Anybody But roder: Our Stop-t he-Columnists Movement
Bethell, Tom
Anybody But Broder: Our Stop-t he-Columnists Movement by Tom Bethell Having studied a mountain of press clippings dealing with the presidential campaign, I’ve come to the conclusion that any...
...Let’s not favor “candidates who give the impression it never happened,” Kraft urged, adding that his “overwhelming impression after having followed all the candidates in the Midwest, the East, and the South is that the dominant issues of the past ten years are being ducked...
...If only that Carter fella would stay in Nashville, or wherever it was he came from, and let us 22 (who are well versed in such matters) run the country...
...Humphrey...
...Thirdly it was not recognized how swiftly a “new face” could appear from the provinces...
...But, Broder cautioned, they “are either unaware of or unmoved by the politicians’ judgment that Carter is anything but solid in Georgia or other southern states that should provide his base of support...
...One of the few columnists whose comments about this campaign seem, in retrospect, imbued with a certain degree of wisdom is James Reston of The New York Times...
...Today, of course, this fairly closely resembles the new conventional wisdom, as Wallace has not failed to point out...
...The effect has been to exaggerate the strength of the “Stop Carter” movement, which (and here is my prediction, made before ‘Superbowl Tuesday’) can be expected to have faded into insignificance by the time of the Democratic Convention...
...The political writers have played up the sports metaphor, whether d e liberately or not it is hard to say, but undoubtedly to the benefit of readership and circulation...
...Richard Reeves (whose campaign coverage has been among the best) duly noted that “the press can be counted on to hype the importance of any successful newcomer just to keep the action and ourselves on the road-like Howard Cosell, we can always find some inane reason to make late-season contests between also-rans seem more significant than Yalta...
...A heresy in Washington, of course...
...Embarking on his coverage of the current campaign, Kraft made an excursion into Alabama in November 1975 and reported that “after a oneanda-half hour exclusive interview with Wallace and chats with various supporters at his headquarters here in Montgomery, my strong impression is that...
...Watergate is receding into the past faster than anyone had imagined, and the likelihood is that a few years from now it will indeed seem-as Kraft seems to fear-like a “local Washington scandal” It is, even now, almost comical to read a column by Tom Braden, written less than a year ago, in which he chides Bo Calloway for suggesting that such matters as the “18Yhninute gap” will not be campaign issues...
...There is a possibility that beneath a being secreted...
...There are more people today that are saying identically what I used to say about many things,” Wallace told Reston...
...In defiance of common sense and experience, this reporter has an irresistible urge to confess to a hunch that has been nagging me for months...
...A few days later Joe Kraft discerned voter apathy surrounding the primaries...
...Perhaps the most noticeable is that George Wallace was consistently “rated” too highly-one of the most misleading outcomes of long-range polling...
...This threatens to undermine everything he has stood for in the past few years...
...But Broder was very uneasy about what he had written...
...Not totally misleading, that is to say, but about as likely to be wrong as right...
...Jimmy Carter...
...For instance, in the spring and early summer of 1975 he had worked on a lengthy series of political profiles for the Post, under the title of “The New Faces of Politics...
...Second only to youknowwho...
...He answers, with something approaching naivete at first, that “it might have been supposed that so liberated and even defiant a generation would have rejected Mr...
...Jimmy Carter might get 600 delegates, Jackson 700, but it will be hard for the leaders to get the nomination “even by trading among themselves...
...William Safire noted in Iowa last Novembercorrectly, I believe, although very much contrary to the prevailing wisdom: “We will be hearing from a generally happy land...
...He was a “spoiler,” Kraft said, who had “no chance” of being the nominee...
...Let’s not pretend otherwise...
...I see no one else who can beat me,” Carter told Perry...
...A certain apathy quotient is necessary to make all institutions work, and things really go to pot when everybody is simultaneously pressing claims to the limit...
...If Campaign ’76 has shown anything, it has shown the meaninglessness of long-range polls...
...In July 1975, then, William Shannon, a member of The New York Times editorial board, delivered himself of a tirade ‘against Wallace, because “his venture into the Democratic primaries is another pleasurable opportunity to discharge venom and mischief as well as generate publicity...
