Take two pills and vote in the morning

This may sound bizarre, but in following the news coverage of the US Presidential campaign, I am reminded of bacteria. I realize that in penning this I am also being more than a tad bit insulting. For that, I apologize. There is a point to this, but it requires a bit of a detour down analogy lane, so fasten your seatbelt.

One of the emerging issues in the field of medicine is how to deal with MRSA’s – drug-resistant bacteria, in layperson’s terms. The advent of penicillin in the early 20^th century meant that people could take a couple of pills a day for a week and survive potentially life-threatening illnesses. When my son was 4, he was admitted to the hospital with the same ailment that killed my grandfather’s older brother in 1927. Three pills a day for five days, and that was that. Antibiotics may have grown in number and in potency, but they are also declining in effectiveness.

There are a number of opinions regarding what happened, but they seem to fall into two categories – one, that overuse or improper use of the drugs has lessened their punch, and two – that the bugs themselves have begun to mutate and build immunities of their own. The truth is likely some combination of the two phenomena, but the outcome is the same. What used to work no longer does, and the experts are left scratching their heads over what to do.

And so back to politics.

Political insiders and professional advisors are often called 'spin doctors' by others and by each other. I know some who view the moniker as some mark of favour, some source of pride. The term really owes to the fact that like practitioners of traditional medicine,  they deal with complex interactions and know what ‘remedies’ to employ when a campaign gets sick (i.e:  goes off the rails). Their patient’s health and wellbeing is what counts, even if it is a campaign and not the human body

For years, they have prescribed the same types of messages, targeted the same demographics, and pushed the same particular issues. The strategies have been repeated because, to this point, they have always worked. 'Play to your base' has been standard operating procedure since before most of us were born. Do it effectively, and you get 4 years and then, come the next election, it's more of the same.

What if, like their medical counterparts, the treatment that these ‘doctors’ are prescribing are losing their potency?  What if all of the pills in the ‘spin doctor’s’ black bag don’t deal with the infection?


Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz should never have – in the eyes of the American Spin Doctor Association – gotten this far, this fast, and with this much potency. Like their medical counterparts, the politicos have thrown every textbook treatment at them. Endorsements from former candidates and current office-holders, nods of support from powerful interest lobbies, and the unleashing of surrogates to the 24 hour news channels and talk radio circuit are the equivalent of following an article in the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine or The Lancet. They look for what the professional consensus declares to be the ‘gold standard’ treatment, apply, then sit back and wait.

But if polls and delegate counts are the blood work and diagnostic tests of the ‘spin doctor’, it is clear that the treatment is not working.

The patient, of course, is not sick – but they are ‘sick and tired.’ They don’t respond to the Bill Clinton pill, and they seem to have developed a severe reaction to the Mitt Romney medication as well.

In this case, people are not the bacteria – but their problems are. Declining living standards, the hollowing out of industries – and communities – as well as the devaluation of what many considered the ‘American Dream’.  The treatments on offer have been the same for four decades, and if they had worked even a fraction of the amount they have been purported to, you would not have seen this phenomenon unfold.

The ‘spin doctors’ say they are as surprised as anyone, but should they really be? When you stake a career on political consulting, when you work 50+ hours a week on K Street, collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from clients, and you get to sit in a studio where Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper ask you what it all means, do you have the luxury of shrugging your shoulders and muttering “I dunno”?

My take is this – the bacteria is ‘anger’. It has been made stronger by a combination of inaction and indifference. The bug gets stronger with each ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t care’ that comes from the governing class. They, in turn, calmly declare that they’ve seen it all before and administer a treatment of ‘we care, seriously we do’, of actors and singers appearing on stage and doing a rendition of their last Billboard top ten tune, or referencing the catch phrase that helped their last picture earn $100 million, and a heavy duty course of surrogates ‘explaining’ what the ‘real’ issues are.

The treatments used to alleviate the discomfort. Joe Q. Public’s overdue mortgage payments didn’t miraculously catch up just because Fleetwood Mac queued up ‘Don’t Stop’ for the umpteenth Bill and Hillary whistle stop, but he felt that much more positive about his situation that he could actually see light at the end of the tunnel.

Today, the light at the end of the tunnel feels a lot like the headlamp of a speeding locomotive.

Joe Q. Public has grown weary of the medicine he’s been taking for the past four decades, and like someone with a long term illness that defies conventional treatment, he’s willing do the equivalent of going to some third world country where a doctor has declared that they have a new experimental drug that the medical community back home won’t certify. If you’re that sick and that frustrated, you might just borrow fifty grand and fly halfway around the world for the ‘extract of the adrenal gland of the whatchamacallit’ because the hospital back home is full of people in white coats who just shrug and mutter ‘I dunno.’

The political establishment, I believe, brought this on themselves. The spin doctors over prescribed answers to tough socioeconomic issues with treatments barely stronger than a placebo. They allowed the ‘anger’ to grow and metastasize. Just as important, they failed to come up with something strong enough to give the patient – the middle class voter – any real relief. Instead, they have tried to manage the anger, much like a doctor tries to manage pain.

And that’s the thing. If all you are doing for your patient is managing their pain, you are admitting that curing their condition is not in your purview. The patient knows that, and that’s why he and she are willing to take the risk.