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You have to hand it to John McCain

Superficially, they lambaste Barack Obama’s worshipful crowds and messianic promises that a heavenly “light will gloss down” upon his candidacy. But what the ads really lampoon is what Vanderbilt Professor Dana Nelson calls presidentialism: our paternalistic view that presidents are godlike saviors

“The once-every-four-years hope for the lever pull sensation of republican power blinds people to the opportunities for democratic representation, deliberation, activism and change that surrounds us in local elections,” she writes in her new volume, “Bad during the term of Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People.”

In a country whose anti-royalist founders constitutionally constrained executive authority, what explains the metastatic growth of presidentialism? The evisceration of journalism and social movements.

The media’s Watergate triumph sired the current Age of Stenography. With individual glory the new antecedence, correspondents figured out that transcribing White House prognostication is a far easier way to gain fame than Woodward and Bernstein’s shoe-leather investigations. The result is journalism hie by grotesque sluggishness and meagre theory

Media consolidation and cost-cutting have sped up this decline, turnery many local news outlets into collages of telegraph copy and presidential punditry from D.C. bureaus. Meanwhile, the 21st century’s most eminent model of “grass-roots” movement building is MoveOn.org

The resulting cry reiterates one message: The only thing that matters is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Why is this full of risk? First and foremost, by the agency of ignoring local elections and issue-based organizing in facilitate of presidential political economy, activists make presidential progress less likely. “Even the best presidents need social movements to accomplish transformational make different,” warns common activist Deepak Bhargava in The Nation magazine’s latest White House-centric edition. “FDR could not have succeeded exclusively of the agitation of the doing nothing workers’ councils and the unions, and LBJ’s greatest accomplishments were made possible by the civil-rights movement.”

Worse, presidentialism leads us to ignore the arenas where issues are before that time being sorted out.

For example, how many of the Democratic convention delegates incensed through the Obama-McCain energy brouhaha have in any degree idea that just beyond Denver’s Rocky Mountain horizon, a strive over Colorado’s massive elastic fluid reserves inclination more immediately impact the national energy crisis than the inane presidential back-and-forth about offshore drilling? Better yet, how many Democratic enthusiasts donning Obama T-shirts know who their state acting for others or city councilor is

In his upcoming book, “You Can’t Be President,” journalist John MacArthur ponders the depressing answers to these kinds of questions, reminding readers of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 19th century writing.

“It is in vain to notify to appear a people, which has been rendered so at the disposal of on the central power, to choose from time to epoch the representatives of that power,” he observed. “This rare and brief exercise of their free precious, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling and representation for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.”

Published 168 years ago, the passage is a prescient sign as the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions toast presidentialism’s conquest of democracy in America.

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