...Hubert Humphrey...
...The following week Carter beat Wallace in Florida, showing “that the country is gradually nursing itself back to political health,” but Carter’s chances were only so-so, Kraft felt...
...Our true skill lies in inventing imaginative rationalizations after the fact for any implausible thing that occurs...
...Beneath the nasty innuendoes and the false bravado,” Shannon wrote, “there is the whine of self-pity in the Wallace propaganda themes...
...It seems likely to me that Washington and detente are being made scapegoats for a sense of national humiliation...
...The “wine-and-cheese liberals,” as Sen...
...Clearly Kraft was not...
...Joe Kraft was described by Timothy Crouse in The Boys on the Bus as a “legendarily aggressive social climber, a member of the set of Georgetown journalists who did much of their legwork on tennis courts and at supper parties...
...If done effectively enough, of course, this could have resulted in Carter going the way of Wallace, and the happy restoration of someone like Humphrey or Kennedy, or even Terry Sanford, if need be...
...The only names that show up in such polls are “old” names-those that became known in earlier campaigns-and the “new” faces, inevitably, remain unknown...
...There is a greater taboo surrounding this subject than there is surrounding one’s weekly visit to the psychiatrist, for example...
...Just ai sports writers provide an analysis of the “significance” of next week’s contest, so political writers analyze next week‘s “crucial” primary, even though it may have no special significance...
...It should be added, by the way, that Watergate and Vietnam are not comparable events, and it betrays a certain simple-mindedness to give them equal billing...
...Even earlier, it might have been vaguely recalled, another Georgian had made his announcement, but in a March 1975 column entitled “The Democratic Vacuum,” David Broder had not seen much hope for him...
...Others recently have tried to explain this, suggesting Carter’s southern origin, which undoubtedly is a factor...
...But, as things turned out, Wallace did fade away, and the country as a result seemed to become more conservative...
...You know, in ’68 The New York Times, for instance, said it was rBcist to talk about law and order, but that was the main thing Maynard Jackson of Atlanta and Thomas Bradley of Los Angeles ran on...
...on permissiveness towards criminals...
...In March 1975, The New York Times Magazine pub lished an article by a Washington lawyer named Milton Gwirtzman specifically arguing that it was no longer possible for the provincials to make it all the way to the big city...
...The following week Kraft spotted Jimmy Carter on the horizon, “still the front runner in Iowa,” but, warned Kraft, “it is increasingly doubtful that he can build the momentum necessary to go all the way...
...Tom Wicker took note of Carter in October 1975, suggesting that “the press and the politicians-both of whom customarily spend much time preparing to fight the last war-have underesti- mated the new boys...
...There have been plenty of successes: The regional press, as David Broder noted, picked up on Carter quicker than tbe natjonal press, although The New York Times did an early series on “One Man’s Pursuit of the Democratic James Reston Presidential Nomination” (by Christopher Lydon) ahd happily chose Cartef...
...is a damn serious candidate for the Democratic nomination, and he’s not doing badly...
...Carter “drowns in a sea of piety the central events of the recent past...
...It is worth noting that Sanford’s entry into the race was, most unusually, hailed editorially by The Washington Post as “the beginning of wisdom,” in one of only two Post editorials on the campaign in 1975-the other warning Ford not to appease the Republican right wing...
...Edwards to say publicly what many of his colleagues were saying off the record...
...An article critical of Kraft in this magazine by James Fallows prompted a number of such journalists to take up their pens and rush obediently to his side...
...and on forced busing...
...Northern editors and reporters discover his charm and intelligence...
...Right on the money...
...I think that if Ronald Reagan gets up the nerve to challenge Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination, he may be a lot tougher than anybody supposes...
...there is little chance to ‘stop Wallace’ in the primaries...
...By this stage Ford was beginning to look better and better to Kraft, and he concluded that the “Democrats remain open to being picked apart by Gerald Ford...
...By the time of the 1976 campaign the kind of adjectives one heard associated with Kraft’s dinner parties were “glittering” and “influential,” and he had become an important opinion-maker among journalists not anxious to stray too far from whatever the currently accepted wisdom might be...
