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Taking a long view of presidential elections
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
A week after Barack Obama’s clinching of the Democratic nomination ushered in the beginning of the general presidential campaign, a UB faculty member offered a historical perspective on presidential elections and asked whether they’ve fallen short of the lofty ideals most Americans have come to expect.
James Gardner, Joseph W. Belluck and Laura L. Aswad Professor of Civil Justice in the UB Law School, provided a review of the average citizen’s role in presidential elections from the nation’s founding to the present as part of a UBThisSummer lecture yesterday entitled “What Are Campaigns For?”
“Dissatisfaction with [presidential] campaigns, it seems to me, is persistent and quite widespread, ” said Gardner, pointing to the common criticisms that campaigns are lacking in thoughtfulness, deliberation, depth and rationality—not to mention too driven by image and personality.
“But the question we like to ask in the Law School is: compared to what?” he added. “If we’re saying something’s not good enough, then what is the standard to which we’re comparing it? What is the standard to which we’ve falling short in our campaigns?”
Even a superficial glance at the voting system of the 18th century reveals practices that would be seen as grossly unfair by today’s standards, Gardner said, noting that every citizen now has the right to vote for the candidate of his or her choice in secret and free from the influence of persuasive practices. But during the 1700s, voting was limited to an elite upper-class of white male landowners and ballots were cast in the public square, frequently by less wealthy farmers whose livelihood might depend on one of the men running for office—men who also were of the opinion that revealing their political opinions and seeking votes before an election were signs of ambition and bias unbecoming a gentlemen.
“The modern ideal campaign would have seemed absurd—and maybe even alarming—to Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries,” Gardner said, noting that a true democratic system in which everyone was free to participate once was seen as little more than “mob rule.” In fact, he pointed out, senators were not elected by the people but by state legislators until 1913, and presidential candidates still are put into office based on the results of the Electoral College, not the popular vote.
Furthermore, Gardner explained that massive voter turnout, avid devotion to political parties and enormous crowds at political speeches and rallies—all of which characterized presidential campaigns in the 19th century—were not signs of a “golden age” in American politics, as some have suggested. Rather, he said, all the other elements of “political hoopla”—including picnics, parades, fireworks, religious revivals, freak shows and the curious practice of rolling giant leather balls emblazoned with various party symbols across the country—simply suggest that political campaigns were one of the more important forms of public entertainment during the 1800s.
“Politics was the best show in town,” he said, also citing the widespread practice of political agents using bribes and alcohol to coerce voters at the polls—as well as the era’s high rate of illiteracy—as further evidence that much of the 19th century fell far short of our modern ideals concerning political campaigns.
It wasn’t until the rise of a movement known as progressivism in the 1880s that Gardner said Americans began forming what has become our current conception of politics and political campaigns. The tenets of this movement include the idea that politics is about achieving the public good—even if it’s sometimes at the expense of individual interests—as well as that the average citizen has an obligation to be informed on the issues. He also noted that progressivism helped usher in the practice of the secret ballot and elevate the status of independent voters to respectability.
But while the opinion of the average voter—as well as the rhetoric of the Supreme Court—seems to uphold the modern ideal that political campaigns are a platform from which politicians can communicate their views and introduce new ideas to the public, Gardner said legal decisions on such subjects as campaign finance reform and ballot access suggest that minor parties are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to getting on the ballot and earning public financial support for their campaigns. Most states require minor political parties to acquire thousands of signatures to even get their names on the ballot, for example, plus make a far smaller amount of public funds available to help fuel their campaigns, he said.
But while this illustrates that “the laws that structure our campaigns undercut our political ideals,” Gardner also argued that “these ideals are probably unattainable” since the most Americans’ opinions are influenced more by what they experience every day than by the rhetoric they encounter in a presidential election campaign.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t need to worry, but we need to worry about something else,” he said, “and that’s how people form their political opinions outside the campaign—think tanks, talk radio, they’re constantly influencing people’s political opinions—so it seems to me that we need to worry much more about inequality of access to the tools of communication and the concentration of mass media ownership.”