What Races Lack in Substance, They Make Up for in Acrimony

With apologies to Richard Lewis, Election 2002 is becoming the Campaign From Hell.

Fans of the HBO sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm” will recall that Lewis, the comedian buddy of star Larry David, recently tried to claim authorship, in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations no less, of the phrase “The -- From Hell.” Much merriment ensued.

It’s been a little less jolly on the campaign trail. Most campaigns this year seem to be operating at two speeds: vicious and vacuous. Here in Texas, Republican Gov. Rick Perry and his Democratic challenger, banker Tony Sanchez, have been very specific in their personal allegations about each other -- and equally vague in their policy prescriptions for many of the state’s problems. It’s a formula evident in races everywhere.

What voters aren’t seeing are candidates, at least not in the flesh. Campaigns appear to be evolving beyond much actual campaigning. Exceptions endure, of course, but the typical candidate today does far fewer public events -- speeches at Rotary Clubs, visits to senior centers, sit-downs at schools -- than their counterparts a decade or two ago.

It’s good news for managing editors watching the campaign travel budgets of newspaper reporters, but not so terrific for everybody else. The chance for real voters -- or even for reporters, as their surrogates -- to push and prod and take the measure of office-seekers is eroding as candidates expose themselves to fewer uncontrolled situations.

Where are the politicians? Usually on the phone, raising money to buy television ads. In Iowa, Democrat Ann Hutchinson, who’s challenging Republican Rep. Jim Nussle in a House race, admits she spends more of her time raising money than on anything else.

As Hutchinson describes it, fund-raising is essentially her full-time job as a candidate; she squeezes in campaign appearances whenever there is a lull. Meanwhile, if you called Nussle’s office for his public schedule earlier this month, they might have directed you to an appearance two weeks away.

This pattern, visible in race after race, is the fulfillment of a dark prophecy that first surfaced in California. Back in the 1980s, Democratic media consultant Bob Shrum famously observed that “a campaign rally in California is three people around a television set.”

In that sense, like so many others, California has now conquered America. In too many races, television advertising isn’t just the centerpiece of the campaign; it is, for all intents and purposes, the entirety of the campaign. Fearful of stumbling “off message,” candidates let their TV ads do ever more of their talking, often in incendiary language that shades the truth. At this rate, it may not be long before somebody nominates a computer simulation for office.

Not that it has been that edifying when candidates step out from behind the TV screen. If there’s one common theme in state and federal races this year, it’s avoidance of confronting tough problems -- especially the budget squeeze facing governments at all levels.

At least 45 states are facing budget deficits. But the biggest deficit in state campaigns this year is in specifics from gubernatorial candidates about how they would close those shortfalls -- much less simultaneously fund the improvements in education and health care many are promising.

If anyone in California knows how Gov. Gray Davis or Republican Bill Simon Jr. would deal with the state’s looming budget deficit, they are telepathic. It’s no better in Texas. The latest estimates are that the state faces a budget shortfall next year of at least $5 billion, and possibly twice that.

But when asked at their debate last week in Houston how they would solve the problem, Sanchez volunteered only that he would scrub the budget for “waste and inefficiency,” while Perry insisted he has the experience to find a solution. The reporters questioning the two men probably had a better chance of convincing them to blurt out the PINs for their ATM cards than disclosing what they think it may take to balance the budget.

The reason for this reticence isn’t hard to see. Governors from Michigan to Maryland next year are looking at painful budget cuts, or tax increases, or both.

“The truth is, if you are looking at a $5-billion deficit, you are going to have to come up with some revenue measures or the cuts are going to be very draconian,” says retiring Democratic state Rep. Paul Sadler, the Texas Legislature’s leading expert on school finance. Few candidates have the nerve to tell voters that.

Candidates for the U.S. House and Senate have been just as evasive concerning the central domestic issue they’re debating this year: Social Security.

With the Dow nose-diving, Republicans have spent the fall in a semantic snit, insisting that their plans for restructuring Social Security should not be called privatization.

Far fewer have made it clear to voters that, under whatever name, they still want to expose Social Security to the risks and rewards of the markets by allowing workers to invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds.

Even fewer Republicans have acknowledged that the means President Bush once identified to fund those investments -- the surplus accumulating in the Social Security account before the baby boom generation retires -- is already being diverted to cover the massive federal budget deficits now projected during the next decade.

Democrats promise to save those surpluses for Social Security. But they have given no hint of how they might balance the budget -- much less fund exorbitant new promises such as a prescription drug benefit under Medicare -- without tapping Social Security money.

The only way that math can add up is to roll back Bush’s tax cut. But just the tiniest handful of Democrats want to say that. So the party is reduced to hoping that voters can’t count.

Here and there candidates are presenting voters with real choices. (Perry and Sanchez, for instance, have some good ideas on education.) But mostly, this year’s campaign is making it tougher for the eventual winners to solve the problems awaiting them.

It’s not hard to curb your enthusiasm about that.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/brownstein.