CAMPAIGN OUTSIDER Still taken in by 'what it takes'
By Muhammad Cohen
HONG KONG - Unless you live in Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Indiana and have
candidates coming to your neighborhood, you may think the presidential campaign
is dragging. That's because most media cover the campaign as a race - who's
ahead, who's behind - and with six weeks between heats, there's not a lot for
them to say during the lull.
The candidates try to help fill the gap. Now we have "Bittergate" after Barack
Obama told a fundraiser that he understood why voters were "bitter" about
government's failure to deal with economic issues that matter most to them.
These "bitter" voters instead look to sideshow issues such as faith, illegal
immigration and guns. He could have said the same thing about the Iraq
war
or healthcare. The professional political class that includes most of the media
prefers hot-button banalities; forgive me, gay friends, but who benefited from
having same-sex marriage on the 2004 electoral agenda?
Naturally, Obama's remarks launched a new sideshow about his remarks. At least
this row, while offensive to the electorate's intelligence, it is amusing as
Hillary Clinton and John McCain try to portray Obama as an out-of-touch
elitist. Obama's previous attempt to speak truthfully about the big issue of
race (See Black and
white and barely read at all Asia Times Online, March 26) hasn't
ignited a nationwide debate of on the subject.
But it has given the Republicans, if not an increasingly desperate Clinton, in
her campaign to convince superdelegates to subvert the party rank and file
will, the "typical white person" sound bite and another sideshow to exploit.
The Illinois senator has thoughtful answers to these issues and the assaults
they inspire, but thoughtful answers are precisely what the political class
loves twisting into simplistic attacking points.
Power ammo
It doesn't even have to be the candidate who does the talking to give the
ammunition for missing the point. Former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha
Power's sensible statement that his Iraq withdrawal plans would depend on
conditions when Obama took office, rather than a timetable conceived a year in
advance, not only got her fired. Now her words give Clinton - who voted to
authorize the war in Iraq and has never admitted it was a mistake - an opening
to say that Obama - who opposed the war from the start and has the same
position on ending the war as Clinton - doesn't know if he wants to end the war
or not. It's a lie and Clinton knows it, but she can find flimsy justification
to say it.
The reasons why news media bothers to cover all of this blather is more
complicated, but no more high-minded. The justification for elevating every bit
of ... um ... verbal diarrhea that comes out of the candidates' mouths to news
is that it all impacts the race. The campaign is a race and the race is the
thing.
It's far easier to cover the presidential campaign as a race because it doesn't
require getting bogged down in confusing issues. Issues do matter when you see
the contest as a race, but only to the extent they impact the race. A
candidate's position on Iraq or stem cell research matters, not because of the
lives that may be lost or saved because of a particular position but strictly
in terms of how many votes that position will change in the upcoming election.
"... and Nader takes bronze ..."
If the winner of the presidential race got a gold medal and a shoe contract,
this type of coverage might make sense. But the winner of the presidential race
has to be president for the next four years. The nation, meaning the voters,
would be better served if the media provided information to help people judge
who would make the best president rather than tell people who is the best
candidate.
What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer's hugely influential chronicle of the
1988 campaign to succeed Ronald Reagan, gives reporters the intellectual
justification to cover elections the wrong way. What's most shocking perhaps is
that even in this limited, fundamentally flawed approach to campaign coverage,
the media still gets it wrong.
The book's faulty premise is that the campaign process, with its quirky demands
- from swaying with evangelical Christians in blizzardy Iowa and black Baptists
in blighted Charleston to sipping steaming cafe con leche and denouncing
Castro in blistering Miami - is the best test of a candidate's readiness to be
president. That's such a quaintly parochial notion - pity the other nations of
the world, stuck with inept leaders due to a selection process so inferior to
America's own - it almost makes you laugh.
Beware the power of a bad idea; take America's Iraq invasion as history's
latest reminder. Particularly in today's round-the-clock news cycle, media
embrace What It Takes as giving them cover to report anything about the
election they can because it impacts the race. Even by this patently stupid
standard, the media does a miserable job covering the campaigns.
Penn and tellers
Until Mark Penn stepped down as Hillary Clinton's chief strategist last week
after pushing a free-trade deal for Colombia that Clinton opposed, few voters
knew his name. Even fewer knew that, while steering the New York senator
through rocky shoals of the campaign course he set, Penn also ran the global
public relations and lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M). Not worked for
Burson-Marsteller, but ran it, and still does while still advising Clinton from
a lower spot on the totem pole.
Other B-M clients include tobacco giant Philip Morris, Iraq shoot 'em up
contractor Blackwater, and Countywide Financial, the largest US mortgage broker
that played regulators to create a crisis in America's housing market and
overall economy, a bath for shareholders in its fire sale to Bank of America,
and a 10-figure payout for its top executive. In addition to Penn, B-M's lineup
includes Penn's polling firm Penn Schoen and BKSH, a lobbying firm whose
principals include Charles Black, a senior advisor to John McCain who is
considered the Arizona senator's pipeline to the Republican establishment.
If you saw this kind of incestuous politics in a movie, you wouldn't believe
it, and if you heard about in Africa or Latin America, you'd shrug knowingly
and cackle, "No wonder they've got such a mess there."
But you barely heard or saw a word about it in America, particularly in
broadcast media. Although a candidate's campaign is supposed to reveal whether
they will make a good president, the media barely covers who the candidates
install to run these campaigns and what that tells us about the candidates. For
example, while McCain talks about being a maverick opponent of the Washington
establishment, his campaign teems with lobbyists like Black drawn from the very
heart of that establishment. Rightwingers note Black's political ancestry
traces back to North Carolina's Neanderthal former senator Jesse Helms.
Old school ties
Obama talks about a new style of politics, but his campaign team has plenty of
ties to the Democratic Party's recent inglorious past. Campaign manager David
Plouffe's roots run through Richard Gephardt's work on Capitol Hill and his
last failed presidential bid in 2004. Many other staffers have associations
with the other half of the Democratic Congressional leadership that guided the
party into minority, former top Senate Democrat Tom Daschle.
Obama media guru David Axelrod traces his political lineage to Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley Jr, whose father was the city's mayor during the riots outside
the 1968 Democratic Convention. According to one Chicago pol turned professor
in a 2007 profile, Axelrod now is "the guy who goes on television to defend
Daley from charges of corruption". Communications chief Robert Gibbs worked for
Fritz Hollings and John Kerry, and in 2004 was with the independent group whose
ads infamously linked Howard Dean, then the Democratic frontrunner, with Osama
bin Laden, still a sore point in some party circles.
But the real problem with judging a candidate by their campaign is that the
qualities to run a successful campaign - or pick a good campaign staff - aren't
necessarily the ones that will make you a good president. The current occupant
of the White House demonstrates that the ability to demonize your opponents and
misrepresent their positions in the lowest common terms aren't necessarily the
best qualification for the nation's highest office.
It's to the American voters' eternal discredit that they found George W Bush an
attractive candidate - twice - but there's no doubt that in both 2000 and 2004
his side ran the better campaign. Regardless of your chosen methodology,
judging who will be the best president is an inexact science. But if the media
had been paying more attention to something besides the horse race, voters may
have noticed that Bush had no interest in being president. That's a much better
leading indicator of what kind of president a candidate will be than anything
else you'll see on the campaign trail.
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the
world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com),
a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal,
high finance and cheap lingerie.
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