Dr. Freud, What Do Voters Want?
Our neurotic presidential campaign.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, December 27, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Where is Sigmund Freud when we finally need him? This is the fellow who famously asked: What do women want? He could have put his skills to better use answering a more difficult question: What do American voters want?
Democrats purport "satisfaction" with their candidates, even as the recent FOX News poll put Sen. Clinton's "unfavorables" at 49%. This comports with the discomfiture with her that one routinely hears, sotto voce, from many Democrats.
Republicans, though, seem especially in need of a long talk on a flat couch. So let's put them there.
They have seven candidates running for president--including a former big-city mayor who revived his city after 9/11, two former governors, an admired former senator from central casting, a senator of deep experience who is a certified war hero and a libertarian with a medical degree. Most of these men have been running for nearly a year and still the average GOP voter is telling pollsters: I'm not happy.
What do these voters want?
On the basis of talks with many voters the past year, it's evident that what a lot want is whichever candidate will crush the other side's candidate. The presidency itself? A second-level concern to be worked out after the more emotionally satisfying act of stomping the other party. Some pollster should ask: Basically, do you just want to win?
This is the Devil's Deal Option. It's not the most inspiring way to think about politics. It does not beget a good mood. One must wrestle with the guilty conscience that will arrive like a subpoena after the devil puts his candidate in the Oval Office.
But let's think higher. Perhaps our angst-ridden voters just want the "best man" for the job. This, too, is the road to neurosis. The Best Man is a mythical beast. Doesn't exist. Voters the length of our history have claimed they saw the best man, just over the horizon. Wrong.
Recalling Freud's original question, the best man never seems to show up. Fred Thompson was the "best man." Until he ran. The politicians themselves understand that the presidency has become a random walk. This is why Joe Biden and Chris Dodd are running against all odds. Why not me? It must kill them that Mike Huckabee is the one winning the why-not-me lottery this cycle. For doing what? At this point, both Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee were a wash in terms of presidential qualifications. Once across the White House threshold, Bill Clinton couldn't be dislodged for two terms.
Whatever they want, GOP voters at the moment don't seem able to get it. It's possible that Republicans, more prone than Democrats to cite the allure of principle, simply have high standards in the picking of presidents. A better bet, though, is that we have imposed on ourselves a very hard system for choosing presidents.
The Constitution is no help. It abandoned us at election time long ago. Beyond the simple qualifications listed in Article II, Section 1 (it assumes, for instance, that by age 35, a person is mature), the Founders saw no reason to offer a guide to getting a president. Ever since, they and we have had to improvise an election process. However eminent the Founders were, their national politics was incomparably more brutish than ours. They fought duels. We hold primaries, a whole lot of them. Obviously over time, efficiency has suffered.
The irony of our electoral unhappiness is impossible to miss: As the gross tonnage of politics rises, so too does public disenchantment.
After nearly a year of campaigning by these Republican and Democratic candidates, we ought to know more about them than any voter could have known 200 years ago, when news traveled by the week. There have been umpteen nationally televised debates. Each candidate running for the presidency has a squad of e-wired political reporters running alongside, connected to cell phones and laptops. The Internet is a white river of news, opinion and background information about each candidate. And we're blue.
The nasty paradox of the modern, data-dumped media age is this: The more we know, the less we know. Weirdly, in a world of total data, people barely know what they want from politics--for themselves, for the country or the presidency.
Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair on his way out of office identified a truism for our times: With the rise of the Web, judgment has fallen because less time is available to think. So one was struck during Sen. John McCain's visit to the Journal editorial page a few weeks ago, when he remarked that campaigns aren't adjusted day to day now, but "hour to hour."
It may be that a Web-stoked media has demoted the office of the presidency itself as an animating idea and elevated the mechanics, the sport, of elections. The unpopularity of the Bush presidency aside, note how a presidential election, now entering its second year, has become a national obsession, which like most obsessions tends to induce disappointment.
We are passing through a largely ideological age, exacerbated by the Web on the left and right. The left doesn't want to do politics with the other side but merely wants to eliminate it, and then run the country. The religious right, by and large, mainly wants someone to pay attention to them and acknowledge their legitimacy. None of this has much to do with finding a candidate who will make more right than wrong calls during four years in the Oval Office.
It may well be that, as so often before, voters starting in Iowa next week will in the aggregate find the right reasons to choose the winner in November. Little wonder, though, that their mood is sour. More than ever, the electorate is being ill-served, and knows it.
The one thing that a globalized media has allowed people to see is that the stakes are large--Russia, China, infectious diseases originating in faraway places, terrorism's many addresses, the shameful images of Darfur, the dollar in decline, a Congress in which there is next-to-no confidence. Amid this comes a campaign running 24/7 unto eternity, even as people madden themselves trying to penetrate deeply enough to get a fix on the candidates and make the right call on the presidency.
Freud also said, "Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity." In American politics, ambiguity is all you get. Our voters are not neurotic. They are just deeply annoyed.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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