New York—There are plenty of good reasons to talk about politics as if it were a horse race. It’s exciting, since you’re predicting winners and losers. It’s easy, because you don’t need a lot of information. (Why bother? Somebody else always has information that supports the opposite prediction.) And it’s always changing, so the discussion always feels new. Even if it’s a discussion we’ve all been having for months and months.

The American presidential campaign is the textbook example of the horse race approach: a large number of exceptionally bright people contest ideas for the direction of their country, and the one thing everybody wants to know, every day, every news cycle, is who’s winning: who’s raising the most money, and who’s got momentum.

From the sidelines, people may occasionally complain that nobody’s talking about ideas. (Hillary Clinton put out a new health care plan Monday. The big question: will it help her or hurt her?) But they come off sounding like a prissy minority. Meanwhile, Barack Obama beats (or loses to) Clinton in quarterly fundraising; Fred Thompson’s campaign loses (or gains) momentum; Mitt Romney places higher (or lower) than expected in the Iowa straw poll. That’s exciting. That’s new. Somebody’s winning. Then somebody else is winning, and it’s new all over again.

Likewise, it’s hard to fault anybody for looking at Monday’s Quebec by-elections like a horse race. Not only are by-elections all about winners and losers. Even better, these by-elections were a double-shot of excitement, a race within a race: the Conservatives win a seat, so Stephen Harper must be pulling ahead for the upcoming election; the Liberals lose a seat, so Stéphane Dion must be falling behind.

Since he announced his campaign for Liberal leader last spring, the coverage of Stéphane Dion has come in two alternating flavours: 1) Dion hasn’t got it; and 2) Dion’s got it again. I’m biased, so I’ll leave it to others to argue which it is at the moment. And I’ll leave it to others to ask whether any of this has had any impact on which party is actually ahead.

I’ll contain myself to one small point. It’s worth remembering that Dion won the Liberal leadership, at least in part, because he was the guy who stubbornly insisted on talking about ideas — specifically, how to make Canada’s economy successful and sustainable at the same time. After winning the leadership, he kept busy, making speeches and releasing policy papers full of new policy proposals.

Of course, you wouldn’t know it. The amount of time spent covering Dion’s ideas pales in comparison to the amount of time spent covering the state of his leadership. What are the broad strokes of Dion’s plan for regulating carbon emissions from Canada’s heavy industry? Who knows. But unnamed sources, predicting his imminent demise? Again? Now that’s news.

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Posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 9:56 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.