The Press Ruined Presidential Campaigns
Greenfield, Jeff
On Political Books The Press Ruined Presidential Campaigns ... and other dubious assumptions about the media and politics BY JEFF GREENFIELD Out of Order: How the Decline of the Political...
...A few pages later, Patterson argues that "in no other era has the course of presidential campaigns been so unpredictable or hinged so much on small issues as in recent years...
...Some of them are true...
...Indeed, it's at least plausible that one of the virtues of a primary-based, press-dominated system is that political insiders cannot employ their "talents for low intrigue" to deny a nomination to an insurgent figure, such as Ronald Reagan in 1980 or Bill Clinton in 1992...
...Regrettably, Thomas Patterson's new book deserves a place in this Hall of Dubious Assumptions...
...I think he's dead right about this...
...It is when Patterson ventures back and forth through recent political history to prove his point that his problems start...
...It would then feature the assertions, in the wake of what happened to Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, that television had diminished the presidency to the point of impotence...
...How this would do anything to prevent superficial, strategy-based, issue-starved coverage is beyond me...
...This suggests that the American electorate is far less a passive victim of the press's failures than Patterson—and many of my fellow journalists—believe...
...The press has this effect because the game schema drives its analysis, and its capacity to see the campaign in other ways is limited...
...He got his facts wrong and sometimes could not remember his own economic plan...
...At the end, in the obligatory "reform" chapter that is the campaign book's equivalent of the obligatory sex scene, Patterson proposes shortening the primary season and grouping primaries in clusters...
...His previous works, particularly The Unseeing Eye, offered fresh, provocative insights into how American voters receive and process political information...
...The dominant tone of campaign coverage, shaped by the "strategic schema" the press brings to politics, is that nothing a candidate says is ever an expression of sincerely held belief...
...The same claim would be laughable today...
...And what about John Kennedy's 1960 telephone call to get Martin Luther King, Jr., out of a Southern jail, thus swinging (we now assume) black votes that made the difference in states such as Illinois and Texas...
...Muskie did less well in New Hampshire than he had to do because he seemed to cry...
...Is it not at least possible that the electorate decided, in the midst of hyperinflation, an industrial recession, and a battered foreign policy that it wanted a clear break with the past...
...Except that no candidate committed more gaffes than Ronald Reagan in 1980, and Bill Clinton demonstrated that the whiff of scandal or misdeed—even when backed by credible evidence—does not necessarily destroy a presidential campaign...
...And in 1992, the compression of four general election debates into nine days created a sense of excitement and involvement among voters that took advantage of the "sports" metaphor in the best sense: It was like following the World Series, wondering whether yesterday's winner would stumble...
...No candidate stumbled more in the press spotlight than Ronald Reagan in 1980...
...Except that the big Iowa caucus winners in 1988 were Bob Dole and Dick Gephardt, the surprise showing was made by Pat Robertson, and the big loser was George Bush...
...This past year, there were not only debates, but pre-primary appearances on such unlikely outlets as "Donahue...
...Similarly, it is equally possible to assign victory or defeat back in the "good old days" to equally "small issues...
...ing functions once performed by party regulars, candidates are subject to disintegration if they commit a gaffe or are caught up in scandal...
...Question: If you wanted to connect young blacks with politics, would you be more successful appearing on "Nightline" or "Arsenio...
...others I find highly questionable...
...What Patterson ignores, I suggest, is the possibility that the press coverage of a presidential campaign—for all the flaws of pack journalism, obsession with strategy, and often incoherent explanation of issues—may not be the powerful influence on presidential campaigns that he thinks it is...
...Except that in 1992, the American public found new connections to the political process and developed a renewed enthusiasm for politics that resulted in a huge increase in turnout...
...The result...
...Patterson is on firm, if well-trod, ground when he notes, with persuasive and anecdotal analysis, that the "watchdog" function of the press has a corrosive effect in the absence of countervailing pressure from established political parties...
...The press is in the news business, not the business of politics, and because of this, its norms and imperatives are not those required for the effective organization of electoral coalitions and debates...
...What about 1948, when a cutting remark by Thomas Dewey about his "idiot" railroad engineer alienated countless blue-collar workers...
...Journalistic values and political values are at odds with each other.!' Fair enough...
...Mondale recovered against Hart in 1984 because he asked him "where's the beef" in a debate...
...What's missing in Out of Order, I think, is any sense that the media's role in campaigns may be subject to powerful currents beyond the nightly newscast or the front page, or any sense that the failings of political journalism may be addressed by new forms of communication...
...But to anyone who has worried about the role the press plays in choosing presidents, Patterson's offerings will seem, to put it mildly, warmed-over fare of little nutritional value...
...Patterson gives relatively little attention to the remarkable nature of the last campaign, asserting that the 1992 campaign was "saved" by the debates, Ross Perot's candidacy, and the participation of the "new" media...
...that expressions of policy, programs, and values all are to be interpreted as moves in the game of political manipulation...
...maybe Hart lost in 1984 because he was too unfamiliar, too suspect as a potential president...
...This exhibit—which might take up the entire National Mall—could begin with the fears from the early days of television that the new medium would endow a president with such power that he would assume near-imperial authority...
...Why did he flourish even as Ted Kennedy's primary challenge to Jimmy Carter was fading in the wake of similarly tough press scrutiny...
...I say "regrettably" because Patterson is one of the most valuable academic observers of the campaign process...
...Maybe Bush won in New Hampshire in 1988 because that state, in the midst of an economic boom, saw Bush as the heir to the (then) highly popular Reagan...
