Political Campaigns in the United States by Richard K. Scher (Columbia University, New York, NY, USA)
A Choice Highly Recommended Title-January 2017
This book is an interpretive analysis of political campaigns in America: instead of focusing on how campaigns are designed and run, it investigates the role campaigns play in our American politics, and the close symbiosis between campaigns and those politics. The text examines how campaigns are an important manifestation of how we do politics in this country.
Hallmarks of this text include:
- showing how campaigns can undermine our democracy and asking how democratic they-and by extension, our politics--really are;
- demonstrating that the ability of the media to accurately, fairly, and deeply report on campaigns has been severely compromised, both because of the growing distance between campaigns and media outlets and because of the structure of Big Media corporate ownership and its tight relationship to Big Money. It asks important questions about the media including:
- tracking the continuing growth of unregulated, private, unaccountable dark money in campaigns as a threat to our democratic elections and politics. Democracy rests fundamentally on transparency and accountability - sunlight - and our campaign laws and norms now allow and encourage exactly the opposite, largely because of decisions by the United States Supreme Court.