Post-Modern Campaign Needs Reporters Rooted in the Now

Jon Margolis [1], former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 [2]," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968 because the country, under Democratic Party dominance, was at war with itself. Come to think of it, the Democratic Party was undergoing its own civil war.

It was an exciting campaign. Starting off more than 20 points behind, burdened by an unpopular president waging an unpopular war and the third-party candidacy of George Wallace, Vice President Hubert Humphrey came on strong toward the end, finishing a mere seven-tenths of a percentage point behind Nixon in the popular vote.
 
Not because of brilliant campaign tactics or effective television commercials. Humphrey started coming up in the polls after he broke, however gently, with President Lyndon Johnson’s hawkishness on the Vietnam War, and especially after Johnson announced the United States would suspend the bombing of North Vietnam.

Progress in the Paris peace talks to end the war might have won it for Humphrey, but on the weekend before election day, possibly encouraged by agents of Nixon’s campaign, the South Vietnamese president said he would boycott the talks. Humphrey’s drive stalled just short.

The campaign mattered, but not as much as events outside the campaign – war and peace, the economy, racial antagonism. The news coverage reflected this reality. Of course, reporters wrote stories about polls, fund-raising and political strategy.  Campaign reporters are covering … a campaign, which is a process in and of itself.

But a campaign does not take place in a vacuum or without context, and in 1968 the reporters understood that context, as they did over the next few presidential elections: Nixon’s overwhelming re-election over a weak candidate of a divided party after the administration proclaimed (falsely, as it turned out) that peace was “at hand”; Jimmy Carter beating the never-elected Gerald Ford, who had hurt himself (though perhaps helped the country) by pardoning Nixon; Ronald Reagan’s victory over Carter during a time of economic “stagflation” and national humiliation thanks to the captivity of American diplomats in Iran; Reagan’s 1984 re-election against the backdrop of peace and economic growth.

In all these contests, the campaigns had their interesting moments. Could Ford have won had he not foolishly proclaimed Eastern Europe free of Soviet domination during a debate with Carter?  Possibly. Would Carter have held on had Sen. Edward Kennedy not opposed him in the primaries and then refused to clasp his hand at the convention? No, though Kennedy might have won had he gotten the nomination. Might Reagan have lost if he had seemed as doddering and confused in his second debate with Walter Mondale as he did in the first one? Could be.

But it was the pardon and high inflation that did in Ford. Mortgage interest rates at 18 percent and long lines at gas stations undermined Carter’s bid for re-election. Peace and an economy that was growing, if slowly, rendered Mondale’s quest close to impossible. As in 1968, the reporters covering the campaign kept these realities in their sights and in their stories.

Are we in another country now?

Because since the end of the party conventions with a few exceptions, this 2008 campaign and the coverage thereof has been about nothing, or at least nothing connected to anything outside itself.

Or, to put it another way, the campaign and its coverage have been about … the campaign and its coverage.

Did Barack Obama call Sarah Palin a pig? Did John McCain say you have to earn $5 million a year to be considered rich? Does Obama really want to teach kindergartners about sex? Are McCain’s campaign ads dishonest?

Forget for a minute that the answers to these questions are: No, No, No and (with Karl Rove’s apparent endorsement) Yes. Instead, just think about their connections to the world outside the campaign. Minimal at best. Not only are the candidates and their talking heads squabbling about events almost entirely unrelated to such mundane matters as war, peace, prosperity, schools, health care and such, but they are squabbling over the coverage of these squabbles, with Obama-ites complaining that the press isn’t forthrightly condemning McCain’s ads and the McCainiacs proclaiming they don’t give a hoot what the “elite media” say.

Now, please understand that all this is being said not as condemnation, but as observation. The world changes – for good, for ill and usually for both – and perhaps the difference in the campaigning and the coverage from a generation ago is warranted. Even if not, maybe it is inevitable.

This could be the first post-modern campaign.

A wonderful term, “post-modern,” because there is no universally recognized definition of it, so we can all use it as we choose. Instead of a definition, it has attributes, one of which, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is an air of “ironic self-reference and absurdity.”

How ironic and absurd is the 2008 campaign remains open to debate. Its self-referential quality is not.

One reason this might be inevitable is that the technology makes it possible, and what is technologically possible will be done. The Internet gives anyone, anywhere, the ability to comment on anything. In effect, this gives anyone, anywhere, the power to nitpick, and as it happens there is not a safe nit in all the political landscape.

Take the latest flapette, the one over the Obama ad deriding McCain for being so out of it that, among other defects, he can’t e-mail.

Bang! Come the accusations from the right side of the blogosphere: He can’t e-mail because his fingers were disabled when he was tortured as a prisoner of war. Nonsense, comes the reply from the other side: If he can use a cell phone (and there are pictures of him in cell-phonic flagrante delictu), he can use a keyboard.

And no one to say that it’s a dumb ad regardless of McCain’s digital dexterity? Who cares if the president can e-mail? He can hire someone to e-mail.

But no doubt it is the culture as much as the technology that has changed the tone of the coverage. Or maybe the technology has changed the culture, as it must. Like the folks covering campaigns 30 or so years ago (of which I was one), today’s campaign journalists understand that they are covering a campaign, a process in and of itself. But now, while they are not really covering that process in a vacuum, they are more likely to cover it without regard – or at least with demonstrably less regard – to its context in what we might call “the real world.”

Again, this is just different, not necessarily worse. Why not cover the campaign simply as a campaign and leave the other stories to other reporters, who might know more about other subjects? That’s what happened earlier this month when the unemployment rate shot up from 5.7 to 6.1 percent. The story, including its potential political impact, was covered, and covered well. But it was covered by the business/financial reporters – Louis Uichetelle in the New York Times, Jim Zarolli on National Public Radio. The folks on the campaign trail hardly noted the jobless jump. They were busy with the Sarah Palin Chronicles. That was their job.

There is much to be said for specialization, but perhaps something to be said against it. For now, we may have come to the end of covering the campaign out of context. The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression might be a big enough stick to wallop everyone into reconsidering the way the job is done.

On the morning after Lehman Brothers announced its demise and Merrill Lynch sold itself to the Bank of America, Meredith Vieria on the “Today” show asked two of its business correspondents to explain the financial meltdown.

“Greed,” came the reply.

Well, sure. But greed’s been around a long time. What’s different is the deregulation of the financial world during the past few decades. This is a financial story, but it’s also a policy story and a political story. The political side is a bit touchy for the Democrats. An all-out Obama attack on deregulation might anger Bill Clinton, who signed some of it into law.

So this story ought to be written by a reporter who knows something about policy and economics but also understands politics and its complications. A reporter, that is, who is decidedly pre-post-modern.