If Maine’s proposed property tax cap fails at the ballot box it won’t really be on the merits. Likewise for the referendum question to ban certain kinds of bear hunting. Even the presidential election, it appears, will turn not on the merits of the two candidates’ ideas for governing the country, but on how successfully they and their supporters have controlled the discussion.
“Hijacking” is the term for this phenomenon, and all politics, in our information-soaked age, turns on the ability of the warring camps to take command of the discussion, not to score debating points but to control the battlefield itself.
The tax cap is an excellent example. Comparing the merits of capping one revenue source in favor of another, or the fairness of this or that form of taxation, could have enlightened all of us. An understanding of taxation and how it works (or doesn’t work) is a critical piece of the democratic infrastructure. If we don’t know where and how we get the money to pay for the things we all need, how can we make intelligent decisions? But instead of enlightenment this fall, all we’ve gotten is fear. We’ve been told the schools will fail, that the lights will go off, that the police won’t come, that our houses will burn down. At the same time, we haven’t learned much about the effects a similar tax cap has had on California. The truth of the matter: in political campaigns, fear works. Nobody pays attention to dry discussions of fairness or good government or better ways to allocate the tax burden.
Bear baiting: as far as the campaign was concerned, better to call it voter-baiting. The TV images would lead you to believe that if we change the rules we’ll immediately be attacked by rampaging bruins. Public debates over wildlife management always produce more heat than light; we need to ban them.
As for the presidential campaign, from the Swift Boats to the National Guard, from Iraq votes in the Senate to “mission accomplished” – the entire battle has been for control of the field. A pattern has held true.