Kinsley: The coddled American voter

A mere week ago, the Rick Santorum boom seemed a distant possibility. In a Des Moines Register poll published the weekend before the Iowa caucuses, 41% of respondents said they weren’t sure whom they were going to support.

And these were people who expressed an intention to attend a caucus. Some of them had inclinations, certainly. But, like diners poring over the menu at a fancy restaurant, they might yet change their minds.

Indeed, if the polls are to be believed, many Iowa voters changed their preferences multiple times over the last few months. The electorate (to lower the tone of the metaphor) seemed to pick up one cantaloupe after another, always looking for perfection, never finding it, putting the melon back and reaching for another. The fruit that started at the bottom of the bin — Santorum — got a big squeeze at the end.

There is at least one difference, of course, between choosing what to eat from the bounty of this country and choosing among politicians clamoring for your vote: In the restaurant, or with cantaloupes, you are probably looking for the best among a variety of appealing options. At the caucuses, or in the voting booth, you are probably seeking the least objectionable among a group of undesirables.

At least that’s how Iowa Republican voters apparently saw it. To a non-Iowa non-Republican, it doesn’t look that way. It looks as if Iowa Republicans had an embarrassment of riches to choose from, including every variety of right-wing fruitcake, from libertarian through evangelical; every degree of Washington experience, from a former House speaker to a fellow who can’t remember the names of Cabinet departments he intends to eliminate; and all sorts of family values, from the candidate who took in 23 foster children to the one who has had three wives. All these options, sandwiched in the polls between two reasonably normal moderate Republicans — throwbacks to the days when primaries were a road test for candidates, looking for one who might win, rather than loyalty exams sponsored by the various tendencies of modern conservatism.

All of these candidates pushed their positions and arguments, and offered their physical presence, to the people of Iowa for the better part of a year. They spent tens of millions of dollars broadcasting their positions. Yet almost half of the Iowans who intended to participate in a caucus said, just a few days before the voting started, that they might still change their minds.

What more information could they need? What did they think might happen on Monday or Tuesday to clarify the choice for them? Why the furrowed brows, the pulled chins?

It was partly, I’d guess, a form of preening encouraged by political polls. Being undecided makes you seem interesting. Being decided makes you seem dull. You are no longer of any interest to the campaigns and candidates — even the candidate you support.

Is there any other democracy where the voters are as spoiled as they are in the United States? Especially, of course, in certain states, such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where the old joke is literally true about the citizens who say they haven’t yet formed an opinion about a candidate because they’ve only met the fellow a few times. But even voters in the rest of the country — if their votes have any relevance at all after the residents of Iowa and New Hampshire have their say — are coddled in many ways.

Consider just a couple. The conventions of political rhetoric in other nations don’t ordinarily require candidates to assure their audiences that they are the greatest people on Earth, or possibly the greatest people in all of history, as every politician seeking national office in the U.S. must. There have been nations, of course, whose politicians have used this kind of talk and meant it — often with tragic results.

I’m not worried about a slide into fascism. For Americans, all this talk of greatness is more of a tic or a habit than a guide to action. Still, it’s unattractive. The U.S. is a pretty great place, where billions of people around the globe would probably move in three seconds if they could. But the more we go on and on about this, the less true it is, and the harder it becomes to make it more true.

More generally, modern American politicians almost never use their campaign rhetoric to deliver bad news or to challenge the citizenry. Every problem we have — to the extent that such a wonderful nation as ours can have any problems — could be solved by a tax cut for you or a tax increase for someone else.

America’s problems today are not all that different from those of Europe. But the rhetoric is completely different. Chancellor Angela Merkel told Germans on New Year’s Eve that Europeans faced the “harshest test in decades.” And 2012, she said, “will no doubt be more difficult than 2011.”

“Austerity” is what every European politician says is necessary. Have any of this year’s Republican presidential candidates (save Ron Paul) used this word, except dismissively or with a sneer? Has President Obama? This is partly because of a legitimate debate in the U.S. about how much austerity is needed, if any. But if and when a dose is needed, the American politician will have a hard time administering it — and the American voter will be completely unprepared for the sting.

Michael Kinsley, a former editorial page editor of The Times, is a Bloomberg View columnist.