SACRAMENTO, CA -- The political conventions are upon us. If recent surveys are correct, reruns of "The Dukes of Hazzard" will attract a larger audience than the conventions, as the peoples’ disaffection with politics
deepens. In 1920 H.L. Mencken asked the question that seems to be on the minds of more and more people today: "What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?"
The chattering class is in a full hand-wringing dither about the public’s declining interest in public affairs, and the likelihood is that the media will take note of this concern with a whole new level of supercilious coverage during the conventions.

Conventions bring out the very worst in the news media. The coverage is likely to resemble the Olympics, where
"human interest" feature stories outnumber the time spent televising actual sporting events. Then there are
all those TV "talking heads" who must be accommodated. Who wants to televise a convention speech when Al Hunt has Something Important To Say?

One reason viewers may turn off the conventions is that media coverage of conventions offers little more than
the conventional wisdom of the media. At the Republican convention, watch for lots of commentary about the GOP problem with the "gender gap," i.e. that fact that women voters prefer Democrats to Republicans. This is
one of those chestnuts of the conventional wisdom that is so widely repeated that its perversity is successfully obscured.

It used to be, 30 or 40 years ago, that men and women voted more or less alike, which meant that Democrats
enjoyed a majority among both men and women. But in the last 25 years, as Republicans have surged at all levels of government, male voters have broken against the Democratic Party by a large margin, while the women’s vote share has remained about the same. So who has the problem: Republicans or Democrats? It is a measure of media bias that the "gender gap" is regarded as a Republican problem, when it is merely the flip slide of Democratic Party deterioration. (And when it is realized that married women vote much more like men,
one can understand why the Democratic Party clings to the agenda of feminism. If too many women get married, the Democrats’ prospects will go down the drain.)

At the Democratic convention three weeks hence, watch for the media to spend lots of time talking about the
difficulty Vice President Gore faces in trying to emerge from Clinton’s shadow, how Gore can’t hope to match Clinton’s "style," and so forth. In other words, highly superficial. At both conventions, viewers will wait in vain for serious coverage, or side-by-side comparisons, of the stands on the issues that the parties are taking. And then the media will complain that the campaign is more about personalities than issues.

I’m going to watch on C-SPAN. It may be that Mencken was right when he wrote that most political convention speakers seem “plainly on furlough from some home for extinct volcanoes,” but that beats putting up with the
“bloviations” (another good Mencken noun) of Sam, Cokie, Tim, Dan, Peter, and Tom.

- By Steven Hayward