As many of you know, in addition to writing my column for The Hill I also run a website called Talking Points Memo.

And as the campaign heats up, like every other editor of a publication, I do my best to strike just the right balance in our political coverage. But one thing I sometimes hear from readers is the complaint that we’re focusing too much on the campaign “horse race” and not enough on the “issues.” It’s a complaint one hears so often — not just of blogs but of network news, cable, papers like the Hill and every other media outlet providing campaign coverage — that it’s almost become a cliché. But even though it’s become a favorite of many media watchdogs and critics, I think it’s largely mistaken, at least when applied to outlets that focus on political coverage.

Now, there are certainly better and worse ways to cover campaigns. You can get more or less distracted by the irrelevancies kicked up by the debate, you can ignore whether what one side’s saying is true or untrue and treat it like a he-said, she-said rather than digging down to provide some refereeing of the flimflam.

But I think the vast majority of readers of a political website like mine or a paper like The Hill know the basic policy differences between the candidates.

Most readers are people who are into politics and are looking for really good coverage of the campaign. And the campaign is a race between one or more candidates. I’m into polls. I want to know what the different campaigns strategies are, what issues voters are responding to, who’s putting together good field organizations on the ground, etc.

And I think readers are too.

Indeed, I’ve always thought that there’s something a little eat-your-spinach-ish about folks who cry out, in the thick of a campaign, how everyone’s focusing on the “horserace” rather than “the issues.” There’s always an implicit and often explicit belief that investment and interest in politics itself is somehow discreditable or that there was a pristine, before-the-flood time in our history where politics was a matter of disinterested mandarins dishing out and serving up issues to an attentive citizenry — much as lawyers do to juries. But I don’t think that’s true. And I’m glad it’s not.

I think it’s no surprise that the eat-your-spinach crowd has hugely invested in the idea that our more engaged politics of recent years has, is and will turn voters off from politics when in fact every measure — voting, media viewership, small-donor giving, etc. — shows that precisely the opposite is the case.

It’s true that it’s hard to imagine a Walter Lippmann or a Joseph Alsop playing Hardball with Chris Matthews. Popular politics has always been like a waterfall, graspable only in motion, always in descent and yet never quite falling. Politics is not simply a matter of issues — at least not as we generally understand the term today. In a democratic society, politics is not just a means to governance but a form of public spectacle and drama. It’s not just a means of finding consensus and unity. It’s also filled with rooting for your side; the joys of partisanship; the camaraderie of shared beliefs; the reveling in political talk; the pleasure of invective.

To say that politics in a democratic society involves pomp and spectacle is not a concession. Nineteenth-century American politics, from Jefferson and Jackson to Bryan, was filled with the most scurrilous political attacks, vicious cartoons, a blatantly partisan press, torch-lit parades and overt appeals to emotionalism of every kind. There is no such thing as an engaged politics that does not to some degree derive its vitality from antagonism.

The critique of interest in politics in itself — that it is corrupting, unseemly or a tendency journalists are supposed to correct in readers — is just not one I buy into.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.  His column appears in The Hill each week.
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