Covering Political Campaigns: Maybe Someday, We'll Get It Right

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.

It’s over.

Really. Hard though it is to believe, the 2008 presidential election, which seems to have begun when George M. Cohan was the toast of Broadway, is at an end. Prepare to decompress.

And what have we learned? A great deal about Barack Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin. Less about Joe Biden, but then, he was pretty much a known quantity to begin with. So was McCain, but we had more time to re-examine him.

And about covering campaigns?

Well, there’s certainly been no shortage of discussion of that subject. Anguished (and sometimes defensive) self-assessment from within the profession, angry criticism from bloggers left and right, and even some informed, disinterested assessment were common if not inescapable. There is by now an entire industry of campaign-coverage evaluation (or perhaps “kvetching” would be more accurate), the combined revenue/expense of which no doubt exceeds the gross domestic product of several developing nations.

Whether all this furor has made any difference is among the great unsolved mysteries of our time.

Reviewing the performance of her own newspaper, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell [3] seems dubious.

“While much Post coverage has been straightforward and some of it is excellent, “ she wrote, “the predominance of horse-race coverage has not satisfied what readers wanted to know ... readers were still begging for coverage of where the candidates stood on the biggest issues. They asked for such coverage beginning in the primary season. They didn't get much information from The Post.”

On the other hand, a report by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that while “horse race reporting, once again, made up the majority of coverage” in the six weeks after the national conventions, its dominance was “less … than earlier in the contest or than in previous elections.”

Still, the report’s analysis [4] of 48 different news organizations found that more than half the space or time was devoted to political strategy, tactics and polling; only 20 percent was devoted to policy matters. If that was an improvement, it wasn’t much of an achievement.

By the way, the study also found, just as conservative columnists and bloggers insisted, that Barack Obama got more favorable coverage than John McCain. Bias toward the liberal? Nope. Bias toward the winner. When McCain was tied or slightly ahead in the polls, he got positive coverage. When he fell behind, he didn’t.

“Winning in politics,” the report concluded, “begat winning coverage.”

How gratifying. We are, collectively, not charlatans, but leeches.

Here and there, reporters did examine how the candidates would govern the country. The recent “If elected” series in The New York Times was thorough and useful, if a bit late. But it was noticeable in part because it was unusual.

The relative indifference of political journalism to policy issues seems to be part of a mutual dumbing-down of political discourse. Although it’s hard to tell which is the chicken, which the egg, as reporters ask fewer probing questions about issues, the campaigns provide less specific policy information.

Not that long ago, campaigns regularly issued position papers outlining their proposals on matters ranging from transportation to the Middle East. They were political documents, full of blather and self-serving rhetoric, but they provided some specific information, backed by a bit of evidence, about what the candidate intended to do if elected.

Now the “position papers” are on the Web sites and are close to being detail-free. "John McCain has a comprehensive economic plan that will create millions of good American jobs,” proclaimed the McCain site. How? Go figure.

Obama provided slightly more in the way of specifics, but a minimally conscientious professor of economics or public policy would have given young Barack (assuming he wrote the stuff himself) a C at best, scrawling in thick red pencil that he really should back up his assertions with something resembling evidence.

Wonderful stuff, evidence. Sifting through it, one can often discover realities about the world. Considering that such discovery ought to be among the central goals of the news business, there was something discouraging about how reporters dealt with the last policy-related squabble of the campaign – McCain’s charge that Obama would “redistribute” income from wealthier to needier folks.

So he will. As would have John McCain, who, like almost everyone else in American politics, has been a firm backer of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Pure redistribution, the EITC. Through the Internal Revenue Service’s system, it takes some of the revenue from those who earn enough to pay income taxes and redistributes it – $43.7 billion of it last year – to people who work but earn very little.

Oh, and that income tax system through which all this money passes? It, too, redistributes income, and with McCain’s apparent blessings. As it is, the more you make, the higher your tax rate, so that (in theory, anyway) the rich pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes. Unlike Obama, McCain did not want to make the tax system more progressive. But neither had he proposed making it less so.

Most of what government does redistributes income, sometimes upward (corporate subsidies and tax credits, ambassadorships), but often downward. The government takes money from (relatively) affluent people, and gives it to low-income people, sometimes as cash or vouchers (EITC, Pell grants), more often as services (Medicaid, community colleges). Again, it does all of this to no objection from John McCain.

All this is reality, supported by evidence and unrefuted by any evidence to the contrary. So why was it not in the accounts in print and on the air as correspondents reported on McCain’s allegation that by favoring redistribution, Obama must be some kind of dangerous radical, it not an outright weirdo?

Not that the reporters should have made a big deal about it. It isn’t their job to be argumentative or to take sides. But by not even mentioning this obvious inconsistency in McCain’s attack, they were being inaccurate, which is worse.

Speaking of argumentative, for a tentative answer to the above question, consider the much-discussed (and rightly ridiculed) interview [5] of Sen. Joe Biden by Barbara West of WFTV-TV Channel 9 in Orlando, who at one point asked Biden, “What do you say to the people that are concerned that Barack Obama will want to turn America into a socialist country like Sweden?"

The absurdity of the question was discussed. Its inaccuracy was not. “Socialism” has a specific meaning. It’s in the dictionary, which calls it a system in which the means of producing and distributing goods and services are “owned collectively.” Usually (though not always) that means by the government.

By that definition (and it is the only acceptable definition), Sweden is not socialist. It has a dynamic, productive, capitalist economic system. Like ours, it is dominated by large corporations, some of which we know about. Volvo. Saab. You can buy stock in them (Yes, their car divisions are now owned by U.S. auto companies, which merely proves that Sweden is part of the global capitalist economy.)

It is true that Swedes pay much higher taxes than Americans do, or would tolerate, to finance a much more elaborate welfare state than we have, or probably want. But that does not make it socialist. It makes it a capitalist economy with high taxes and an elaborate welfare state.

But you know what? We have a welfare state, too. And we like it, as long as we don’t call it by its name. The typical American voter might say that he or she doesn’t want a regulated welfare state. But he and she both want Social Security and a strong Clean Air Act.

Or a regulated welfare state as it is sometimes known.

The problem here transcends political coverage or journalism in general. The problem is that political reporters and journalists have bought into the national delusion that we are all autonomous individuals doing things our own way totally uninfluenced by outside forces, our economy powered solely by the individual decisions of producers, consumers and investors in an unfettered market. No social engineering for us.

This is nonsense. Modern life is an assembly of systems. Systems must be engineered. Ours is by an Interstate Highway System, state universities and the National Institutes of Health, among others. We even have elements of central planning in our economy. Not Soviet-style, thankfully. We have a market economy. We also have a Federal Reserve System, which deliberately tampers with the market to influence interest rates. Come to think of it, we also have a military establishment whose purpose often seems as much to prop up regional economies as to defend the country.

American individualism is a powerful force. And it’s a positive one, up to the point where it fools us into denying that much of what we do – even some of how we think – is influenced by impersonal forces, such as government, corporations, foundations, universities, advertising, popular culture. Perhaps it is time for all of us, including those who cover campaigns, to grow up.

Tell Jon Margolis [6] what you think; after all, it's only four more years to the next presidential election.