SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Numbers Game Once again the press is screwing up coverage of the Presidential campaign. We screw up every four years because, like French generals, we are always fighting...
...That's what makes the national news...
...In marketing circles, it is said that the market recapitulates itself—what sells is what is sold...
...In its better moments, this kind of quiet campaigning resembles what democracy was always supposed to be about— a conversation between sovereign citizens and those who wish to govern them...
...The horse finishes fifth...
...But Germond also likes to tell the cautionary tale about the horse-player who wakes up one morning after dreaming of the number five...
...Political reporters write about the polls, not about the people...
...Meanwhile, we were all ignoring an obscure former governor of Georgia and the religious baggage he was carrying...
...I cannot tell you how often the conventional wisdom is dead wrong in politics, but that never seems to discourage its collective arrogance...
...Now Time magazine runs a cover story headlined Who's in Charge...
...We missed it completely...
...It came in thousand-dollar chunks from people whose names you could find in regular reports...
...Five...
...Conflict is easy to cover...
...And all day long he sees fives...
...James David Barber, the scholar of the Presidency, holds the press responsible for letting Reagan lead the voters into Fan-tasyland...
...He bets $5,000 on horse number five in the fifth race...
...We are obsessed this year with the titillating blunder...
...Greider says, "It's as though the media had decided that, having failed to hold a popular President to account for his frequent lapses of truth, it will now make up for it by uncovering any foibles of these Democratic fledglings it can find...
...But none of this seems to interest the news media...
...Reagan dwells happily in a world of his own making...
...The gang on the bus wants conflict, red meat, candidates turning on each other...
...This is not, as Reagan said after invading Grenada, "our finest hour...
...Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...No story...
...In 1980 and 1984, the great collective failure of the press was that we let Ronald Reagan get away with it...
...You miss a lot about a horse race if you only look at the numbers...
...Jack Germond, one of the best of the shoe-leather political reporters, likes to say there's nothing wrong with the horse-race school of campaign reporting...
...That ought to be the ultimate question of politics and campaigns, but strangely enough, it bores most political reporters...
...Follow the money" is what Deep Throat advised, and we did...
...You know how superstitious they are...
...The underlying assumption on the part of both politicians and the press is that people are so dumb they'll choose pretty lies over homely truths every time...
...These conversations tell us something about how these men would govern if elected...
...There it is—the last war...
...The press now complaining about "the Seven Dwarfs" seeking the Presidency is the same press that portrayed Reagan as a titan...
...says the player...
...In 1976, of course, we were hot after the money...
...From the front in Iowa, Greider reports, "Amid the customary campaign platitudes, some sophisticated, original ideas have emerged...
...In 1972, for example, the story was money...
...You can already tell that we're going wrong again in 1988...
...Campaigns begin not with dreams and ideals but with in-depth polls to establish what will sell...
...People want to know who's ahead," he says...
...But by then campaign-finance reforms had made money—well, not precisely irrelevant, but at least less critical...
...about "focus groups," not about hopes and principles...
...But polls are static, campaigns are not...
...He was no less bizarrely disengaged back in 1984, when Time was printing reams of drivel about "morning in America...
...Politicians don't tell the necessary but unpleasant truths because they are afraid that the voters will kill the messenger...
...issues are not...
...There were corporate checks made out to the Nixon campaign, briefcases full of cash, Maurice Stans acting as bagman for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP...
...about the country's leadership vacuum, noting that the President is "bizarrely disengaged...
...Conventional wisdom in politics holds that those who talk most realistically about our problems are least likely to get elected...
...There were gallons of it, hell, oceans of it sloshing around that year...
...He says it was the press that built the image of the "Teflon President," the press that was unwilling to risk unpopularity by waking anyone up...
...We screw up every four years because, like French generals, we are always fighting the last war...
...reality bounces off him...
...Greider observes of the Iowa campaign, "The politicians [are] not only talking, but listening...
...The time on the clock, the balance in his checkbook, the cab fare to work, the address of his appointment—all fives...
...Bruce Babbitt says, "We have evolved a cycle of dishonesty in our national discourse...
...Politics more and more resembles marketing...
...So he's out at the track that very afternoon...
...We were busy covering the 1968 race, determined to corner Nixon at last and make him tell us his secret plan to end the war in Vietnam...
...What a story...
...Even at this late date, there is still some question about whether the verb "lie" is the right one for what Reagan does...
...So people learn not to expect the truth from politicians...
...Yep, they do...
...We all know he regularly says things that are untrue, but since he believes what he is saying, is he really lying...
...One of the country's finest political reporters is William Greider, who left The Washington Post a few years ago to write in the more exotic editorial surroundings at Rolling Stone...
...Instead they are absorbed by their chronic score-keeping—who is winning and who is losing...
Vol. 52 • January 1988 • No. 1
