Music: The Year of the Loner

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Along with the computerized attitude study, the modern candidate often hires a top-flight image maker, who concocts an advertising campaign selling whatever he finds voters are buying. "The new Democratic chairman of New York is David Garth,' says Sidney Frigand, once an aide to former Mayor Abraham Beame. Garth is the campaign consultant who masterminded Governor Hugh Carey's victory, as well as several other Democratic campaigns.

Garth's Republican counterpart is John Deardourff, who worked unsuccessfully for Carey's opponent but helped win eight races in seven states. Deardourff estimates that television now claims 60% to 70% of most candidates' funds and that costs for such advertising time have escalated 50% in the past four years. "There is no better way to spend money," he says. Television lets candidates reach large numbers of people easily, but even Deardourff acknowledges that "it turns people into spectators rather than participants." This feeds voter lack of interest and contributes to the eroding of party affiliation.

Taken together, the money, the media, the managers and the computers may be turning American politics into a strangely lonely process. Candidates now buy what they need, pick their positions knowing in advance what is popular, and then spread those views widely on television and selectively by direct mail. Vanishing are the hosts of volunteers, the massive get-out-the-vote operations, and the need for help from established party organizations.

Fortunately, this wizardry doesn't always work. In Michigan, for example, Democrat Carl Levin was outspent 2 to 1 and was slightly more liberal than the computerized polls would have told him to be, but still won by almost 150,000 votes over two-term Incumbent Robert Griffin.