Presswatch/Whence Hartpence?
Barnes, Fred
WHENCE HARTPENCE? by Fred Barnes Did the press miss something? Was some rough beast named Gary Hart slouching month after month toward Manchester and victory in the New Hampshire primary, only...
...Barbara Waiters bludgeoned him during a television debate on February 23, and it took him weeks to recover...
...Since 5th-century I pofitics and Money...
...The highly flattering coverage didn't happen because reporters like Hart so much...
...When he was campaigning indifferently and attracting little attention and even less support, that was reported accurately...
...every room, or that a hungry obsession with checkbook balances might not lead to the most sensible appraisals of one's friends...
...was emblazoned across the cover--that implied Mondale was already the winner...
...So don't blame the press for failing to see Hart as a potential front-runner in the Democratic presidential race at the time when he wasn't any more a potential front-runner or incipient front-runner or embryonic frontrunner than Reubin Askew...
...Ernest Hollings had one...
...John Glenn had one...
...Jonathan Swift bitterly deplored the new race of stockjobbers worming their way into Walpole's government, and cried out for the good old days when corruption hadn't reared its loathsome head, when men were motivated by a virtuous love of country...
...For Hart, the honeymoon ended March 12, the night before Super Tuesday, when two TV networks ran negative pieces about him, one dealing with his name and age changes...
...Or Ronald Reagan the Republican nomination...
...Was some rough beast named Gary Hart slouching month after month toward Manchester and victory in the New Hampshire primary, only to have reporters miss the whole thing because their eyes were averted...
...At some point, the message is what matters . . . . In New Hampshire, I will move from the status of dark horse and become a national candidate...
...the free media no longer grooved with the paid media...
...Drew too likes to sound doomsday tones: Her book ends with, "The public knows that something is very wrong . . . . Until the problem of money is dealt with, the system will not get better...
...Shales was half-right: television didn't create Hart, but it does love to destroy and scoff and clobber...
...If Hart did well, why that must mean Mondale's a goner...
...He's just a fellow clever enough to know how to exploit the press, for a time at least...
...I confess this was my view, particularly after Mondale took the Iowa caucuses overwhelmingly...
...Only Glenn's was given any credence in the press, and then his scenario was dismissed as unlikely after he faded last fall, leaving Mondale the leader...
...In her latest book,J Elizabeth Drew joins a long, distinguished line of indignant writers shocked by t h e corrupting power of money in politics...
...He has the Courage of his convictions," wrote the normally levelheaded Michael Kramer of New York...
...I think Newsweek did exactly the same piece 12 years ago," he told Larry Eichel of the Philadelphia Inquirer...
...This put him in the enviable position of having his so-called free media groove perfectly with his paid media (produced by a little-known but talented consultant named Raymond Strother...
...H a r t , of course, said all along that he would soar to front-runner status...
...That's something a politician should never do...
...Last year the media scoffed at Hart's concentration on issues and dubbed him idealistic and uninteresting...
...Edward Bellamy, as American a socialist as one could ask for, told businessmen that his Nationalist movement was really quite conservative: He was, he said, trying to rescue republican self-government from the new plutocracy, the giant corporations suddenly making a mockery of American democracy...
...Far from it, though it surely warms the hearts of many detractors of the political press to think so...
...If that were the case, Mondale wouldn't have gotten into trouble in the first place...
...True, there was reason to be dubious...
...Recall for a second all those stories written from the early fall of 1983 right through to the eve of the New Hampshire primary last February...
...We have allowed the basic idea of our democratic process-representative government--to slip away...
...America may be the quintessential bourgeois paradise, a land of Babbitts with vapidly complacent grins happily salting the stuff away...
...Montezuma, an Antifederalist shrewdly pretending to be a Federalist, revealed that Federalists liked the proposed Constitution because it would keep property in their hands...
...Or in earlier years, Jimmy Carter would never have won the nomination...
...Askew had one, based on a good showing in New Hampshire followed by a super showing in the South on Super Tuesday...
...The only question is whether.we are serious about trying to retrieve it...
...Every one of them--opinion polls, organization, crowd size, fundraising, endorsements--indicated that Mondale was headed toward the nomination without glitch or bump...
...Reporters tend to have short memories, while suffering from the illusion that they are equipped to see the future...
...Hart's first two gaffes of the campaign came right after Super Tuesday, and the press was whetted...
...A steady stream of doomsayers has vainly alerted countless generations that now, right now, the politics of virtue is being replaced by the politics of moneygrubbing...
...When the Hart fad began around midJanuary and then mushroomed after the Iowa caucuses, that was reported with still more eye-popping accuracy...
...The refrain grows rather tiresome, especially when one realizes that it sounds suspiciously like the boy who cried wolf...
...The reason is that all the usual measuring sticks used by reporters to gauge how well a candidate is doing failed...
...Mondale, that just isn't there, it turns out...
...Pretty prescient stuff...
...believe it or not, he is far from being their favorite candidate (Mondale or George McGovern would qualify for that...
...Perhaps you simply have to accept as immutable fact that politics, like economics, isn't a science, no matter what they call the college courses...
...Not surprisingly, he went on a winning streak...
...A candidate has to do that on his own...
...To make matters worse, columnist Anthony Lewis seized on the interview as full of profundities for all generations of Americans...
...The trouble is, every also-ran candidate had some plausible-sounding if farfetched scenario that ended with his triumph...