...In his own state, said Mr...
...But it seems that, while Mr...
...What confused the political writers was that Wallace was continuing to do very well in the polls-he was the choice of 31 per cent of those polled a year ago, for example-and political commentators, often having nothing better to go by, go by the polls...
...Carter precisely because he gives public witness to his religious conviction-and of course many of them do...
...one read in The Washington Post that Carter “romped to victory” in Arkansas, and that Udall “limped home third” in Kentucky...
...A similar folly prevailed the following week, when Carter once again got the largest number of delegates, but was reckoned “the loser, if there was one,” in The Washington Star by Jack Germond (who has been prone to this kind of misleading analysis), because Carter ran behind the “uncommitted” slate in Rhode Islanddecreed as the contest that week...
...Similarly, when coverage of an election that does not take place until November 1976 begins early in 1975, as has happened, the misleading conclusion is bound to be drawn soon enough that no “frontrunners,” no “new faces” are emerging, even before the first primary...
...The reader here The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 will take note of the danger inhereht in accepting the judgment of politicians as gospel-another lesson, as they say, of this primary season...
...Kraft asked a few days later...
...A Frightful Queerness’ Like Kraft, Reston is well known for dining with topsiders, but unlike Kraft’s, Reston’s antennae really do seem to pick up a few ideas from time to time...
...What had happened to Muskie...
...In addition, there was no mention of Georgia, the home state of another candidate who in 1975 announced his jntention to seek nomination by the Democratic PartyJulian Bond, the liberals’ darling in the Deep South, who may well have felt slighted by this omission...
...Similarly, Sanford’s candidacy was saluted in a New York Times editorial as being “good for the party...
...This leisure class, 16 of course, includes many of those who live in Washington, for whom politics is an addiction in much the same way that baseball or football can be if you start following the results closely...
...Kraft revised Carter’s convention delegate count up to 800, which “would at least make him a prime candidate for Vice President...
...He remains a viable political force because too many Americans feel sorry for themselves, and he makes their pvling heard in the land...
...Then Reston really puts his finger down on the crucial point, for the first time: “Quite a few people regard him as a throwback to the age of illusion and even as a personal rebuke to their hard-won emancipation, and their liberating ‘life-style.’ ” Personal rebuke: I think Reston makes a great discovery there...
...foreign aid handouts...
...Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie...
...But he might get a big bloc of delegatesenough to force a brokered convention “ending with the selection of Hubert Humphrey or Edmund Muskie...
...1976 has been a year of changing conventional wisdom (a change that has been stubbornly resisted by liberals, whose point of view, it could be said, tends to be defined by the conventional wisdom), which is what has made this election so unusually interesting, and perhaps comparable in significance to the election of President Roosevelt in 1932 and the advent of the New Deal...
...It was true, of course, that Wallace had in the past made an overtly racist pitch to voters, but he was not doing so in 1975...
...This happened most particularly on May 25, when there were six primaries-three in southern states, the others in Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada...
...The old Democratic coalition was “cracking apart,” suggesting that Jackson would not do so well as he had claimed in New York, “nor Morris Udal1 as well as he hopes in Wisconsin...
...This presentiment, of course, looked rather odd from the vantage point of Washington, D. C., but it had been nurtured in Broder’s talks with fund raisers and precinct workers across the country, who “sense the country is moving in a conservative direction, which it surely is...
...Reston withdrew to his retreat in Fiery Run, Virginia, to ponder the matter: how is it that “so many people in this secularized and largely agnostic country have given their votes to a devout evangelical Southern Baptist...
...In a survey of the contenders, none of whom was then showing “any real sign of strength,” Broder established that “Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia, is getting the best local press as he travels...
...It consisted of these points: an attack on the high taxation of the middle class and on the burgeoning Washington bureaucracy...
...gave readers accurate advance warning that Campaign ’76 would become, in its appeal to the leisure class of newspaper readers with the spare hours to peruse weekly tabulated delegate counts and lengthy assessments of “front runners,” “also-rans,” and “bantam contenders”even what NBC unblushingly called “Superbowl” on the night of the California primary-the sporting event of 1976...
