Spinning W.'s L

(continued)

by Dan Kennedy

First of all, the press wants to be seen as fair above all else. Thus, absent some unusually addled gaffe tumbling from Bush's mouth, there wasn't a chance that a serious commentator - as opposed to the buffoonish Matthews or the online pundits - was going to whack Bush for his abysmal performance. The media had fed expectations that Bush might actually start drooling at the podium, so the fact that Bush came off as an adult - if not an especially bright or well-informed one - was enough to declare the debate a virtual tie.

Take, for instance, the lead of John Harris's unintentionally (I guess) condescending lead to his Washington Post analysis: "Republican George W. Bush did not bobble the names of foreign leaders, lose his train of thought in the middle of some policy discourse or seem like an impostor of a candidate . . . To the contrary, he took some punches and gave some back in return, becoming especially spirited when the discussion turned to the tax cuts and the education plans at the heart of his agenda." Well, let's award little George an "E" for effort, shall we? Even more stunning, in a way, was what Reagan-era transportation secretary Drew Lewis said of his man Bush. "I was pleasantly surprised by how well Bush handled his material," Lewis told the New York Times' Johnny Apple. "He wasn't overwhelmed at all."

Second, the media, terrified of leading public opinion, slavishly follows it, no matter how doltish or ill-informed it may be. Two snap polls showed the public thought both candidates had done well, with respondents to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey finding that Gore had won, 48 percent to 41 percent, and ABC News reporting that Bush had won, 48 percent to 45 percent. (CBS News's quickie poll, putting Gore up by a substantial 56 percent to 42 percent, was the exception.) These mixed verdicts - hardly a surprise, since they mirror the results of recent presidential-preference polls - were reinforced by shockingly ignorant focus groups of undecided voters assembled by CNN and MSNBC. (I might have missed one or two, since the cable company in my blighted community doesn't carry the Fox News Channel.) For example, on MSNBC, a young African-American man who had favored Gore came away leaning toward Bush because Gore "didn't come across as the type of leader I was expecting to see." Thanks for sharing. Never mind that Gore came across exactly the way he has come across his entire career. Indeed, as Frank Bruni noted in the Times, Gore even continued his rich tradition of invoking tragic moments in the lives of family members, this time an uncle who had supposedly been gassed by the Germans in World War I.

With vox populi sputtering stupidly, the pundits apparently believed they had to follow suit. Good thing they didn't in 1976, when the first snap polls showed Gerald Ford had beaten Jimmy Carter, despite Ford's liberating Poland from Soviet domination approximately 14 years too soon, or 1984, when the public initially handed victory to Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale even though Reagan had exhibited all the early signs of Alzheimer's disease. In the matter of Gore versus Bush, you could make a solid argument that, rather than trying to figure out why viewers thought Bush had held his own, the media could perform a greater public service by explaining why they were wrong. Surely that would be better than this, from the Boston Globe's estimable David Shribman: "The public saw two men whose eyes, gestures, and manner suggested that they were ready, willing, and maybe even able to take command, not only in the pastoral duties of the president but also in the persuasive, even evangelical role." I want to know what channel Shribman was watching.

Another explanation for the media's and public's wrongheaded view of the outcome is the curious role of presidential debates. On the one hand, most viewers - 83 percent, according to a survey released on Tuesday by Harvard's Vanishing Voter Project - say they've already made up their minds, and that it's "not at all" likely they'll change their vote as a result of anything that happens during the debates. On the other hand, for a public that is increasingly disengaged from politics, the debates are the first occasion that tens of millions of people have seen the candidates for more than a few seconds on the news or in a commercial. To such casual observers, Bush's attempting to parry Gore's very specific criticisms by accusing him of using "fuzzy math" may have seemed quite a bit more clever than it should have.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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