[rolux]

If you're asking me for a thesis, then I guess it would include the idea that what people should be willing to devote to politics is more than, and fundamentally different from, attention. Once politics become politics of attention, they become, quite precisely, the spectacle you're referring to: a real-time feed of gossip, gaffes and stats.

More specifically though, my impression was, quite simply, that obsession with details, as a mainstream phenomenon, often coincides with the inability or unwillingness to see the bigger picture. While I can't back this up with statistical data, I'm pretty sure there's a well-founded psychological term for it.