CAMPAIGN COVERAGE: OUT OF IT

As the Merry Pranksters used to say, you're either on the bus or off the bus. It's time the presidential campaign press corps got off the bus.

Ever since the days of Theodore H. White, reporters (and their editors) have viewed campaign coverage as the ultimate test. White's The Making of the President 1960 created two enduring characters in our national mythology: the noble young leader who redeems his country, and the all-seeing, all-knowing reporter whose virtues gain him (in those days it was always him) total access to the candidate -- and the material for a best-seller.

But if White held out the Grail, it was Rolling Stone reporter Timothy Crouse who glorified the Quest. For The Boys on the Bus, Crouse's raucous band of hard-partying reporters covering the 1972 presidential campaign, the kind of late-night, soul-baring encounter between candidate and reporter that was White's specialty was no longer even a possibility. Crouse depicted campaign coverage as a cross between bear-baiting and sportswriting. His "boys" kept each other up long after the candidates had gone to bed, and his gleeful account of their antics inspired a generation of reporters eager for their own piece of the action.

In 1992 nobody stays up late. Nearly half of the traveling press corps are women, and Crouse's mobile frat party has been replaced by a sharing, nurturing kind of thirtysomething in the sky -- lots of political banter punctuated by heartwarming anecdotes about kids, computers, or cholesterol. But the bottom-line myth has remained remarkably stable: the campaign press is an elite group of irreverent truth-seekers, the best and brightest of the nation's newsrooms, in whose reporting is contained the revealed wisdom of our political life.

Which prompts a couple of rude questions: If the traveling press corps is so smart, how come it does such a lousy job? And if whistle-stop coverage of the candidates is so important, why has so little news come from the campaign trail (and why has so much of what has made news been in reaction to stories filed by reporters who stayed home)?

Could it be that the pageantry of the traveling campaign press is nothing more than an extremely expensive waste of time?

Consider the following items of historical trivia:

The last really pivotal story filed from the campaign trail ran on May 3, 1987. Democratic front-runner Gary Hart responded to New York Times reporter E. J. Dionee's query about rumors of "womanizing" with a challenge. "Follow me around," said Hart. "I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'd be very bored." That same day The Miami Herald ran a story by a reporter who'd done exactly that, introducing the nation to Donna Rice and putting an end to Hart's campaign.

The next-to-last event of historic importance on the campaign trail occurred on January 25, 1984, when candidate Jesse Jackson had what he thought was an off-the-record conversation with Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman in an airport cafeteria.

My brothers and sisters on the press plane may never forgive me for saying so, but if they were all grounded tomorrow campaign coverage would probably improve. The only conspicuous losses I can think of are Maureen Dowd's witty dispatches in The New York Times, but even she might flourish on a topic of genuine importance.

In politics, as in any other beat, the best way to know what's important is to have been paying attention all along -- which is exactly what staying on "the bus" makes impossible. So far this year the traveling press has provided full and frank discussions of Jerry Brown's taste in neckwear, a Brown adviser's taste in headgear, infighting among George Bush's campaign staff, and Bill Clinton's electoral inevitability.

Meanwhile, the stay-at-home press has been forced to content itself with such crumbs as where Bill Clinton's money comes from (In These Times writer John Judis traced nearly a third of Clinton's funds to Wall Street donors), and whether George Bush's 1988 campaign broke election laws and then destroyed the evidence (Wichita Eagle Washington bureau chief Barbara Demick's account strongly suggests the answer is yes). Jill Abramson's anatomy of Perot's political wire-pulling in The Wall Street Journal also showed what a reporter can do when she's not chained to a seat on the press plane.

For the most part, campaign reporters are every bit as diligent, skeptical, and intelligent as their counterparts off the trail. But the spectacle that so delighted Crouse, even in its kinder, gentler 1990s incarnation, is always going to favor horse-race speculation and colorful features over in-depth reporting.

Polls, fundraising, media strategies -- that's what the insiders on the road want to know about. Ask a candidate a detailed question about health care and you're instantly marked as a yahoo. Ask about day care or job creation or the racial makeup of his staff, and you're tagged as a fanatic -- some kind of "ideologue." Why this should be so is difficult to explain, except that "on the bus," naivete is the worst possible offense. Even novice reporters quickly learn the philistinism of the road -- that the best way to seem sophisticated is to ask the shallowest questions, preferably with a sneer in your voice.

Very few reporters are able to resist such peer pressure. Back in 1960 one of them made an unseemly fuss about a candidate's eagerness to intervene in Vietnam. The candidate was Richard Nixon. The reporter was I. F. Stone.

