January 27 - February 3, 2000
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It ain't over
Iowa speaks, and the pundits rush to judgment. But first there's the small matter of the primaries.
by Dan Kennedy
Monday night's Iowa caucuses were supposed to mark the official opening of the 11-month presidential campaign. The results -- viable, energized contenders in both parties, with everyone living to fight another day except for Orrin Hatch and possibly Gary Bauer -- portend a rock-'em, sock-'em steel-cage match of a New Hampshire primary this coming Tuesday. But to judge from the post-Iowa media blather, you'd think we'd already had it up to here with these guys.
"Doug Bailey, cut to the chase here. Is it over?" asked Christopher Lydon, host of WBUR Radio's The Connection, on Tuesday morning. Mind you, that was Lydon's opening question. Bailey -- editor of the Hotline, a daily political newsletter -- sounded momentarily flustered before answering no. To be fair, Lydon quickly agreed with Bailey that the lead-up to New Hampshire can be "the best eight days in American politics." But Lydon wasn't the only one ready to call it a campaign.
On NBC's Today show, Katie Couric asked Al Gore whether he would urge Bill Bradley to get out of the race for the good of the Democratic Party. Granted, Bradley had just taken a 63 percent to 35 percent shellacking, but Couric's proposition was bizarre and preposterous. Bradley lost in a state where caucusgoers had to get up in front of their friends, neighbors, and union officers to vote against the establishment candidate. Even though Bradley's New Hampshire numbers appear to be slipping, that state's open-primary system is far more congenial to an insurgent candidacy such as his. Which is why Gore responded to Couric by saying, well, no, there's the matter of the primaries to be dealt with first. Duh.
On ABC's Good Morning America, Clinton-flack-turned-political-analyst Dee Dee Myers told Diane Sawyer that the race was pretty much over on the Republican side. With George W. Bush taking 41 percent and John McCain just five percent, Myers said, it was difficult to see how Bush could be stopped, even if McCain won New Hampshire. Now, Myers is hardly the first pundit to observe that Bush's financial and organizational advantages may well make him unbeatable. But her underlying premise -- that McCain's hopes had been done in by the Iowa results -- was ridiculous, given that McCain hadn't even campaigned in Iowa.
The media story of the Iowa caucuses was one of too many reporters, analysts, and talking heads chasing too little news. The results were in before 9 p.m. on Monday, giving the all-news cable networks four hours to pick them over and attempt to explain what it all meant, and how it would play out in New Hampshire.
Also, the underdog campaigns focus on New Hampshire
As television often does, though, it drained the caucuses of excitement -- wrung out every last drop -- and left precious little to scrutinize. In a characteristically perceptive analysis in Tuesday's New York Times, R.W. Apple Jr. wrote that, by directing their full glare on what was once a tiny, barely noticed event, the media have made it difficult for candidates to evolve as the campaign moves forward. Apple compared this year's caucuses with those of 1976, when Jimmy Carter's surprising victory paved the way for his eventual election as president. "Mr. Carter was free to define himself in the later stages of the campaign, and to keep his party reasonably united behind him," Apple wrote. "Today the nation sees not only the Iowa results but the campaign that produces them." Exhibit A: Bush, who was forced to be more specific in his anti-choice stand than he wanted to in order to fend off right-wingers Steve Forbes, Alan Keyes, and Gary Bauer. Bush may pay dearly for that later in the campaign; yet if he'd stayed fuzzy and had therefore come in with less than 40 percent, the media would have pronounced his Iowa effort a failure.
Indeed, the most absurd aspect of the Iowa caucuses is the expectations game -- or "winning versus declaring victory," as ABC's Ted Koppel put it in his introduction to Nightline on Monday night. What's striking, though, is how both sides, the media and the candidates, have learned to play it. Bush called his less-than-overwhelming 41 percent a "record-shattering victory," since it beat Bob Dole's 37 percent of 1988. (Not that it mattered: Bush's father beat Dole in New Hampshire a week later.) Steve Forbes, who came in 11 points behind Bush with an admittedly surprising 30 percent, was bouncing around like a cyborg with a brand-new battery pack. Alan Keyes's 14 percent won him nothing more than bragging rights to the loony right-wingers both he and Gary Bauer were appealing to. But that didn't stop Keyes from popping up on CNN at 12:30 a.m. on Tuesday and telling Larry King that Bush's voters were "duped into supporting him" by "phony polls." He added: "I think I will win the nomination." Surely that's not the only strange thought he harbors. Only Bradley appeared to acknowledge the immensity of his defeat, even though he actually exceeded the 31 percent benchmark he had set for himself.
As Time magazine's Margaret Carlson put it on CNN, "It's unpunditlike to say the winners are the winners."
