Election 2000 will be remembered as the year of the swing state and the undecided voter, geography dominated by stubborn but fluctuating battlegrounds, territory that refused to be won by either army of campaign consultants right up the very end. This should have been a battle between deeply held convictions and contrasting visions. Instead, it was smaller than life, a narrative not for the big screen, but rather one played out in miniature, the participants bickering over the details of uninspired agendas.

In this hip, postmodern culture where all media texts refer to something else, this election could have been read as the ultimate reality show: Al and George W. as contestants in a high-stakes competition, under extraordinary pressure, forced to rely on their own ideas, wit and personality to win the biggest prize on earth. Beat that CBS! But twice as many people watched any single episode of "Survivor" than watched any night of the political conventions on all the networks combined. Where did the campaign producers go wrong? In this current media environment, the trick is to figure out the different ways reality shows are faked. With the conventions, that game was too easy. The once vibrant, suspense-filled political dramas had become campaign infomercials, slick media spectacles in red, white and blue, so many sentimentalized mini-bio-documentaries.

Gore's 4.4-second, seemingly unscripted smooch with his wife livened things up, but the reality show campaign only went down hill from there. It's true that the Bush/Gore contest lacked an exoticized tropical island, but the real problem was that neither candidate ever relied on his own ideas, wit or personality. On "Survivor," the action moved forward, the strategies changed and the dialogue didn't repeat. The election dragged on for weeks with the same tag lines: "I will fight for you," "I trust you to make the choice," "He wants to squander the surplus," "I can get the job done."

The "tightest race in 40 years" should have been riveting, but the repetition of memorized lines was no reality show.

Fighting for the same undecided voters, the candidates stuck to their carefully targeted messages over and over again. In fact, the frequent repetition of single messages to the exclusion of others is the very definition of propaganda. But in politics this is called "message management," a term coined by Republican adviser Michael Deaver as he attempted to keep Ronald Reagan to a prepared text. Much more than simple propaganda, election 2000 marshaled the full arsenal of marketing strategies and political enticements, from every kind of poll and focus group imaginable to millions of dollars worth of advertising. Worse, the media celebration of that persuasion became the dominant news theme, a commercial text to which the campaigns and the coverage all referred.

The constant reminder that this election was a marketing spectacle came every time a TV reporter stood in front of a focus group of undecided voters. The irony of an uninformed, politically uninterested group of people dominating the media was more than most viewers could take. Swing voters have determined elections for a long time now, but something else was happening here. Camera lenses were trained on the hapless undecideds in the hope that, under the glare of national exposure, the process of persuasion itself might be revealed before our very eyes. "Did anything they said change your mind?" "Do you like one of these candidates now?" "Do you know who you are voting for after this debate?" Eager journalists hoped for definitive answers, yet the undecideds always managed to disappoint. Their waffling began to seem stubborn and deliberate; the whole country was getting annoyed. Radio commentators started to refer to them as "those boneheaded swing voters."

Persuasion is always a frustrating affair. It's the desperate effort of a scoundrel, like the word "RATS" dancing in the shadows of video manipulation. When The New York Times decided to run a front-page story on the subliminal message created by notorious Republican media consultant Alex Contellanos, other media followed suit, reveling in the moment with stories made more fascinating by Bush's mangling of the word he repeatedly pronounced as subliminable. While Dubya was learning to pronounce the word, the rest of us were becoming experts on hidden messages. Advertising practitioners got airtime and column inches as we learned that Madison Avenue couldn't agree on whether subliminal advertising really worked or not. In an age inundated with commercial messages and marketing strategies, little was surprising about the story except that this was advertising of a different sort, something vaguely unfair, with residues of a kind of brainwashing that seeks unconscious acquiescence to a message never recognized. Nothing could be further from a democratic process.

The story the media missed about "RATS" was that after all, the ad was just an ad. It worked as most ads do; it created an arbitrary association with the product, one with no logical connection or political content. Politics now exists in the realm of arbitrary associations, both positive and negative. It is a virtual media world dominated by the advertising message. Bush is a "compassionate conservative." The phrase itself is a marketing tool, and as such, it worked well. A compassionate conservative is different, yet familiar, just how advertising makes all products seem. But the phrase was more than just a label; it served as Dubya's cover, allowing him to avoid his own contradictions, especially during the second debate when he virtually frothed at the mouth in anticipation of putting people to death. But consumer culture, inundated as it is with promotional hucksterism, is a culture not accustomed to exposing logical contradictions in any meaningful way.

