The Banality of Punditry

Columnist Noel Whelan is fond of referring to that wonderful and already much missed TV drama West Wing. In his last column for the Irish Examiner he referred to President-elect Santos’s effort to get CJ Cregg to stay on and work for the new administration because of her “institutional memory” and made a comparison between outgoing Chief of Staff and veteran Labour Party official, Pat Magnier, who had just retired.

The latter had given a TV interview and had signalled that the outcome of the next election could mean that a FF-Labour coalition would have to be considered. This piece of blindingly obvious speculation was treated as if it was highly significant and Whelan made a 1200 word article out of it.

In today’s Irish Times Whelan quotes the mercurial strategist Josh Lyman who makes the point at one strategy meeting that although people think election campaigns are about competing answers to the questions, they are not - elections are about a competition for the question itself. This is more of the bleedin’ obvious; agenda setting theory and framing have been written about by political communication scholars for some time. What I found attractive about West Wing was that it was about a group of people who were drawn together on the basis of conviction. It wasn’t all about being attracted to power for its own sake but about what one could do for the causes one supported while actually operating the levers of power. The programme was a very sophisticated treatment of the opportunities and constraints of power.

The race between Matt Santos and Arnie Vinnick was as much about the clash of deep convictions as about tactics and strategy of the campaign. The trouble with most coverage of Irish politics is that it’s all about the horse race. Typical of this coverage are two pieces in today’s papers that give end of Dáil term reports about the state of the parties. In fairness it’s not all the fault of punditry when there’s very little conviction politics in evidence. Fianna Fáil exists solely as a party of government but what of the opposition? My biggest fear is that the Magnier scenario could turn out to be true. Rabbitte has evinced serious conviction about the Rainbow alternative and wanting to put Fianna Fáil out of office. But where’s the policy beef in all of this? Clarity of choice must be about more than who is to be Taoiseach.