate coverage on the networks to be much more meta than in the past.

Indeed, this campaign has shown the full flowering of meta-commentary, both on the right and left, on television and on the Internet, and everywhere in between. Pundits and writers are focusing not only on the policies and performances of Barack Obama and John McCain but also on the way media is bringing that information to its audiences. Sometimes that coverage eclipses the actual content generated by the two  candidates, leading to the idea that the candidates do not have ideas, a decidedly negative result. But at the same time, metaness acts as a mitigating filter, letting audiences know the ways media and political campaigns are giving them information.

Of course, that's what this blog is about too; we think the signs and symbols of the campaign are a crucial part in understanding the messages behind the messages.

That's not to say of course that issues are not important; obviously, they are the most important aspect of a campaign. But at least the coverage of the coverage of the campaign has caught up with the implicit focus on non-issues in the election.

Comments? I'm still working through some of the ideas behind this...

--J.S.

*If you want to know the positions of the candidates, the worst place to find it is in network news coverage and the best is on the campaigns' websites. The debates are somewhere in the middle.