Researching a Time magazine piece about Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton, historian-journalist Garry Wills last Wednesday visited Clinton`s mother in Hot Springs, Ark. He was not alone.
The Philadelphia Inquirer had been there the day before and, as Wills sat with Clinton`s mom, ”the phone kept ringing all day from other reporters wanting to talk with her,” he recalled.
The Northwestern University professor said he made the trip partly because, after writing books on Thomas Jefferson, Richard Nixon, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, he believes that ”character is a better predictor” of a president than a candidate`s policy positions.
It`s something to remember as a nearly lethal dose of media scrutiny is injected into the body politic and, when mixed with spicy rumor, leaves citizens wondering what`s important.
Jefferson, Abe Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were no strangers to vigorous and dirty campaigns, but they didn`t come close to experiencing the psyche-to-toe probings from a trade without the most minimal entry
requirements. Just imagine ”Geraldo” doing ”Tom Jefferson and Slave Women: Did He or Didn`t He?”
Today`s White House hopefuls confront press practitioners of grotesquely varied aptitude, ranging from cerebral analysts such as Wills to tabloid TV hosts, some armed with the tools of journalism, psychiatry and gravedigging.
There are long newspaper and magazine cover stories, dissecting past deeds, current policy claims and apparent inconsistencies. Paid commercials are pored over as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. No public appearance goes unwatched; no gesture or pause unstudied; no past romance unquestioned.
The media armies dwarf not just the trickles of 50 or 100 years ago, but those of 8 or 12 years back. Where once one or two dozen newspapers, the TV networks and a few magazines and radio networks sought an hour or more alone with a candidate, now the requests soar into the hundreds.
Even financially strained local TV stations, beneficiaries of the age of the satellite, travel the campaign trail and request ”one-on-ones,”
demanding from a candidate the same (well-rehearsed) personal minutiae for the audience back in Peoria or Syracuse.
But in asking thousands of questions, one remains: Does this make for a citizenry more informed about choosing a president? The answer is surely yes, but with many qualifications.
”Saturday Night Live” last week spoofed C-Span, the austerely run cable channel beloved by political junkies. It portrayed C-Span following George Bush on a mindless foray into a New Hampshire coffee shop ”with our only camera.” Afterward, the parody heralded next week`s prize catch: ”Paul Tsongas visits a sock factory outside Nashua, N. H.”
Supporting players and non-players don`t escape. Vice President Dan Quayle inspired a recent (and puffy) seven-part series in The Washington Post. Even the Great Un-candidate, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, went polysyllable to polysyllable with ABC`s Ted Koppel for 30 minutes on ”Nightline.”
Planeloads of reporters are in Arkansas or headed there. Most won`t admit it but, especially for those lacking the stature or self-confidence of a Wills, there`s a pressure to come up with something new, hopefully something big, probably the better if negative.
Clinton, whose rumored infidelities inspired a somewhat defensive Koppel to examine the matter on ”Nightline” Thursday, is tagged the Democratic front-runner by some vaguely mystical force. Competition spurs reporters to act like prosecutors cross-examining murder defendants or defense lawyers seeking to sully alleged rape victims.
What results is an avalanche of information-facts, half-facts, quarter-facts and balderdash-that, together, dwarfs what we knew in the past about candidates, according to Texas Christian University historian Paul Boller Jr. Boller, author of ”Presidential Campaigns,” notes that Lincoln didn`t campaign and it really wasn`t until William Howard Taft in 1908 that candidates regularly started making their own speeches.
”I`m not really sure if Lincoln could get elected today,” Boller said.
”He`d served only one term in Congress and really didn`t speak too well in public, though people were impressed by his intellect.”
The evolution of radio, TV and many statewide primaries altered the process. Meanwhile, press dispositions changed.
Where a compliant group once held tight to knowledge of the disintegrating health of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy`s womanizing, now the media are inclined to tell, or insinuate, much more.
Baltimore Sun columnist Roger Simon cites the ”explosive growth of personality journalism,” including the 1974 birth of what became the most influential magazine of the 1980s, People.
Simon, who chronicled the 1988 presidential campaign in a book, ”Road Show,” believes a growing focus on personality joined the press` sense that the public had been ill-served by the traditional ”what the candidate said today on the stump” story.
”The problems of Richard Nixon and Watergate were problems of personality,” Simon says.
And the makeup of the national political reporting corps changed. A new breed, fans of the journalistic writing of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, wanted to do more than to show up in a state, call the county chairmen of both parties, listen to a few speeches, gather some polling data, and write.
A stock academic criticism of political coverage is that it`s too ”horse race” oriented, places too much emphasis on who`s up or down. But one political scientist, Emmett Buell Jr. of Ohio`s Denison University, determined that to be an unfair charge in his book on the 1988 campaign, ”Nominating the President.”
He analyzed early coverage by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Atlanta Constitution and Chicago Tribune and concluded that
”any interested citizen stood to learn a great amount about the candidates and their stands on substantive issues. And the major papers tended to be critical when candidates offered only slogans.”
”I don`t know many college professors who could turn out such quality given the lack of time for reflection,” Buell says.
Notice, though, that Buell`s first impulse is to mention accounts and analyses of policy, not character. That omission appears to be one of the flaws of media coverage and the campaign process itself. There are many.
Remember the hoopla in 1988 over the early release of Massachusetts inmate Willie Horton and how Bush`s use of Horton and the death penalty issue in his TV ads devastated Michael Dukakis?
Now, did you know that the issue was old, and seemingly settled in Massachusetts, and that a small paper already had won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the case? What does it say about the quality of our campaigns that this incident could rise from the ashes to significance?
Another flaw may be that increasing fixture of campaigns, the debate. It`s dubious whether the skills that debate demands are those needed to be president. If we wanted people who adroitly regurgitate answers without counsel, maybe we should elect the top contestants on game shows like
”Jeopardy!”
How a person reacts under stress, not in the structured setting of a debate, surely is more important in judging a prospective president. Yet our system doesn`t seem to care, or provide any avenue to judge that.
Bush is open to tough inquiry on, among other matters, how he acted before and during the war with Iraq and an invasion of Panama whose merits are dubious. But the press is more intent on assessing candidate position papers on the economy, which themselves may be rewrites of musty think-tank treatises.
Coming to terms with a candidate`s cultural background and psyche seems much more relevant, especially in assessing how he might act in a crisis, nuclear or otherwise.
It`s not easy, especially for journalists emulating Sigmund Freud and employing 12-step self-help formulas to instant political diagnoses. Clinton may not be instantly understood by viewing him as an adult child of an alcoholic father.
What Wills calls for is a coming to terms with a person`s entire social milieu, including the element that often scares a pack of journalists, who tend to have a secular bent: religion. Wills is right.
The media get nervous dealing with subjects who hold strong religious views, seeing them as zealots or fakes.
”Jimmy Carter`s Southern religiosity helped inform how he performed,”
Wills said. ”He couldn`t have pulled off the Camp David accords (between Israel and Egypt) without that.”
So Wills didn`t talk to Clinton`s mother last week because he wanted grade school factoids.
He`s trying to understand the cultural milieu of Arkansas, itself portrayed by much of the press as a homogeneous dirt-poor backwater. He`s less interested in Clinton`s use of a supposedly ”regressive” sales tax to fund education as governor than in coming to terms with the populist streak that cuts against the grain of a state that strongly fought school integration.
If he does his job well, he may deflate a few myths, add a few facts and broaden a body of knowledge in a world where the instant transmission of the media`s handiwork is a curse but, all in all, probably a blessing.
