Mountains of money have turned election campaigns into advertising campaigns, where unarguable slogans -- "We need to teach children to read" -- are juxtaposed with images of the brand's men, sleeves rolled up, walking into the sunset to the crecendo of the 30-second spot. Democractic deliberation and judgment have been reduced to demographic preference, brands of candidates taking their place besides brands of cars, shoes, deodorant.

But big money isn't the only thing behind the poor quality of public discourse in our election campaigns. Networks' desires to predict the future and commentators' practices of telling citizens what to think rather than helping us form individual and collective judgments are equal culprits.

Motivated by the commercial pressures of reporting "breaking news," journalists' reliance on the misleading results of public opinion polls -- understanding random numbers as somehow "news" -- has removed the deliberations and judgments of the great majority of American citizens from election campaigns.

Where are we in all the prefabricated polling and manufactured drama? Even more this year than in the past, news coverage of the campaign consists largely of reporters interviewing commentators and pollsters, all trying to predict the future. Why should any citizen pay attention to the campaign, why talk to one's family, friends, neighbors and co-workers about the campaign and about the pressing public issues we need to face, when the outcome is determined by money and polls?

In order to count what percentage of fellow citizens think one thing or another at a particular moment, the subject is reduced and simplified into language that will accommodate binaries: "Are you for it or against it?" However, human reasoning about questions of value -- particularly questions of value that strike at the heart of our shared polity -- is not a matter of mere yeses and nos, zeros and ones.

Besides money and polls, "expert" commentators and other talking heads insist on telling people what to think rather than creating and then inviting citizens into public venues for making collective judgments about the candidates and about public issues on which the collective wisdom of the people is the only democratic remedy.

Presidential election campaigns reveal as do few other phenomena the state of our public discourse. And it appears from what this year's political discourse has to offer that the discussions and judgments of citizens have nearly disappeared from the campaign process.

Fantasize along with me for a moment: Imagine a candidate, rather than following like a sheep the dictates of interest groups, lobbies and polls, arguing that his campaign's views should be based on the issues "the people" think are important. How would he or she ever know what those truly "public" issues are?

In other words, if journalism and polling generally do as much to obscure as to illuminate the will of the public, where do we turn to know what is important to us as a people?

That's a great question, and I don't have an easy answer.

In addition to the studied inadequacies of television, commercial talk radio qualifies as entertainment more than deliberative discourse -- at best. At worst, talk radio turns public voices into demographic commodities to be bought and sold by corporate radio giants who don't care about the quality of public discourse in our city, state and nation. They care instead about the bottom line: making their stations profitable so that they might be sold to someone else.

Of course, by writing this, I am set apart from nearly all of my fellow citizens -- set apart because I refused to be a mere spectator in what passes for democracy anymore.

I'm writing to encourage my fellow citizens to become citizen critics and to reclaim our place in public discourse and deliberative democracy. I'm not sure how to tell you to do this. But any way is better than no way.

There aren't many places to find citizens' voices in public discourse today. If our democracy is to survive big money and opinion polling, we need a way for the ideas of citizen critics to be heard side by side with the talking heads and their crystal balls. Any ideas?

Eberly, associate professor of rhetoric at The University of Texas at Austin, is author of "Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres and The Elements of Reasoning."

© Copyright 2000 Austin American-Statesman

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