Bam! Zap! Pow! Really?

Jon Margolis [1], former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of “The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964,” lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

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On the Monday after Easter, NBC’s Today show began its political coverage with co-host Matt Lauer calling the Democratic campaign “a real bare-knuckled brawl” just before introducing correspondent John Yang, who told the world that “the longer the seesaw battle’s gone on, the nastier it’s gotten, and now it seems it’s personal. It’s got all the intrigue, maneuvering, and infighting of a reality show.”

Whereupon a reality show intruded. There on the right side of the screen were Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; on the left Heidi Klum, hostess of “Project Runway,” telling them, “one of you will be named the winner, and one of you will be cut.”

OK, this was a fake. Klum had not really interviewed the candidates; NBC had just decided to use a bit of artful tape-splicing to illustrate the Democratic campaign/reality show nexus.

For the nonce, let’s ignore the ethics of this deception on the grounds that few were likely to have been deceived. Let’s concentrate not on how NBC made the point, but on the point made.

Which was? Presumably that the campaign now resembles a reality show. Because one will be named the winner and one will be cut? But we knew that. That’s how elections work. Only one candidate wins.

Or maybe it was that the campaign was getting “nastier” and “personal” and has become “a real bare-knuckled brawl.”

Except that NBC’s example of bare-knuckledness had nothing to do with anything Clinton said about Obama or vice versa. It was New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s account of his phone call to Clinton to tell her he was endorsing Obama. The conversation, Richardson said, got “a little heated … you know, a little tense. But it was understood.”

If this strikes you as “bare-knuckled,” you ain’t seen much fighting.

But that seems to be the prevailing view of the campaign coverage on television. NBC was hardly alone. On all the networks, correspondents and anchors seemed appalled by what they considered the vituperative tone of the Democratic campaign. On CNN one day, the crawl at the bottom of the screen wondered whether the Democrats could “survive” all this malevolence, and anchor John Roberts proclaimed the “divisions in the Democratic Party this year really kind of stunning.”

Stunningness is in the eye of the beholder. But it might be relevant here to point out that the candidates had barely criticized each other. The only comment that might be called nasty came from James Carville, an unofficial adviser to Clinton, who said nothing about Obama but compared Richardson to Judas. This was mean. But it was also so absurd that the net effect was simply to make Carville appear ludicrous.

It isn’t that the Clinton-Obama contest presents no danger to the eventual Democratic nominee. By week’s end almost every news organization had dealt with that possibility, and Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean was worrying about a debate that might “demoralize the base of the Democratic Party by having the Democrats attack each other.”

But there was an obvious difference in both content and tone between the print and electronic versions of the story. The newspaper coverage displayed at least some awareness that earlier nomination fights had been rougher than this one. The Washington Post’s Dan Balz even pointed out on March 26 that the drawn-out battle could be “good news for the Democrats.” More voters are registering as Democrats, Balz noted, and state and local party organizations were gaining valuable experience.

No nuance for the TV folks, though. On the air (or the cable), the prevailing outlook seems to be – “Wow! A fight!”

Even if neither contestant has thrown a punch with much zip in it.

Here an anti-corporate conspiracy theorist would suggest that the suits in the network corporate offices had ordered their correspondents to make much of little because conflict is what gets ratings. But it’s more likely that the TV newsies themselves are so obsessed by the personal and the dramatic that they confuse disagreement with mayhem.

But the new hypersensitivity seems not limited to journalists. Perhaps it’s the spirit of the times, what with all the attention spent on people’s feelings and not hurting them.

Consider the only recent remark by either candidate that could be interpreted as a criticism of the other, Clinton’s claim that the former minister of Obama’s Chicago church, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he of the occasional outlandish declaration, “would not have been my pastor,” that she would have – and by implication Obama should have – switched congregations.

In reply, Obama spokesman Bill Burton called it “disappointing to see Hillary Clinton's campaign sink to this low.”

Disparaging Obama’s intelligence, sanity, integrity or ancestry might qualify as low. Making the suggestion that a person ought to think about leaving a church whose pastor is a bit dippy is reasonable, if perhaps not central to the campaign. But these days everybody likes to play the role of put-upon victim, so there seems to be political advantage in the “look how mean she’s being to us” reply.

There is also the problem of memory or lack thereof.  In the past two presidential elections, both party nominations were won so quickly that intra-party wrangling never really got a chance to flourish. So if life began in 2000, the present proceedings might seem mean.

But life actually started a few years earlier than that. The Clinton-Obama contest is no harsher than the hostility between supporters of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan in 1976, or Jimmy Carter and Sen. Edward Kennedy in 1980. Yes, Ford and Carter lost those general elections, but not because of their pre-convention nomination contests. Ford might have won in 1976 had Reagan campaigned for him after the convention. But he probably would have won had he not pardoned Richard Nixon two years earlier, with or without the Reagan challenge. And Carter would have lost in 1980 had there been no Kennedy campaign.

There was ample animosity between Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1980, and it was not confined to supporters and surrogates. Bush was tougher on Reagan’s key issue – the “supply side” tax cut that would, Reagan insisted, actually lead to more government revenue. Bush called that “voodoo economics.” Reagan was not pleased. He didn’t much like Bush. But Reagan was not foolish, either. He put Bush on the ticket.

Perhaps one explanation for the relative shortage of memory is that fewer folks who remember are covering the campaign. Writing in the American Journalism Review, Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi noted that “ leading news organizations are sending younger and less experienced reporters into the field.” As a result, Farhi quotes former NBC News political director Elizabeth Wilner saying,  “They don't have the long view. They’re very much focused on the next five minutes … so the coverage lacks depth and historical focus. They just don’t know a different approach.”

A little more memory might have provided the context necessary to interpret the one piece of news last week that did seem to portend peril for the Democrats. This was the Gallup Poll released March 26 showing that 19 percent of Obama supporters would vote for Republican John McCain if Clinton wins the nomination, and an even larger 28 percent of Clinton’s supporters would vote for McCain if Obama ends up as the Democratic nominee.

That’s a pretty impressive and (for Democrats) discouraging degree of defection. It’s also par for the course at this stage of the race. In March of 2000, the Pew Center for the People and the Press released a survey showing that 51 percent of the Republicans and independents who backed McCain’s challenge to George W. Bush would vote for Al Gore if Bush won the Republican nomination. Some Democrats were just as miffed, with 10 percent of the Democrats (and 39 percent of the independents) who supported Bill Bradley over Gore saying they would vote for Bush in the general election.

That’s not what happened. In the polarized politics of 2000, almost all the Republicans voted for Bush, almost all the Democrats and at least half the independents for Gore. Here in the Internet age, it should have been easy for any reporter to find that information about the polling in 2000. But in fairness to reporters, here in the Internet age, they might not have had time. In that American Journalism Review article, Paul Farhi quotes Time magazine senior political analyst Mark Halperin noting that “everyone who is on a campaign plane now is asked to do much more than four, eight or 12 years ago … you’re not only just trying to produce a top-quality story on deadline for the newspaper, you’re also being asked to write for the Web, to make an appearance on TV, to file a blog item, and so on.”

At week’s end, a new poll from the Pew Research Center came out indicating that the Clinton-Obama wrangling had done neither candidate any discernible harm. Both led McCain by just about the same margins as the month before.

Perhaps voters, most of whom have tougher lives than most journalists, can more easily tell the difference between a real fight and a few hissy fits.