Hope's Renewal

This semester, with Bruce Barry, I’ve been team teaching a course called “Mass Mediated Politics: Images and Issues.”  The course, a version of which we taught four years ago, attempts to provide a critical look at elections through the eyes of media criticism.  Because we pack the course with a great number of guest lectures—from people who make political ads to pollsters to netroots activists to campaign mangers—I end up learning far a great deal more than I normally do when I teach.  I’m a fairly good media/rhetorical critic, to be sure, but I know very little about the actual practice of a campaign.

Four weeks into the semester, Barry and I have noticed an “emotional” pattern emerging in the class, a pattern we witnessed the last time we taught it as well.  The students—most of whom are political enthusiasts of some degree—began the course feeling very optimistic and bright eyed about electoral politics.  About this point in the semester, however, that feeling has taken something of a downward swing.  Where there was forward looking optimism, there is now disillusionment and pessimism.

As one guest speaker after another has explained the ways in which candidates are shaped and “controlled” (to a degree) by their campaigns, as well as the ways issues are “created” and brought to prominence, the students get more and more disillusioned.  As every seasoned veteran of big time political campaigns tells stories about how campaigns “really” work, the students go from thinking that politics is transparent to finding it misty and illusory.  It is as if their worst fears are being realized.  Politics, as they are coming to see it through the eyes of our speakers, is more a game of tactics and strategies than one of presenting the truth and having the best ideas win. 

And no matter how much I attempt to explain to students that they should see these campaigns as voting for broad ideas rather than for particular people or particular issues, the realization that candidates are not—and cannot be—transparent seems to alter the students’ perspective in a downward fashion.

I should be clear that I'm really only talking about what I imagine the students to be speaking.  And I do realize that I'm speaking in large generalities.  There are clearly students who have rarely ever felt "hopeful" about politics, and there are clearly students who remain optimistic.  So, I want to pause to be clear that I'm talking more about a general feeling of disillusionment than I am about its "truth"--I obviously don't know what the students are actually thinking or feeling.

While this disillusionment--to whatever degree it exists--certainly isn’t something to celebrate, there is an upsides we can take away from it.  I have found myself marveling at this:  the fact that the students are so disillusioned, so crestfallen, speaks to just how powerfully they hold a beautifully naïve set of ideas about the purity of the democratic process.  I swear:  if you’re near my age, you would—at least in part--find their disillusionment providing you with cause for a minor celebration that people their age continue to be so bright eyed about their politics.

And I’m not alone in this feeling, evidently.  Last week, one of our speakers was Roy Neel, a former Chief of Staff for Al Gore, Deputy Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, and the campaign manager for Howard Dean (he came in after Dean’s 2004 bid had imploded).  Neel was interesting throughout his talk, of course, although he, too, had elements which once again led students to the by now familiar expressions of disillusionment.  While Neel talked about the incredible work that Gore has continued to pursue after the bitterness of his presidential campaign, he also gave enough of any insider’s perspective of the political process that the students once again looked pained at just what a soiled process politics can be. 

It was the question and answer period which really changed things this week, however.  After a few historical and factual questions about the campaigns on which Neel had worked, one student asked Neel about the qualities that campaigns were looking for in potential employees.  After jokingly asking the student if she were looking for a job, Neel went into a very moving and spontaneous talk about what it was like to work on a political campaign.  While he certainly talked about the thrill of working for ideas that one believes in, he seemed especially taken with the energy one gets when working with 20-something campaign workers.  Neel noted that while working with young, energetic, idealistic people didn’t make him feel twenty again himself, it did make him feel 30 and full of hope and possibility. 

I was struck at this moment with the one in which the idealism of youth really does seem to drive the train of politics.  While raw power may lie in the hands of older and more manipulative cynics, there was clearly something about what “youth” brought to organizations that drove them, that made the “dirty” work easier to do, that made raw politics palatable.

And while I know it’s a cliché to observe that hope springs eternal, I for one am glad that it does.  For as long as the idealism of youth is renewed on the campaign trail, I have reason for hope myself.