Primary Numbers.

Roger Ailes was right when he predicted at the beginning of the television era that in the future all politicians would have to be performers. But politicians are, for the most part, lousy performers.Their advisers are pretty awful at what they do too. In the absence of inspiration, they have fixed upon the crudest, most negative and robotic forms of communication. They’ve made moments like Robert Kennedy’s in Indianapolis next to impossible.TIME‘s Joe Klein laments the dawn of the soundbite-heavy, market-tested-within-an-inch-of-its-life consultants’ republic.