August 22, 2008 12:29 PM

What Does Presidentialism Look Like?

I've gotten some email today about my column in the Denver Post about the concept of "presidentialism" - ie. the obsession with presidential election politics to the exclusion of all else. People are asking me whether presidentialism is as pronounced as Vanderbilt professor Dana Nelson's new book makes it out to be - and what it looks like in practice. To answer those queries, I present to you the above graphic, juxtaposing two pages of the Denver Post, where my column runs every week.

As you can see on the left, most of the entire front page is taken up with presidentialism - specifically, speculation about who one candidate might choose for vice-president - an office that has almost zero power or impact on ordinary people's lives. Now take a look at the right side where there's an image of page 7A. Right, you see it there if you squint hard enough - a tiny AP story headlined " U.S., Iraq Negotiate Gradual Pullout" about a potential end to the war in Iraq, wedged next to a Dillard's ad.

Mind you, I'm not at all trying to pick on the Post (in fact, the paper's coverage of serious issues like energy and water has been far better than most, and you could argue that with the Democratic convention coming to Denver, the paper has a reason to focus on the presidential hullabaloo - and also, in this same paper, they ran my column questioning presidentialism). This is merely a mundane example of a much broader phenomenon that all of us are part of. I checked around other media today and found that many major dailies (for instance, Boston Globe, Detroit News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Columbus Dispatch and Columbia State) made little or no mention of the potential end to the longest and most expensive war in American history among others, but carried stories about the latest presidential gossip.

But as I said in my column, the media is just as much a reflection of presidentialism as a manufacturer of it in our culture. Politics has been celebrified to the point where everyone from bloggers to activists to regular voting citizens see the American Idol quality of a presidential campaign as more important than the actual issues that campaign is supposed to be about. We are left to believe that the only thing that matters in American democracy is the White House horse race - and what a travesty that line of thinking really is.