Journalism Today

So over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times managed to print three editions of its newspaper, with less than 90 days to go until a statewide election, without including one story - ONE - covering the California governor’s race.

And today's sole story was entitled “Angelides and the Charisma Question”, showing that state and local political reporting suffers from the same single-mindedness on personality and horse-race process as its national counterparts.

It is no small task for Angelides to compete in a personality contest with Schwarzenegger, a Hollywood star who has spent three decades polishing the public image that produced his wealth and political power base.

For Angelides, a Sacramento insider who toils over bond sales and pension funds in his job as state treasurer, a lack of pizazz would, in theory, have little bearing on his ability to run the state.

But candidate personalities always matter in a race for governor, and the difficulty of vying one-on-one against Schwarzenegger's is one of the most serious challenges that Angelides faces.

"Voters vote for people, not for platforms," said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who often surveys public opinion in California. "At the end of the day, who a candidate is, as a person, is vastly more important than almost anything else."

Hey, thanks, Mark Mellman! Thanks for furthering the most idiotic frame in politics! The one that got George "I'd rather have a beer with him" Bush into the White House twice! It's such a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Pollsters and pundits say people care only about personality. So they write stories that only focus on personality. And then the people, deprived of any substantive analysis of candidate positions on the issues, have nothing on which to base their vote but... personality!

This is ridiculous. The electorate is starving for a real issue-based debate, that's why they continue to migrate online and tune out the horse-race process stories that define all political reporting.

UPDATE: Watch the governor say that he has no plan to bring down the state's deficit. But he's cooler than Angelides, so who cares?