“Mr Burns, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?” So asked an exasperated Lisa Simpson, wannabe journalist, in season two of the series that famously bears her name.

Of course, young Lisa was being manipulated by a power drunk zealot fixated on controlling his campaign message. And at times in this election campaign, life has imitated art—the mainstream media have wholeheartedly embraced the Dorothy-Dixer school of cuddly questioning with nary a concern for the real task of sending the candidates sprawling.

The so-called Obama ‘love-fest’, while hardly reaching the hysteria claimed by the killjoys at Fox News, was still evident—in the heady days of spring, the nation’s glossies one-upped each other to produce the puffiest puff piece possible.

The Sarah Palin Show enjoyed a good two weeks of barely-concealed hyperbole before an unlikely sniper in Katie Couric called her bluff on McCain’s historic obsession with scorched-earth deregulation. Even so, the hockey-mom myth hangs on, just, for now.

But maybe the superficial media storm is understandable. What’s left to report on when both campaigns are empty shells, detached from any kind of social base needed to give content to their message and drive real political change?

In an earlier era (let’s call it ‘Industrial Society’), voting allegiances were obvious, to commentators and citizens alike. Workers, especially the beneficiaries of the Post-War manufacturing boom, broadly aligned themselves with something called ‘labour’, which exerted collective pressure on state institutions in the name of progressive reform. The other group, ‘capital’, knew they were on a hiding to nothing if they ignored labor’s demands. So they struck a dirty compromise with the federal government. Under the terms of this deal, capital would accept a high-wage, high-tax economy in exchange for tariff protection and domestic subsidies. The result was the ‘virtuous circle’ of white bread Keynesianism and its symptom—Wonder Years¬¬-style suburbanization.

For labor, it was culturally and economically obvious that its interests aligned with trade unions and the Democratic Party that funneled its concerns. That consensus has now disintegrated. An orthodox culture based around work has fragmented into a thousand sub-cultures and personal prevarications. The economic consensus has been long-hijacked by global competition and rapid technological change. As a result, the Obama ‘movement’ is a mish-mash of washed-up hippies, identity-fixated groupies and that most-pernicious of groups, campus-based Facebook activists.

The McCain/Palin ‘base’ is also unraveling. The coalition of red state cultural conservatives and Wall Street financiers masterminded by Reagan is finally, after 25-years, fraying at the seams. As foreclosures accelerate and temporary work takes hold, the old deal of voting against your economic self-interest to head-off abortion and gay marriage is starting to look decidedly less attractive.

The failure, for both sides, is an inability to tap into the wholesale cultural shifts that have created a strikingly different post-industrial society divided by abstract global financial flows on the one hand and cultural homogeneity on the other. The result is partial, scrapping, middling appeals to short-term prejudice and non-specific ‘change’ coupled with old-style messages that fail to cut through. No wonder the media’s failing to dig deeply—in a virtual campaign divorced from real experience, the most rational response is to kick back and enjoy the ride.

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.