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politics
'No Sense of Proportion'
by Jack Germond
Jack W. Germond has covered national politics since 1960,
and he has been based in the Washington bureau of the Baltimore Sun since
1981. He has co-authored four books on presidential politics with partner Jules
Witcover. He and Witcover also write a syndicated column and a weekly column
for the National Journal. Germond was a regular on The McLaughlin
Group for fifteen years, and now appears regularly on Inside Washington
and occasionally on Meet the Press. His latest book is Fat Man in a Middle
Seat: Forty Years of Covering Politics.
This
is my eleventh presidential election campaign, so it isn’t surprising that people
keep asking me how long I’m going to continue covering politics. “Until they get
it right,” I always say. But I really don’t expect that to happen any more. The
political process is a shambles, and the performance of the news media is little
better.
Our failures are nothing new. About ten days before the 1972 election I asked George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president, whether he thought the American people had been given an accurate picture of him. McGovern already had come to terms with the prospect of a landslide defeat by President Richard M. Nixon. But he responded vehemently.
“Accurate?” he shouted, pounding the table. “I’m running against Richard Nixon and people think I’m the dishonest one! How can that be accurate?”
I haven’t spent many sleepless nights worrying about whether McGovern was unfairly portrayed in that campaign. But after forty years of covering politics, I have finally come to realize that there is something wrong with the way we do our job.
The weakness in our performance is not our devotion to the “horse-race journalism” decried by the political scientists and editorial writers. Any reporter who doesn’t answer the reader’s first question — who’s winning? — should be covering the school board. Nor do I believe we fulfill our function properly by making up checklists of “the issues” and concentrating our coverage there. Our fundamental failure is more basic than that. It is our inability to give readers-viewers-voters an accurate and round ed picture of the candidates and the dynamics of the campaigns.
One result is that we keep electing presidents who turn out to be unhappy surprises. Did we tell Americans in 1988 that George Bush would be unable to understand their economic concerns? Did we warn the voters in 1992 about how self-indulgent Bill Clinton would prove to be?
The other side of that coin is that some good candidates never get through the process. Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., the Tennessee Republican, was one. As a candidate in 1980, he made the mistake of first predicting he would win a straw poll in Maine, and then losing it, a blunder from which he never recovered. Just why a single gaffe should disqualify a presidential candidate has never been explained satisfactorily but it has happened repeatedly. There is no sense of proportion in the way we cover politics.
All is not the fault of the press, of course. The politicians in Washington perform so poorly in office that the voters increasingly ignore campaigns. And that, in turn, encourages the politicians and their professional handlers to make the crudest and most simplistic appeals for support.
It is not our function to repair the system, however. Political reporters should not take it upon themselves to claim some public purpose beyond gathering and presenting the news. If the system isn’t working, we should describe it, not fix it. But, as it turns out, we aren’t even doing that very well.
Much of the problem is the dominant role played by television in campaign coverage. Twenty years ago the networks were insecure enough about their own news judgments that they allowed newspapers to set the agenda. Now — as a newspaperman I hate to admit it — the situation has been reversed. The networks set the agenda with what they choose to cover, however briefly, in their nightly news programs. The images that appear on those screens are the ones on which elections are decided.
The growing influence of television is not intrinsically destructive. There is no reason to assume that television news directors and reporters are less committed to doing their jobs well than those sainted people who work for newspapers. But there are some inherent problems peculiar to the medium. Pictures are too important, and so is brevity. The temptation is to oversimplify. And there is obvious irony in the fact that the networks have gained even more power at a time when they devote fewer resources and less sophistication to covering politics because, their audience surveys tell them, nobody likes politics.
One particular problem arises from political stories that are covered in such short bursts of time that there is not enough room to deal with complicated questions and almost no room at all for nuance. When I was reporting in a Pennsylvania community a couple of years ago on the public reaction, if any, to the campaign finance excesses of the Clinton campaign of 1996, I was struck by the fact that only older voters seemed to have any understanding of the issue. I learned that these were the people more likely to read newspapers. Those who rely largely on television had only a headline reader’s grasp of a controversy that could not be explained in a headline.
Too often we are providing coverage that doesn’t go beyond the headlines. And that has made politicians easy marks for manipulation. Things have even reached the point that, for example, reporters covering a debate seek out the spin doctors so they can get a lot of canned — and totally meaningless — quotes for their stories. It’s embarrassing to see reporters clustered around some flack asking to be spoon-fed pap.
Sometimes the readiness to swallow spin can be more important than in judging a debate. The reporting of the last two important contests in the New Hampshire presidential primaries makes the point.
In 1992 we all fell in line behind Bill Clinton’s triumphant cry that he was “the comeback kid” because he had finished second in New Hampshire even after all the controversy over Gennifer Flowers and his history of avoiding the draft. The story we did not pursue was the pattern of Clinton’s self-indulgence suggested by these controversies and later made clear to everyone — but only after he had spent a full five years in the White House.
In 1996 we focused our coverage of the Republican primary on the fact that Bob Dole had survived and effectively eliminated rivals such as Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes even if running behind Pat Buchanan. What we failed to examine adequately in this case was how weak Dole showed himself to be in New Hampshire. He had the support of the party regulars but no one else, perhaps because he had nothing to say.
Too much political reporting is both superficial and derivative. When George W. Bush made his first foray into New Hampshire last summer, it caused the equivalent of a press riot, scores of reporters and television crews from all over the world covering a spectacle they were creating themselves by being there. The same thing happened with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “listening tour” of upstate New York. Columnists like myself also turn up to observe and stroke our chins thoughtfully as if we are gaining some special insight by watching Bush give a speech. Baloney.
Most of those covering these “events” don’t have a source in the state. When Bush appeared at a prep school outside Manchester, I watched several well-known Republican activists walk past the press corps unrecognized by all but a couple of reporters. If it weren’t for The Boston Globe and The Union Leader, most of those covering the story wouldn’t know where they were.
The candidates are not much fun either. There was a time when they felt comfortable having dinner or a few jars with a reporter. Everyone understood what was off the record and what wasn’t. It was possible to come to know the candidates a little better and to describe them to readers in more than two dimensions. Now many politicians fear, with valid reason, that they cannot trust reporters because we are all going to take the cheap shot if the opportunity arises for us to lift ourselves out of the pack.
I remember going to dinner with candidate Ronald Reagan at his home in Los Angeles in 1979 and being startled at some of the outlandish things he said over the martinis — things that might have made page-one stories for my employer at the time, The Wash ington Star. He suggested, for instance, that Squeaky Fromme’s attack on President Gerald Ford in 1975 might have been a put-up job to build a “sympathy vote” when Reagan was challenging Ford for the Republican nomination. Ye gods.
But I had understood from the outset that the dinner was off the record. It wasn’t a social occasion. It was symbiotic. The Reagan handlers got to show me he was more complex than he was being depicted in the hope that would be reflected in my copy. I gained a chance to come to know the candidate better. But it was off the record, so I didn’t report the candidate’s indiscreet flights of imagination.
I ran into a colleague-competitor of similar vintage and we began to complain to each other about the quality of American politics today. If he had a kid coming out of school, my friend said, he would never advise him to follow in his father’s footsteps. I wouldn’t either.