...To begin with, there is in his account a powerful sense of the pastoral—a conviction that things used to be different and better—which brings to mind Burt Lancaster's comment in Atlantic City to a first-time visitor: "You shoul-da seen the ocean in the old days...
...In 1992, voters could hear them for an hour or more on the morning news shows, on "Larry King Live," on MTV...
...The little arts of popularity' are at the heart of the modern media campaign...
...In my view, the sense of the campaign as an exciting event was one big reason why turnout was up so substantially...
...maybe Muskie lost in 1972 because a centrist, complacent campaign with no ideological content is always vulnerable to a candidacy fueled by powerful ideological fervor...
...More significantly, it reads as if Patterson felt himself under a compulsion to come up with some device that would fix the process...
...And I have no doubt that four or eight or 20 years from now, it will be all too easy to sweep up examples of shallow, inaccurate, or simplistic reporting...
...Maybe so...
...The hypothesis that the American public has ways of determining how it feels about candidates that are independent of the established political press, or at least independent of the judgments the press wishes to make, is at least worth investigating...
...None of this should be seen as an apology for the way campaigns are covered...
...If I'm right, that should be a cause for celebration...
...Reagan won in New Hampshire in 1980 by declaring "I'm paying for this microphone...
...The horserace-based, frenetic, poll-obsessed, "who's-ahead-who's-behind" coverage of politics has disconnected the voter from the process...
...that nothing is to be taken at face value...
...The thesis of Out of Order is clear: "The United States cannot have a sensible campaign as long as it is built around the news media...
...Were primary voters deprived of real knowledge of the candidates' stands before they voted...
...Is it not at least possible that the voting public understood much of the daily ebb and flow of press coverage was essentially irrelevant to its judgment about what was needed...
...Patterson himself mentions the 1884 campaign, when a follower of James G. Blaine called Democrats the party of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion...
...Moreover, in the Democratic primaries, the big states have decided the nominee ever since 1980...
...maybe Reagan won in 1980 because his long-held conservative beliefs were what mainstream Republicans finally wanted to rally behind...
...In what may have been the most creative decision of the campaign, Phil Donahue introduced Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton in a joint appearance before the New York primary and then left the stage to the two contenders for an hour...
...I also think the public knows this as well, which is why they were so determined to let the candidates speak for themselves in 1992, and why they may increasingly decide to listen for themselves in the future...
...None of us who critique the media is likely to be cut out of a job anytime soon...
...He then presents an account of recent campaigns that is a model of reductive reasoning: Bush won the New Hampshire primary in 1988 because Dole wouldn't sign a no-new-taxes pledge...
...The problem is that these "turning points" may have been far less consequential than other, more substantial reasons for political success or failure...
...For instance, Patterson quotes Alexander Hamilton's arguments in The Federalist that presidents would not be chosen on their "talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity...
...He should have been whistled off the field by the middle of the primary season, if the often-scornful press coverage was any guide...
...He should have been whistled off the field by the middle of the primary season, if the often-scornful press coverage was any guide...
...Why did he flourish even as Ted Kennedy's primary challenge to Jimmy Carter was fading in the wake of similarly tough press scrutiny...
...In Out of Order, however, Patterson has given us an account of the press's role in the political process that is a rehash of familiar observations...
...and other dubious assumptions about the media and politics BY JEFF GREENFIELD Out of Order: How the Decline of the Political Parties and the Growing Power of the News Media Undermine the American Way of Electing Presidents Thomas E. Patterson, Knopf, $23 If the folks at the Smithsonian are looking for a new feature to drum up business, let me suggest that they start planning a Hall of Dubious Assumptions About How Our Political System Works...
...Were the political weekend talk shows ghettos of elitism...
...What gives this possibility added force, in my view, is what happened in 1992...
...My own view is much stronger: In 1992, I believe, many of the fundamental flaws of traditional press coverage were cured by the availability of different forms of political communication...
...He got his facts wrong and sometimes could not remember his own economic plan...
...We could then add a whole display of electoral certainties, followed by their collapse in the face of reality: • The nominating process put too much power in the hands of such states as Iowa and New Hampshire...
...Patterson's comment on this...
...By emphasizing the game dimension day after day, the press forces it to the forefront, strengthening the voters' mistrust of the candidates and reducing their sense of involvement...
...The most helpful portion of the book for a practicing journalist is the mountain of evidence Patterson offers that we journalists have become so jaded, so cynical, so determined to point out the manipulative aspect of campaigns that we have made it harder for our elected officials to develop any bond with the electorate...
...But what about the 1916 campaign, when a botched meeting between California's Hiram Johnson and GOP nominee Charles Evans Hughes caused California Republican progressives to sit on their hands, thus delivering the state, and the White House, to Woodrow Wilson...
...With the press performing the gatekeepJejf Greenfield is Political and Media Analyst for ABC News and a syndicated columnist...
...No candidate stumbled more in the press spotlight than Ronald Reagan in 1980...
...it is that they are so familiar...
...but "the talent for low intrigue" has been a staple of the American presidential campaign from 1800, when Jefferson and Burr battled for the presidency, or since 1824, when followers of John Quincy Adams deprived Andrew Jackson of the victory he'd won...
...Indeed, my disappointment with Patterson's book is not that many of his assertions are wrong...
...Had the traditional press silenced the candidates' voices by compressing their views into eight or 12 second sound bites...
...Viewers of "Arsenio" saw Bill Clinton not just playing the saxophone and wearing shades but talking about crime and violence and gangs and urban life for an extended period...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 1