In a world of 24-hour cable news channels and the Internet, the biggest media losers are the political weeklies -- the New Republic, the Weekly Standard, and the Nation. At their best, the weeklies provide the sort of tart, nasty-edged commentary that simply isn't available elsewhere. But, being chronically short of cash, they can't afford to move into the Internet age with anything more than a token presence, leaving them well behind the curve. The Standard got lucky this week; its Web site featured a week-old column by Andrew Ferguson lamenting the decline of negative campaigning ("Mud isn't what it used to be") that turned out to have been timed perfectly. This, after all, is a campaign in which there have been more Bush commercials about Forbes's negative ads than there have been actual Forbes negative ads. This week, McCain unveiled a commercial in which he accuses Bush of negative campaigning. And in a move that's stomach-turning even by the standards of politics, Bradley released a 30-second spot in which Niki Tsongas accuses Gore of using the same negative tactics against Bradley that Bill Clinton did against her late husband in 1992. The implication is that Clinton and Gore, having killed Paul Tsongas, are now trying to kill Bradley. It's typical Bradley: go for the jugular while hiding behind someone else, all the while maintaining a sanctimonious distance from the crime scene.National Review, a conservative biweekly that has sunk some money into its Web presence, won the best-fun-fact award on Tuesday morning: it turns out that Forbes spent nearly $200 for each of his 25,000 votes. Wrote Gary Geipel: "The image of Jimmy Carter's walk across Iowa with his garment bag may need to be updated with a new stereotype." But the real instant-analysis mantle (at least when it comes to the written word) has been passed to the big Web-only publications, Salon and Slate. Wiseass wanna-be Jake Tapper laid an egg with his lead for Salon -- "Something no one ever told me about caucuses is that they can be rather stinky," he wrote, making a remarkably lame observation about the olfactory effects of long johns, hot rooms, and sweat. But Tapper's colleague Anthony York told a useful truth about Keyes: "Of course, the fact that Keyes's third-place finish . . . is big news coming out of Iowa is a symptom of the media's boredom with the race to date." That doesn't explain why York wrote an entire feature about the articulate wingnut, but what the hell. On the other hand, Slate, which has been the number-one stop for media and political junkies during the pre-campaign season, didn't quite manage to rise to the occasion. The best was a piece by Jacob Weisberg in which he described in some detail the tedium, the disorganization, and the petty grandstanding that make up caucus night. "The usual complaint about the Iowa caucus is that it's unfair to give so much power to a small state that's not representative of the rest of the country," Weisberg wrote. "The lesson I take away is that the caucuses are much worse than that. They give vast power to a tiny minority in a small state -- those willing to put up with a huge amount of bullshit."
There's a lot of repetition amid the punditry, and for that you can blame the pernicious effect of media mergers and partnerships. On Tuesday morning, four major Web sites -- WashingtonPost.com, Newsweek.com, MSNBC.com, and Slate -- featured news analyses by Washington Post staff writers David Broder and Thomas Edsall. And as New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has observed, the Post's entangling alliances mean an increasingly wider audience is being exposed to material simply because it originated with the Post, not because it's the best. Indeed, the Post's Iowa coverage was bombastic in comparison to the Times'. The Times treated Iowa as another stop along the campaign trail; the Post, as electoral Armageddon. Edsall's Bradley analysis, for instance, asserted in His Girl Friday-like clichés that the candidate "stumbled badly" and suffered a "stinging setback." In the Times, James Dao focused more substantively on the question of whether Bradley needs to change his approach for New Hampshire, writing about "concerns among some aides about the state of his campaign." Not that the Times is immune from the urge to merge: it had a less ambitious partnership with MSNBC before it was dropped in favor of the Post, and just last week the Times announced a new alliance with ABC News. Go to ABCNews.com, and you can watch a daily Webcast featuring Times political reporters such as Adam Clymer, who has a TV presence that makes you understand why he's spent his distinguished career as a print journalist.So now it's on to New Hampshire. The ultraconservative Manchester Union Leader, which has endorsed Forbes and which is the only statewide newspaper, offered some of what's in store in its Tuesday editions. The front-page headline -- FORBES HAS GOOD NIGHT, BUT BRADLEY DOESN'T -- was notable for its failure to mention either of the winners. The paper played up a snippet about some guy getting dragged away by Texas Rangers after jabbing his finger into Bush's face shortly after Bush arrived in Manchester at 3 a.m. And inside, there were -- count 'em -- two pro-Forbes editorials, one a reprint from the weekly Weir Times, and the other an effort by editorial-page editor Bernadette Malone Connolly to convince her fellow twentysomethings that Forbes really, really is a very cool dude. "[T]here is no excuse for apathy this year," she wrote. "One guy in the race is actually -- ready for this? -- a straight talker."
Had enough? You've got to be kidding. Thanks to the ridiculously short primary schedule and the warping role of big money, the nominees will be decided in a few weeks anyway. In the meantime, though, we might as well enjoy it. And ignore the pundits who want to believe that it's already over.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