News pundits criticized the candidates for having fun doing feel-good interviews on daytime talk shows like "Regis," "Oprah" and "Rosie O'Donnell" while avoiding the serious press with its tough questions. But the "serious" press wasn't asking tough questions. Instead, it cheered from the sidelines when a marketing strategy was effective, if the performance was persuasive and moved the polls. The news was busy legitimating the superficial, image-based marketing criteria from which, we were told, we must decide. Providing spin after each debate, pundits assured viewers that the packaging of the candidates should be taken as the legitimate measure of their worth. The color of their ties really did mean something. Bush appeared presidential, but Gore's neckware couldn't pretend to be nice. For the "serious" press, the image was reality. Speaking on CNN, Time.com editor Rick Stengel asserted that what voters really needed to know about W. was whether he could "play the role of President." The most intelligent thing I heard on TV came not from a journalist, but from the movie critic Roger Ebert, who said: "We don't have political analysts anymore, we have marketing consultants who are talking about image and delivery." After half a century of image politics on television, marketing those images became the news.

No wonder viewers wanted to see the candidates in casual, unscripted settings where they could be themselves, not human promotional packages. But it is impossible to escape the world of marketing. The most notable thing about Bush on "Regis" was that he dressed like Regis. He wore the dark matching signature tie and shirt, opening his jacket for all to see. In doing so, he hoped that the popularity of Regis would transfer onto him. He was selling himself as image to media audiences, an image that viewers had already bought, like the Regis line of clothes. We are hailed as audiences and consumers, not citizens. One commentator said candidates were selling their votes.

The superficial language of marketing permeated the campaign, and the two-minute debate format only made the predigested, carefully tested marketing discourse more obvious. This became the stuff of late-night comedy. Much has been made this election season of political jokes. The face of "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno stuffed with political buttons gracing the cover of The New York Times Sunday Magazine (September 24) led to a spate of commentary. A Pew Center poll featured in the magazine discovered that almost half of people in their twenties were getting their election news from comedians like Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. Indeed, the Times started running a weekly tally of which candidates were roasted and with what frequency.

Making fun of ourselves has become the aesthetic of choice in the hip, self-reflexive nihilism of commercial culture. Comedy is a soothing bromide, but does it relieve more contradictions than it exposes?

Commercial images fill TV screens and the marketing machines behind them constitute news. There is no room in this environment for stories of the exploitation of global workers toiling to make the products advertising sells to media audiences. Nor is there room for Ralph Nader in the debates or on TV. He would actually explain how campaign contributions translate into corporate welfare and lax regulation, from which, for example, the corporate media secure enormous profits. Such revelations would damage the legitimacy of persuasion. Repeated slogans and manufactured messages lose their authenticity when confronted by alternative information.

Even in the absence of an alternative discourse, the public understands that the language is faked and the candidates are actors. But consumer culture finds its way out of this as well. Postmodern cynicism adopts a critical stance while supporting the persuasive enterprise. Advertising has learned to wink and nod at us, acknowledging its manipulative intent while making fun of itself and us. Dan Rather chides the debates as studies in narcolepsy and refers to "focus group hocus-pocus." Reporters and pundits make fun of the process and the candidates without ever having to mention an alternative. The real proof of the extent to which commercial techniques have infiltrated the process is in the candidates themselves, who have learned the art of self-mockery: Gore's "Remember America, I gave you the Internet and I can take it away," and Bush's making fun of his own polysyllabic blunders.

Marketing is not the language of political visionaries. Simple slogans that pass the test of focus groups do not challenge existing economic or social assumptions. Marketing is not a language that can question why so many young black men are in jail, why one out of five children in this country go to bed hungry, or how the death penalty reinforces a culture of revenge and retaliation. Seeking solutions to serious injustices and creating a better world is the stuff of political vision. But that language doesn't test well in focus groups. If this election proved anything it was the failure of both campaign politics and news reporting in an age dominated by marketing.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

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