...And so, as it were, Joe Kraft ended up a Republican...
...Fighting the Last War’ One should not be too critical of the columnists...
...In addition, the idea that more government is not necessarily better government was not acknowledged by The Washington Post, and denigrated by The New York Times...
...This lack of intense public interest in politics may not be all that bad,” Kraft thought...
...Wallace’s constituency-the middle class-continues to make itself heard, only this time it looms much larger (in the form of votes for Carter or Reagan or Ford, who are not so easily discredited as Wallace), thus creating the impression of a rightward swing in the country...
...But they go on again as before, isolated, with the same old arguments and political tricks, knowing the world is different, but not knowing quite what to do about it...
...On his return to the capital from Orlando, Kraft began to make careful delegate counts...
...and this has been most particularly evident in The New York Times’ coverage of this campaign...
...It is here, especially, that the liberal bias of the fashionable press has proved misleading...
...In any event, Wallace’s “agenda” has now been very largely adopted by the front runners of both Republican and Democratic Parties...
...It is fascinating to read, for example, early in October 1975, the following : “If you talk to them separately [mentioned in the paragraph above were Ford, Reagan, Humphrey, Jackson, Kennedy, and Muskie] you find a common thread: They all sense that the old techniques are not working, that a frightful queerness has come into life, that events are beyond their control...
...It is an easy matter to go back over old clips and point with glee to fallacious assessments...
...who seeks the Holy Grail...
...He gives a strange interpretation on this unexpected turn of events...
...Which may well be the last serious word on the primaries...
...There were enough uncommitted dele gates shaping up “for an outsider such as Hubert Humphrey...
...Sometimes it seemed at the outset of the campaign that Bond might get more coverage than Carter in the “liberal” press (a word since mercifully striken from the political lexicon by Morris Udall, in a development that was itself not foreseen by the liberal press...
...A survey of the campaign as reported in The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1975 shows the following: There was, with a few very isolated exceptions, no premonition in these papers of the “ideas” that unexpectedly came to dominate the campaign- the “an ti-W ashington” mood of the voters, with its corollary that the “new faces” would indeed be new and would be governors or ex-governors rather than senators or congressmen or other Washington insiders...
...The columnist who has most plainThe Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 ly revealed all these matters is Joseph Kraft...
...About as great as that of being struck by lightning...
...For the scorekeepers, Reston had seen “momentum” in September 1975...
...In effect, Gwirtzman said, this was because televised hearings enabled senators to grab hold of topical issues and thereby get lots of publicity...
...And the following week, Kraft gave the following advice to Ford: “Think very hard about winning without the South...
...Meanwhile, it might have been worth somebody’s time to take note of what Wallace was saying...
...Kraft’s presidential preference would soon enough become clear...
...Another oddity...
...Mary McGrory is another good example-her mental apparatus is apparently stuck hopelessly in 1968, no doubt to remain there indefinitelybut Kraft’s columns about the campaign reveal themselves as an exquisite study in liberal angst, 197 6-style...
...The well-nigh unmentionable subjects are those little matters, Watergate and Vietnam...
...Edward VI1 may well have felt the same way if coal miners ever crossed his mind...
...If this is the case,” Gwirtzman wrote, “what chance do the [provincial] Democratic candidates have to catch fire in the 12 months before the primaries...
...David Broder, The Washington Post’s leading political commentator, summed up the problem neatly when he wrote this May: “There’s a special Pulitzer Prize for Prophecy awaiting any journalist with clips showing advanced knowledge that the two most powerful messages in American politics in this bicentennial year would be: 1) ‘Love to everybody from Jimmy and Rosalynn and little Amy...
...contends that in a three-way Georgia primary Carter would run behind both Wallace and him...
...Research assistance for this article was provided by Nancy Hearon...
...Don’t laugh,” Perry wrote...
...Carter and his inner circle are not versed in the great problems of national and international affairs, and no set of storebought advisers can remedy that weakness,” adding that John Kennedy, too, had been a neophyte, but he had been in the U. S. Senate, after all, and finally Kraft turned with some relief to Ford...
