Watching Washington

In Politics, It's Not Too Late To Enter The Game

Right now quite a few people are getting interested in baseball, Wall Street and the presidential election. Possibly in that order.

Of course, some people are interested in all three, and some are utterly preoccupied with one of these subjects all the time. Indeed, whichever of these pursuits you spend time on, you will find hardcore types who do little else.

They are the participants in The Conversation, the incessant buzz about The Game, The Market or The Race. Disparate as the subjects may be, the stare and the addiction and the rapid-fire jargon are much the same.

Of course, you have seen the baseball version. They have their own fantasy teams that occupy their working and evening hours. There's a well-worn baseball cap somewhere in the office, and a gleam in the eye this month that's not been seen since pitchers and catchers reported to training camp in February. The BlackBerry is programmed for 15-second-refresh on a team Web site, where you can see each pitch to each hitter located relative to a graphic strike zone.

And you thought they were checking their e-mail...

Then there's the Wall Street equivalent, watching multiple screens ablaze with market measures and the performance of individual stocks. When not absorbed in this green glow, this person is very likely listening to talking heads discuss market moves and stock plays and what's happening to bonds in Brazil. The e-mail is full of tips. There is an online trading account number somewhere.

When this manic personality moves into political mode, it's still deep in the data. They're all about precincts and polls and past percentages of vote by race, gender, education and income. There are Web worlds devoted to fundraising, ads and blogs. You can move from link to link for days without ever leaving cyberspace. You are the campaign and the campaign is the world.

No, these obsessives are not average or typical or, to be blunt, entirely normal. They are junkies: professionals, semipros, devoted amateurs and constant observer-commenters who pounce on every new nugget of information as though it were food. They live among charts and graphs to keep track of the charts and graphs.

Ultimately, in all three fields, it's all about projecting human behavior. The basic belief is that if you can get enough hard data on what people have done before, you can predict what they will do next. And maybe you can, although most efforts to do so go awry (or fall short of their desired effect).

What is distressing in the political realm is that the self-contained world of The Conversation becomes more the focus for candidates, campaigners and media than the larger realm of the electorate or its issues and concerns. Voters, after all, are many and mysterious, contradictory and hard to pin down.

This time of year, you see people following baseball who usually don't. In July, they didn't know the wonder of the Tampa Bay Rays or the woes of the Detroit Tigers. But in late September they'll look up to see who's in the playoffs or going to the World Series.

For the markets right now, the broadening of the audience is not so much seasonal as crisis-driven. You see people's nerves twitch when someone says Wall Street. Once upon a time they did not even open that envelope that comes in the mail from their company's 401(k) manager. Now they're calculating just what each 100 points on the plummeting Dow may mean to their retirement date.

As for politics, our interest is about a season's end and a crisis that may be just beginning. People who otherwise need a war or a recession or a sex scandal to watch Washington news will perk up as the presidential election season nears its end. And as they turn in on schedule, they are finding a presidential contest far more significant than they might have presumed.

Voters may come to this election disillusioned with recent events and recent politics, deeply suspicious about both parties and largely unpersuaded by the candidates at hand.

And latecomers matter when it comes to elections in a way they do not in the worlds of baseball and high finance. Those who come to baseball late in the season are merely spectators who have nothing to do with the outcome. In the market, the distracted small-time investor may wake up in time to send a sell order, but the larger forces will remain beyond his apprehension.

Only in politics does the verdict of those who just showed up at game's end really matter. In fact, those who are just tuning in often break decisively for one candidate and determine the winner.

7:29 AM ET | 09-16-2008 | permalink

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