Meerabelle Jesuthasan | Bad Television

You Speak English? | Why American elections are like Pretty Little Liars, but worse

By Meerabelle Jesuthasan 02/14/16 9:54pm

Remember when you stopped watching “Pretty Little Liars,” because the repetitive subplots and twists, no matter how exciting initially, just seemed to slow the whole thing down?

The United States presidential election, too, seems to elicit a feverish intensity lasting so long that its quality is compromised.

At this point, the long-lasting sensationalism of the American electoral process is taken for granted. It’s been almost a year since Ted Cruz announced he was running, and it will be another year before the results are announced.

This is absurd. In France, the presidential campaign is two weeks long. In Argentina, advertising starts 60 days before the election. In the United Kingdom, the campaign cycle in 2015 was about five months.

A lengthy campaign cycle is also what makes money the unspoken villain of American elections, simply because of the amount that is required to keep a candidate campaigning for such a stretch. This seems reason enough to question the length of election season, because what do American voters hate more than the omnipresence of money in politics?

Unlike most countries, the United States doesn’t set a concrete limit for the length of the campaign cycle. This has played a large part in shaping the nature of election campaigns today, especially in making them feel more and more like a standoff for who can spend the most money or make the most GIF-able impression. That is, it feels more like a spectacle than a democratic process.

On the other hand, it has been argued that the length of the American election season is advantageous because it gives candidates time to drop out via decline of public opinion — a hunger games via debate and media, if you will. But this is exactly what leads to a magnification of the personal, rather than the political.

Candidates know that the battle to win over American hearts and minds has a lot to do with likability. Public perception is obviously an important factor in elections worldwide, but it is amplified when so much time is spent on “getting to know” the candidates through an avalanche of campaigning. Eventually the involvement with candidates becomes so personal that voters are more invested in their personalities than in the issues at hand.

Thus, Donald Trump’s antics enjoyed a disproportionate amount of media time when Bernie Sanders was polling at similar numbers, while feminist discussion on Hillary Clinton has turned largely to the ethics of voting based on gender. Sanders supporters even managed to almost totally ignore his comments linking gun violence to mental health, despite the fact that the same demographic usually protests this common generalization.

Not to mention that, by this point, every candidate has descended to some level of meme-hood.

It’s almost an essential part of the election — laughing at Trump getting destroyed by Trevor Noah, memes of Sanders and Clinton discussing Star Trek or Jeb Bush fumbling at the podium. It’s all great entertainment. But great TV isn’t necessarily great politics.

Jokes are good and satire (in my opinion) is a crucial part of political discussion, but, at this point, the farce outweighs meaningful discussion.

Polls, a distinctly American phenomenon, are also complicit. They play a huge role in determining a candidate’s perception and are self exacerbating, even though not all polls are created equal. In the words of Harvard professor Jill Lepore, “when good polls drive bad polls they’re not so good anymore.”

But this doesn’t have to be the case. In many countries, the length of the campaign cycle is set in stone or the candidates’ ability to campaign through TV and radio is monitored. This is the case in France, often held as a positive counter to the U.S. system as it also has two elections rounds. These countries are also spending less money on campaigns.

Right now, though, the United States is running in a hamster wheel of tired analysis, looking at the same well-groomed personas, the marketed politics and the sensationalist outbursts. It may be “just politics,” although that is a counterintuitive interpretation of a process that takes up half a presidential term. And to many of us watching, the overblown fanfare sure seems a strange way to run a country.

MEERABELLE JESUTHASAN is a College freshman essentially from Singapore, studying English and Cognitive Science. Her email address is jesum@ sas.upenn.edu. “You Speak English?” usually appears every other Monday.

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