...But it would certainly be misleading to give the impression that Broder was always wrong...
...Like William Shannon, he regarded Wallace as one who “caters to envy and resentment...
...At the same time Tom Wicker of The New York Times was displaying the conventional prejudice against Wallace by saying that the Governor merely regarded the Democratic Party as a vehicle for his “fierce hunger for power and recognition,” concluding that “despite the rose-colored hopes of former governors Jimmy Carter and Terry Sanford...
...The most striking feature of the presidential campaign is the The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 deliberate turning away from two dominant affairs of the recent past,” he wrote...
...In March, Kraft took up the sporting metaphor, seeing the primaries not as “a golf game where one player can take a big lead and breeze to victory,” but more like “ a tennis t ornament” from which “there emerge leaders,” but since “none of the players are all that strong, an outsider could still come in at the last minute and take the nomination...
...in fact, it could be said that this notion was subtly repudiated by both newspapers...
...George Wallace is apt to be even more of a force in the 1976 election than he was in past national races...
...Liberals had been right about Wallace in the ’60s-he had been a racist-and so they were confident that they were right about him again in the ’70s-he merely catered to those who “feel sorry for themselves...
...But almost certaiqly more important is his religion...
...The press not only knew, and repeatedly said, that the analogy Wallace had drawn between himself and FDR was false-Roosevelt was not paralyzed from the waist down as Wallace was-but, far more significantly, the press also knew that it had no intention of being kind to Wallace, as it had been to Roosevelt, by not photographing him being trundled about in a wheelchair...
...But in one respect the article was tndy prophetic: its title, “Who’s On First...
...Beyond that there has been the Campaign As Sporting Event, which for most people has been undoubtedly its most important aspect...
...But, not surprisingly, two days after talking to Governor Edwards, Apple wrote a story on Wallace’s growing popularity, saying that he would go to the convention with possibly 40 per cent of the delegates...
...Tom Bethell is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...It is true to say, then, that one of the major misperceptions of this campaign derived from a failure to understand Wallace’s appeal...
...But what was Wallace actually saying...
...Edwards, who is a backer of Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, Mr...
...his list, of course, included the states of three politicians who never did announce their candidacies (Muskie, Rockefeller, and Kennedy), and a fourth who, at the time the article appeared in June 1975, had not announced (Bayh...
...The mental outlook of some of our renowned opinion leaders has really been very strange recently...
...Consider: In June 1975, at a convention of the Democratic governors in New Orleans, Governor Edwin Edwards of Louisiana, Wallace’s neighbor, was quoted by R.W...
...Now, one year later, it is less so...
...And this happened time and again...
...With Wallace, of course, it was only a matter of hours before TV cameras showed his being tipped back at 45 degrees as he was lifted onto platforms...
...The economy” has undoubtedly been one of the most grossly inflated “issues” in this election, the error being attributable in part to the recent economic recovery, but also in part to the political bias of a good many journalists...
...It may well be that the country has not, as I had assumed, taken the shocks of Watergate and Vietnam in stride,” he writes...
...His appeal derives its motive power from racial hatreds and fears and from the popular fantasy that there can be simple answers to complex problems such as criqe, poverty, and economic injustice...
...Don’t even snicker...
...The field is littered with the bones of those who let their ‘instincts’ blind them to what was going on...
...Promoting Hubert Later in the month Kraft rightly saw Reagan as a “sharp challenger to Ford,” but, oddly enough, as a challenge “from the center-not as expected, the far right...
...With considerable myopia for someone in so responsible a position in the press, Shannon continued: “The persistence of Mr...
...That same week, Julian Bond got a headline or two by calling Wallace a “hillbilly Hitler...
...The point about Sanford, of course, was that he was perceived as having a chance of knocking out Wallace in the South without, in the process, threatening to disturb the conventional wisdomwithout, that is, going so far as to espouse such Wallace-like ideas as criticizing the bureaucracy or detente...
...The religious approach, he felt, “heightens qualities apt to cloud Ckter’s prospects as the primary parade moves into more hotly contested industrial states...
...Broder’s own columns clearly illustrate the difficulties facing the political prognosticator...
