There was something missing in the coverage of the most recent presidential campaign—policy. The major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted only 32 minutes of airtime to policy issues from the start of 2016 until late October according to the Tyndall Report:
No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates’ terms, not on the networks’ initiative.
If you had doubts that Donald Trump as president will be a total disaster, this should should remove them: “Rumsfeld says he’ll ‘clearly’ vote for Trump, calls him ‘known unknown’.”
There is a passionate debate as to whether Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz should be replaced. This debate focuses on three main points: did Wasserman Schultz show favoritism towards Secretary Clinton, has she been biased against Senator Sanders, and can Wasserman Schultz unify the party? However, neither of the preceding points are the most important criteria for evaluating the Chairwoman’s performance as head of the DNC.
And as people focus more closely on this race, they will surely come to recognize that Trump is not a generic Republican candidate but rather an unscrupulous and vulgar narcissist, a pathological liar, a bigot and a xenophobe. That will overwhelm what any model would predict. Because, in the end, we do think.
During Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to him, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” And he answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”
We can only hope that Fareed Zakaria is right and Adlai Stevenson is wrong.