Democracy has become a media event, and this year presidential candidate Larry Agran got written out of the script. Agran has some useful things to say about urban policy, and we’re never going to know what they are. But maybe that’s a small price to pay for order in political prime time.
In late January MacNeil/Lehrer sponsored a candidates’ forum. Agran was not invited. We have read the nine-page letter Agran wrote pleading his case. He reported that his campaign had raised $200,000 from donors in 37 states, that he’d already qualified for primary ballots or caucuses in nearly 30 states, that the New York Times had described Irvine while he was mayor as a “crucible of municipal innovation.”
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A serious lapse in the common effort to treat Agran as though he did not exist was committed in January by the New York Times. An article out of Washington that carried the headline “Mayors Appear Unmoved by the Major Candidates” began like this:
What the league was acknowledging here is that media coverage both reflects voter interest and creates it. No interest is being created in a candidate who isn’t covered, which makes it hard for the candidate to say why he deserves to be. Agran could never get past this Catch-92. His fund-raising collapsed when the debates went on without him, and he wound up with less than 1 percent of the vote.
He ran a computer search of 20 major publications and found about 150 mentions of LaRouche since last September. Citing these, his affidavit concluded, “Lyndon LaRouche clearly meets Michigan’s statutory standards.”
“It comes down to this nebulous idea that you’re not significant because you’re not anointed by the national media,” Kaspar moaned. “The secretary of state in Florida will say, ‘I haven’t read about you enough in the New York Times, so you’re not a significant candidate.’”