...The press, in effect, “stipulated” victories for Carter in the southern states, for Governor Jerry Brown in Nevada, and for Senator Frank Church in Idaho, leaving Oregon as the “contest” to be focused upon...
...false detente” with the Soviets...
...Here he is in one of his better moments-July 20, 1975: “If you report politics for any period of time, you learn that nothing can be more misleading than your own hunches...
...No bad thing, he felt, from the vantage point of his Georgetown eyrie...
...Then, early in April, Joe Kraft wrote one of his most interesting columns, reflecting on Watergate and Vietnam- “issues ” which badly misled liberal columnists early in this campaign, as they continued to mislead Kraft here...
...Campaign writing is more and more tuning into a full-time job, inevitably with misleading results...
...The tendency of the press, and television, in the fmal few weeks of the primaries, was to “play up” certain primaries as being “significant” for no reason other than the fact that a close contest was expected...
...He had a serious issue going for him this time, namely the neglect of blue-collar, middleclass, 18 middle-American interests by a Democratic Party that had been taken over by an upper-middle-class elite that was forever taking up the cudgels on behalf of some new minority-the smaller the better...
...inequitable farm policies...
...The upshot was that 24 Carter ended the day with a gain of 107 delegates in all these states, Church with 30, Brown with 13, and Udall with three...
...Kraft’s instinct was that the slow bumbler “may do better than the knight...
...Crouse notes that “the single most influential piece of journalism” written in the 1968 presidential campaign was by Joe Kraft, a column in which Kraft noted, accurately, that “most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary America-in Middle America...
...By January 1976 Kraft was back on track, correctly discerning that “all the signs [in the Republican race] indicate a long drawn out, bitter head-tehead fight which will take Ford and Reagan down to the wire in the fashion of the Eisenhower-Taft 20 battle of 1952...
...Professional assessors of the campaign have become known as “handicappers...
...He has three shining virtues: candor, humor, and, above all, a lack of political bias (or at least the appearance of such), giving his columns a sense of genuinely disinterested appraisal that is rare in political commentary...
...inaction in the energy field...
...There was that momentum, making an early appearance...
...Inflating Watergate A few days later Kfaft led off his column with the observation that “You can practically hear the tearing and splitting noises,” and there was some truth to that...
...Sanford was a university president, after all, and thus could be expected to keep the liberal faith-not like Carter, the peanut farmer, who was “fuzzy on the issues,” which became the code way of saying that you didn’t like his stand on the issues...
...but Carter, who had considerably increased his lead, was deemed to have “lost” the day b e cause Church beat him in Oregon...
...Poor Broder’s remarkably erroneous perception of the peanut farmer at this very early stage of the campaign (suggesting that he did not even have Georgia tied up) could conceivably have been based on information supplied by Julian Bond himself, who is a member in good standing of the “Quote Circuit” and a name in every editor’s Rolodex, as was suggested two months later when a Nation writer (mercifully anonymous) reported that “Julian Bond...
...In the first place, Wallace’s great personal handicap, that of having to campaign from a wheelchair, was known in advance...
...Muskie was now clearly out of it...
...In the late primaries, of course, there was an overpowering temptation to play up the “sporting contest” aspect of the campaign...
...And another thing is that the great mass of middle-class America is probably in the greatest state of anguish and discontent that they’ve ever been in...
...Is America ready for a Christian President from the South...
...Jack Germond noted in The Washington Star that in North Carolina Carter could “look ahead to a replay of the Florida contest against Wallace,” and that Jackson’s Massachusetts victory “altered the early handicapping” for the nomination...
...Despite his shortcomings, Broder comes across as among the best of the political commentators appearing in The Washington Post, The Washington Star, or The New York Times...
...When they spread out the facts and follow the trends into the future, they have a shrinking and fugitive sense that something is happening to them and the nation, so that life will never be quite the same...
...All the more clearly, then, does one perceive in his columns the problems that the pundits have encountered in covering this remarkable presidential campaign...
...Roosevelt was President for 12 years before such photographs were published...
...The weekly primaries, the changing delegate counts, the charts and tables of front runners, the “forecasting” of the next “crucial” primary, can in sum induce an addiction that is identical to a sports addiction...
