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November/December 1999 | Contents
politics
The Job COLLINS: My thought process has changed. When I started in the early ’70s, a lot of people still believed that the democratic process worked just the way they saw it in the history books. And it was useful to tell them the other side. It was fun to tell them how it really works behind the scenes. Now, they all know that the emperor has no clothes — they don’t even believe that the emperor has a stitch in his closet. So it’s not necessary to debunk for them. They’ve already over-debunked themselves. The challenge now is to make it interesting, because people don’t really want to read about it. The challenge is to get them to think about it at all.
KLEIN: I started during the war years, Vietnam. It was the same kind of thing: the government is a criminal enterprise, and our job, especially in the alternative press in Boston, was to expose the criminality. Happily, over time, I reported my way past ideology. Covering busing in Boston was a big breakthrough for me, because I couldn’t find any black people who were in favor of it. It began to be clear to me that life was a lot more complex than ideology. From that point on, I learned to love reporting and shun false gods. COLLINS: There are true gods, besides the false gods, Joe.
KLEIN: Yeah. I think the truest god is the god of complexity. I also try to leaven the politics with other things. I really have a lot of sympathy for the people who get assigned to the Dole bus for six months. For me, the best way to cover politics was to not cover it sometimes, to go out and learn the rest of the world. And then when you get back to politics, you see it within the context of the real things that politicians are in the business of attending to.
COLLINS: I’m sort of positive about what’s going on in politics right now, and our coverage of politics. The thing that’s really hard to find a good side to is what’s happening with TV.
KLEIN: Gail, that’s like saying we’re really in great shape except for that cancer that’s metastasizing. Print is in the rear of the bus. People get their news from television.
COLLINS: That’s true. We are now doing all the reporting for TV, basically. But I just think the idea that you hear so much — that the print side is just covering the race and not covering the issues — that’s just absolutely not true.
THE PACK
KLEIN: I’m of two minds about this. I remember you and I were both sitting in the press section at the Iowa straw poll. And I looked down the rows and I saw a great many close friends. And really excellent political reporters. But, when you aggregate us — when you strip away our individuality and create this great mass of cameras and microphones and notebooks that are staring the candidates in the face and influencing the campaign — I think we have become a kind of mindless and destructive force in the ’90s. And I say that acknowledging the fact that issues are covered. In fact on CNN, every time one of these guys gives a substantive policy speech, CNN broadcasts the speech live. Free TV time for substance — it’s a good thing. But after the speech the analysis usually is, “why was he giving this speech politically,” and “how is this going to position him or her?” And number two, whenever there’s one of these little scandal frissons — like Pat Buchanan’s telltale sentence in his book — then, all of a sudden, we become this tremendous force, like a tidal wave. And as individuals we can’t control that, and our editors can’t even control it. I’ve been trying to figure out just why it was that I could love so many people in the business, and hate the business occasionally as I do. I think a good part of it is the impact of television and the intensity of it, and the quickness of it. I don’t know if you feel this way, but I always hate myself after I’m on television. Whenever I see myself on TV I feel like throwing a pie in my face. It tends to distort and mess with even the smartest, most sensitive people we know. And then there are a whole bunch of people who aren’t that smart and sensitive. You have to oversimplify. Cleverness is rewarded. Snottiness is rewarded.
COLLINS: Yelling at each other is rewarded.
KLEIN: Cynicism is rewarded. And cynicism is the easy default position to be in. You’re not going to get taken to the cleaners by your bosses or your colleagues if you’re cynical about a politician. Cynicism is what passes for insight among the mediocre. And what you were saying before, Gail, is absolutely true. Our job now is not just to make it interesting, but to try and convey to the public the rather bizarre notion that there are people of substance involved in politics, that there are honorable people involved in politics.
THE VOTERS
COLLINS: Well, it used to be that the public believed that the other party was all full of crooks and evil people, but that their own party was full of good, honest, fine politicians. The biggest thing that’s happened has been the falling apart of parties. That’s changed the way the public perceives the politicians, and the way we cover politicians. The voter used to know that he was a Democrat or he was a Republican. So that going to the polls was sort of a celebration and affirmation of his or her identity as a part of this group. If voting is this very individualistic thing, then it’s a much greater burden than it used to be. It’s the difference between rooting for a team and trying to figure out who every single player is, and judging them all individually.
KLEIN: Another thing that we’re seeing now is that there aren’t any huge ideological considerations to divide folks.
COLLINS: People get into politics when they feel that they’ve got something big at stake. I can remember, in my whole lifetime, only three or four elections in which the public was deeply engaged. And ’92 was one of those elections. Everybody thinks it was all about Gennifer Flowers. But it wasn’t. People were really engaged with questions about the debt and what we’re going to do about health care, and that kind of stuff. It was a very serious election.