Unlike today's journalists, Stone, who was his own boss, didn't have an editor looking over his shoulder asking, "Who cares about Vietnam?" In 1960 few of Stone's colleagues were willing to be seen talking to him, let alone socializing with such a political outcast. Finally, until surgery restored his hearing in the mid-1960s, Stone was practically deaf, unable to play the game of find-the-sound-bite that keeps today's reporters so busy.

Even after his operation, Stone seemed to hear things differently. "The Nixon-Agnew strategy is not just a 'Southern' strategy," he wrote in 1968, "but the mobilization of white backlash against black aspiration and of small-town prejudice against urban sophistication. This is what [Nelson] Rockefeller's defeat at the Republican convention meant. . . . He symbolized the big city, and the big city involves some comprehension of the black man, who is beginning to hold its fate in his hands."

Stone's powers of analysis were unique, but his method is available for emulation: read everything, remember what the candidates said (and did) over a period of years -- not just days -- and bear in mind that politics doesn't take place in a vacuum, or a television studio. Above all, don't confuse positions with interests, or media-generated excitement with a grass-roots political movement.

I'm not suggesting that the press should boycott the presidential campaigns (though that might not be the worst thing to happen to American politics). I'm just suggesting a more reasoned approach. Let CNN, the wire services, and a small rotating pool of reporters travel with the candidates. Let the local media cover on-the-ground events in each state.

Keeping a reporter on Bill Clinton's plane can cost as much as $ 1,200 per day in airfare alone. For about $ 3,600 a magazine or newspaper can subscribe for a year to the American Political Network's campaign hotline, a daily on-line twenty-four-page computer digest of 100 different media sources. The hotline, which was started in 1988, has gone a long way toward providing a level playing field for political reporters around the country. It is now possible for a reporter based in Seattle, for example, to read what the Arkansas papers have to say about Clinton's record -- in some cases even before those papers are on the newsstands.

If newspapers used local papers the way TV networks use local affiliates, not only could they save money, they could also use their own peoply more efficiently. Instead of keeping good reporters on the road playing traveling stenographer (or waiting for a candidate to get assassinated, to cite another frequent justification for day-to-day coverage), they could be assigned to really check out a candidate's record. Or to figure out precisely who would benefit from a candidate's tax proposals. Or whether a candidate's rhetoric on race relations or government regulation or abortion is at odds with his or her private life.

Without the press hanging on their every nuance, candidates might remember who they are supposed to be addressing. Already this year we've seen a candidate with the will to skip the spectacle -- and the means to use technology to go over the heads of the news media. Ross Perot doesn't seem to need a conventional campaign -- or a press corps. And Jerry Brown, a candidate for whom the pundits had no use, got pretty far on an 800 number and a prayer.

Nobody likes to be told they are irrelevant. Nor are high-flying reporters (or their editors) likely to take the first step toward grounding their oversized egos. As Kim Philby, a former London Times correspondent, once said (explaining why he joined the KGB), "One does not refuse membership in an elite service."

But Perot's surge in the polls, accomplished without a formal campaign and despite the obvious hostility of the mainstream press corps, ought to serve as a warning. "I'm not sure how much people read anymore," he told New York Times reporter Michael Kelly. "What happens on TV is what really impacts on people."

Perot may be a special case. His Texas-sized bankroll gives him the delicious luxury of spurning free media less fortunate candidates dream of cultivating. The reporters' unspoken threat -- if you don't answer our questions, we won't put you on TV -- is meaningless to a candidate who can buy all the airtime he wants, whenever he wants. Besides, as Perot told Kelly, antagonistic questions from the press only help push the public into his corner. Claiming that calls to his phone banks surged after a grilling on Meet the Press, Perot asked, "What triggered those people to volunteer? It was the part of the show that was the 'gotcha.'"

The public's well-founded distrust of the media isn't going to go away overnight. And while confronting Perot or his rivals with their many inconsistencies may make for good television, giving their evasions equal time with the facts isn't necessarily good journalism. What Perot clearly knows -- and the media have yet to learn -- is that Americans are bored stiff with the rhetorical questions and rehearsed answers that make up most campaign-trail coverage. Turn off the sound and the visuals all look like beer commercials. Turn off the visuals and you hear the press: the sound of a pack barking up the wrong tree.

The press will continue to matter in American politics only if it has something to say. The print press will continue to matter only if it does more than provide scripts for TV. First, though, reporters will have to get off the bus.

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