...Like so much else of today's muckraking, Politics andMoney is an exercise in journalism by innuendo...
...H a r t is not a creation of the press...
...And he lost...
...Why the misjudgment about Mondale's political strength...
...it, too, involved a breakthrough in New Hampshire...
...It doesn't take much to realize that we can do without a food processor in Don Herzog is assistant professor o f political science at the University o f Michigan...
...Then I will get more press coverage, my standing in the polls will rise, money will come in and then I win...
...I heard Hart spin out a scenario like that last December, in between speeches before crowds numbering in the single digits...
...At some point, people have to vote for him or against him...
...And Muskie had more endorsements, was higher in the polls, had advantages that Mondale doesn't have...
...he was to emerge as frontrunner by sweeping the South...
...Aristophanes heaped merciless abuse on Pericles for daring to pay jurors: Instead of being another display of civic pride, Athens' jury, he thought, had become a place where tired old men with nothing to do sat to collect a few drachmas...
...Hedrick Smith of the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 25 New York Times, interviewing Hart, treated snippets from his "futurepast" shtick as holy writ...
...That will happen right here [in New Hampshire...
...Whoever came out of Iowa as the alternative to Mondale would inherit that bloc, he said...
...And political reporting, like economic reporting, is guesswork, often uneducated guesswork...
...But America is also the country of Thoreau, sternly insisting that we don't own our possessions, they own us...
...Besides, there was something that the press did miss, namely the shallowness of the support for Walter Mondale...
...So Drew invite~, 'some higher wisdom, or some outright cynicism: The good old days never existed...
...they always will be...
...If Mondale did well yesterday, why that must mean he's got the nomination sewed up...
...it can't cause him to win or lose...
...Despite the miscalculation, I frankFred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...Television loves to destroy what it creates because it doesn't trust what it creates," wrote Thomas Shales, the TV critic for the Washington Post...
...ly don't know what I'd substitute for the conventional tools used in calibrating a politician's strength...
...Macmillan, $11.95...
...And suddenly, all the indicators began to point accurately to a Hart surge--large crowds, improved organization, better fundraising, a few new endorsements, a rise in the polls...
...If Drew really thinks that once upon a time, representatives, carefully screened from the excess influence of their constituents as Publius hoped they would be, deliberated on the common good, well, we might say, so much the worse for Drew...
...Or Barry Goldwater...
...In the week leading up to the New Hampshire primary and for two weeks after it, Hart was covered in a totally unreflective, wow-look-athim-go Ta~ion, especially on television...
...Whatever happened yesterday or over the last week is certain to continue inexorably in the future...
...They told reporters that Mondale had reached the ceiling of his support and that there was a huge non-Mondale bloc of voters out there...
...The press can help or hurt a candidate...
...Look what happened to Jesse Jackson when he thought he was so golden with reporters he could utter anti-Semitic epithets...
...He spoke not only of past and future but of an American idealism seeking new ways of expression--a theme that speaks just as much to voters over 45...
...But instead of Glenn it was Hart...
...Unless you think Jimmy Carter was re-elected in 1980, there are grounds for being skeptical of the ABC-Post poll...
...The sources are often anonymous: On page 97, which I selected at random, 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984...
...b y Don Herzog Money: We may want it, more and more of it, endless gobs of it, all the time...
...Athens, and no doubt before, Western civilization has apparently always been about to slide down some desperate precipice of corruption...
...Like Carter, Hart treats reporters as intellectual inferiors, as paparazzi...
...WHERE THE BREAD...
...Now that he is demonstrating tremendous charismatic prowess on television, they clobber him for allegedly ignoring issues and call his 'new ideas' nonexistent...
...He got a solid week of negative coverage before the Illinois primary...
...money and politics have always been entwined...
...Instead it might betray the colossal naivet~ of the indignant...
...They suggested a depth of support, a commitment on the part of Democratic voters to Mr...
...The daily polling of ABC News and the Washington Post captured the Hart ascendancy as he moved to equal footing with Mondale, and they reported it...
...In that interview Senator Hart broadened out his theme in a way that I thought was significant," Lewis wrote...
...The list stretches on, and on, and on some more...
...Unfortunately for him, Hart is not a humble man, and he gave off the impression that he had mastered the press in such a way that he was getting a free ride...
...Mondale is mush," he told Sidney Blumenthal of the New Republic, referring not to the quality of Mondale's thought processes but to the durability of his appeal...
...And the case against Drew might be reinforced...
...The gist was "that Mondale, having disposed niftily of his only serious challenger, John Glenn, had the nomination all but locked up...
...Nothing at all was missed in the Hart phenomenon...
...The next evening, Roger Mudd of NBC savaged him in a live interview...
...Yet in the haste to catch up with the hot new star, some breathtakingly ingenuous things were written about him...
...Case closed...
...After this state, it will be a contest between myself and Walter Mondale, and I will win...
...They can't do a thing for himif his message isn't solid...
...Neither can organized labor...
...But Glenn and his strategists were right about one thing...
...Early last January, Hart sneered at a story in Newsweek--"Can Anyone Stop Fritz...
...But don't start thinking the press has become the arbiter of who is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee this year--or any other year...
...Righteous indignation, of course, need not signal there's anything wrong with the world...
...He has 175 paid people in Washington, that's all...
...They talk about Mondale's great organization...
...but it makes us uneasy, too...
Vol. 17 • May 1984 • No. 5