...Wallace...
...that is clearly beyond us...
...and 2) ‘To hell with tin-horn dictator Torrijos from Nancy and Ron.’ ” Broder added with a good deal of accuracy, although whether with accompanying irony it was hard to tell, that “the real work of political journalism is not to provide advance insights into coming events...
...Jackson so felicitously described the% have,, I think, been truly staggered to find that a presidential candidate could make headway in America in 1976 while being quite open about, and in fact drawing attention to, his religious beliefs...
...There was also a second and far more serious error-that of underrating the Wallace constituency by dismissing it as an aberrational vestige of racism in an otherwise enlightened nation...
...James M. Perry wrote a story for the National Observer in May 1975, entitled “Don’t Laugh At ‘ Jimmy Carter...
...How else to explain something as unreasonable as the anti-Washington mood...
...So do me a favor,” he ended his column, “and @get I ever mentioned that hunch The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 . . . unless, of course, it comes true...
...But the political writers, nevertheless, go chasing after those doing well in the polls and not surprisingly report back (as happened time and again in this campaign-before New Hampshire) that none of the new candidates seemed to be catching on...
...Polls, then, are a snare for the press, but so are the pols...
...He plugged Hubert H. Uncommitted once again in April, noted with enormous condescension that “Mr...
...The handsome, 47-year-old Cajun dismissed as ‘an exercise in futility’ the notion that southern governors running as favorite sons might head off Mr...
...This seems to have been the result of something very like wishful thinking on the part of a number of allegedly “liberal” editorial writers and columnists, who were thus able to persuade themselves, and mislead their readers, into thinking that if only Wallace personally would go away, their vision of government (with Hubert Humphrey at the helm) would finally come to pass...
...He foresaw “a fluid period with a lot of wheeling and dealing just before or during the convention itself, perhaps to the benefit of Sen...
...Gwirtzman went on to point out that this problem was particularly acute for those out of office, such as Jimmy Carter and Fred Harris...
...The misperception of Wallace is worth looking into in greater detail because it seems, in retrospect (unlike some other errors in political forecasting), so inexcusable...
...The resistance to change in the conventional wisdom manifested itself most strikingly in a great search, undertaken by Steven Brill and others, to uncover signs of a racist background to Carter or, indeed, any slight deviation from the liberal orthodoxy that could conceivably be unearthed...
...In a recent colump he comes closer than anyone, I believe, to explaining the ferocious resentment of Carter that surfaced when he became the likely nominee...
...The series consisted of visits to ten states in which political developments relevant to the upcoming campaign could be expected to occur...
...One doesn’t know where they “stand on the is sues,” after all...
...He could be right,” the Nation writer allowed...
...Such had been the shock of this campaign, revealing, as I believe, extraordinarily strong class and regional prejudice among our “elite” writers and thinkers of the northeast, who undoubtedly see Jimmy Carter as a manifestation of the fundamental “tackiness” endemic to the American hinterland-and now actually knocking on the gates of the citadel of power...
...After wins in Pennsylvania and Texas, Carter swiftly became just too Evans and Novak much for Joe Kraft to take...
...The outsider’s cheap shot at Washington,” Kraft calls it...
...The ten states were: California (where former Governor Ronald Reagan was the man to watch), Alabama (Governor George Wallace), Washington (Henry Jackson), Maine (Edmund Muskie), New York (Vice President Nelson Rockefeller), Indiana (Birch Bayh), Arizona (Morris Udall), North Carolina (former Governor Terry S an f or d ), Massachusetts (Edward Kennedy), and Michigan (President Ford...
...One who already had-to his credit, under the prejudiced circumstances surrounding him-was New York Times columnist James Reston, who had interviewed Wallace in Montgomery and published portions of the transcript in the Times magazine...
...Of course, those “right-wing” votes had been there all along, but as Wallace votes they were discounted by liberal columnists as secret votes for racism and therefore not likely to be an enduring factor in American politics...
...There was, of course, a good deal of truth to this, but it was still decidedly unfashionable to say it...
