Dispatch #11

On Tuesday of last week, candidate Santorum terminated his hopeless and ill-conceived run on the Republican nomination.  His surprising three-state primary flare faded all too certainly, as did the equally brief lights of Donald Trump, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich before him. The GOP’s long, expensive, and rather dismal internecine contest is now over; in its place is promised a longer, more expensive, and equally dismal contest against President Obama and the Democratic Party.

For a number of reasons having to do with the expansion and diffusion of media in this country and a Supreme Court decision that effectively, essentially, and officially recognizes money as political speech, this race will be the most mediated, the most expensive, and probably the most trivial and vicious. (You don’t have to have a particularly meaningful message, only the financial means to message.) Unless you are entertained by such—and many in this country are, as by traffic accidents—it would be best, again, not to attend too closely to the give-and-take of this free-for-all. The electoral outcome, as I have stressed before, will have much less to do with the cheap shots, the errant tweets, mud-slinging, name-calling, put-downs, gaffes, gibes, labels, and the simplistic ideological values-mongering on both sides than with the trends in the unemployment rate, housing market, GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth, and the Dow (the stock exchange). Follow that money.