THE CAMPAIGN
KLEIN: The 1992 campaign was one of the best I ever covered. And that’s why it’s kind of interesting that this one has been so substantive so far. You’re going to have serious debates about health care policy and about Social Security.
COLLINS: It’s also hard to cover, until the candidates start taking each other on. When you’ve got candidates all by themselves walking around issuing policy statements, it’s hard to get people roused. There’s one interesting thing that’s been happening that I didn’t anticipate — that’s the factor of the gender gap. People have gotten so aware of the gender gap and so desirous of tapping in to that soccer mom vote. There are a lot of fabulous things about the way women look at elections, but one of them is that they don’t like conflict. They like everybody to seem to be able to work together in a very collegial way. And that makes for really, really boring campaign rhetoric.
KLEIN: Let’s face it. What you’re seeing is campaigns that are entirely focus-grouped and market-tested. We’ve allowed consultants to give these people lobotomies — personality lobotomies. The press is part of that operation. We’re driving all the interesting people out of town.
COLLINS: I don’t know that that’s entirely true. John McCain would be utterly ignored in the world if it weren’t for the fact that the press is so enchanted by the fact that he’s sort of a normal guy and that he has an edge, and that he’ll express it. Every year, the press falls in love with one of these guys with an edge, and then the public rejects him.
KLEIN: It’s not just edge. I remember being enamored of Bruce Babbitt in 1988. He had no edges at all. The reason that I liked him was that he was dealing substantively with issues that a lot of the others wouldn’t event touch.
COLLINS: He’s also perceived as a normal human being.
KLEIN: Yeah, normal is terrific, and quirky is even better, I think. My idea of a president with character was a guy who wrecked his marriage by cheating on his wife, drank a pitcher of martinis every night, cheated at poker, lied to his staff, sicced the IRS on his enemies, lied to the American people about basic issues about war and peace — and my grandfather voted for him four times. Franklin Roosevelt. I kind of think that these great ones are like great pieces of meat — there’s fat and there’s muscle, and it’s marbleized. You can’t get the great strengths without great weaknesses as well. And it’s on us, in the press, to report the weaknesses, but not in the self-righteous, and pompous, and condemnatory way that we have.
THE TONE
COLLINS: You’re never going to be able to sell the American people at this time in history on an approach to politics that sort of celebrates the idea that everybody is great. However I think you can celebrate the idea that it’s a good process, and that everybody has their moments. We talk about the Iowa straw poll, which is the most ridiculous process. I loved all those people out there with their kids, bouncing around, and standing in line for their chili, and wearing their little tee shirts for whatever candidate they wanted. And it was nice, and they were having a good time. And they actually stayed and listened to the speeches, which were, unfortunately, terrible. To celebrate the fact that this process is really nifty when you get right down to it, is okay.
KLEIN: But Gail, when I’ve been criticized for my journalism — by other journalists — it’s been because I was unduly positive about somebody, not because I was unduly negative.
THE FUTURE
COLLINS: The local papers are generally regional papers, and they don’t cover the inner workings of a town in a way that would let the people of the town feel like they were really involved citizens. I’m really hoping that the Internet’s going to make a huge difference. Once they figure out how to make that sucker take advertisements that’ll work, you could take four people and do a Web site, and do a newspaper for any town in America. And I’m sure that people who live in that town would read it and be interested in it. That’s where I hope journalism is going. It’s true that younger people are not reading newspapers very much, and if they’re watching TV a lot, they’re not getting much news because news is so expensive on TV, it’s not cost-productive. But the Internet — if they figure out how to do it — I think it’s the most exciting thing.
THE POLITICIANS
COLLINS: I thank God for the New York Senate campaign every day of my life. That’s the best campaign in the world, if it happens. Two people who could not beat anybody in the world except possibly each other. It’s wonderful.
KLEIN: Mrs. Clinton is more of a mystery because we haven’t seen her as a candidate yet. But God save us from the candidates who were their high school student government’s president, married their high school sweethearts, and then did nothing else in their lives except be ambitious. The more fun the better. We need more of that, more style, more personality in politics. Fewer people who will not say anything unless it has been passed through a focus group and a platoon of consultants.
COLLINS: My father is a Republican, conservative, very middle-class clean-government kind of guy in Cincinnati, Ohio. But he’s got a picture in his office of James Michael Curley, who he ran into in Boston, I guess, when he was in the Army, and who he just adored. He was much more interesting than any politician we’ve ever had in Ohio.
KLEIN: To see politics done elegantly, to see it done well, is the grandest kind of theater. It’s what we live for, I think. If we thought that this would just be a completely, processed-cheese sort of process, we wouldn’t be out there doing it. I live for the next moment when I see a politician do something great and unexpected, and inspiring. And I’ve seen it happen, time and time again. |
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