...Some months later Jules Witcover published a “Wallace Agenda” in The Washington Post...
...Wallace’s Wheelchair Examination of the Times and the Post brings to light other serious early misperceptions of the campaign...
...They are recklessly frank in private...
...Not much...
...Kraft went on to advise his readers that in foreign policy “Reagan favored ‘detente’ to achieve peace with our adversaries...
...Even if another public event of the magnitude of Watergate were to evolve, they could not expect to be part of it...
...Anybody But Broder: Our Stop-t he-Columnists Movement by Tom Bethell Having studied a mountain of press clippings dealing with the presidential campaign, I’ve come to the conclusion that any connection between what the columnists, editorial writers, and POlitical savants said would happen this year and what actually has happened was purely accidental...
...Russell Baker noted ahead of the field (August 1975) that the Democratic Party was beginning to look like “a junk yard full of 1937 ideas and their 1964 retreads...
...And this is not merely the church-going regulars, though they are a numerous and powerful political force, but also the social weekend ‘believers’ who are not very happy with the ‘liberation’ or ‘style’ of their lives...
...Kraft was clearly getting nervous about Carter: “He is overconfident and stakes out claimssuch as reforming the federal governmentwhich he can’t back up...
...That in itself is a way of insinuating that Vietnam and Watergate were not national tragedies but local Washington scandals...
...But Shannon now snobbishly implied that the middle class did not belong in the Democratic Party, and he ended his column with a he a vy- h anded diatribe containing strong overtones of class warfare...
...The outsider, of course, would be an insider (perhaps a dining companion) from among “the heavies, notably Sens...
...Just as the liberal columnists inflated “the economy” as an issue, so they inflated Watergate...
...Joe Kraft is simply horrified that Americans now seem to think the country “was not wicked but good...
...Wallace’s political strength, however-despite his lack of seriousness, the emptiness of his ‘program,’ and the fraudulence of his posing as a Democrat-is a sinister phenomenon...
...Hyping the Newcomer There is more to this than metaphor, it is worth pointing out...
...Carter will lose this particular vote,” Reston continues mildly, “he is getting the support of a much wider constituency in America that longs for The Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 something it has lost and thinks he represents...
...Wallace has the backing of 60 per cent of the Democrats, and ‘neither Edwin Edwards nor Senator Bentsen nor anybody else could erode that support.’ ” As it turned out, however, Wallace got nine of Louisiana’s 41 delegates, Carter got 13, with the remainder being controlled by Governor Edwards...
...This occasionally leads him astray-he fretted unnecessarily for a while last fall that the campaign was going to produce nothing but old men and old faces-but he became interested in Governor Brown very early on, and he saw that governors, at least, were likely to play a big role in the campaign...
...And the result shows up . . . in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the kind of presidential candidates who appeal to them” This was quite true, of course, but by 1976 it all-too-clearly applied to Joe Kraft himself, who was by then in touch with Middle America to about the same extent that King Edward VI1 had been in touch with the thinking of Welsh coal miners...
...People on pne end are looked after, and people on the other end are looked after, but those in the middle have been looking after everybody...
...The point was, Kraft ended up, no one can doubt “that many of those who have so far restrained their enthusiasm for the announced candidates feel a cert ain partiality toward Sen...
...In “liberated” society, of course, if you have any religious beliefs, you keep quiet about them...
...What is particularly refreshing about his columns is the feeling, first, that he is genuinely interested in the well-being of the country, rather than in subtly denigrating it, as is the case with so many of his colleagues, and equally refreshing is the sense that he really does think for himself and doesn’t first hoist a damp finger into the air to determine which way the winds of opinion are blowing...
...Apple in The New York Times as follows: “It remained for Mr...
...Kraft was displeased to note that Carter “comes on as the ‘outsider’ running against the Washington establishment...
...The big issue, Kraft felt, was “the economy,” this being standard fare from journalists who are anxious to see a restoration of the New Deal...
...Here Gwirtzman demonstrated another of the principal misperceptions in the early reporting of the campaignthat issues, not “personalities,” were what counted...
...What chance did they have of gaining national attention...
Vol. 8 • July 1976 • No. 5
