Chill, Baby, Chill: The Campaign Is Over, But We Keep Talking

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.

Beware existential angst. All sorts of foolishness spring therefrom.

Whoever doubts that need only glimpse the sorrows – and the work product – of political journalists after the end of a presidential campaign. For almost two years, this battalion of intense and devoted men and women have had no doubts about their goal in life.

Make that their purpose in life.

And then – as if by magic – it’s over.

Now what? Does life still have a purpose?

Of course it does. It has to. It had a purpose just the other day, didn’t it? Here, psychological momentum takes over. There must be something to obsess us, for without an obsession, we are nothing. If we can’t write about who’s going to win, and why, and what it will all mean, then we can write about … well, about why he won, and what it will all mean.

That we haven’t the foggiest idea what it will all mean will deter us not an iota. We must write deathless prose or speak endless words. Nor will we recognize the obvious fact that the guy who drives the forklift at the warehouse knows why Barack Obama won as well as do we professional journalists.

We are in a recession and two wars that are not going very well. The typical household earns less real income than it did eight years ago. The current administration is held in lower regard than any in the history of polling, if not the universe. So the incumbent party’s candidate lost. Big whoop. All that stuff about what if John McCain hadn’t picked Sarah Palin, or Obama not run such a disciplined campaign, doesn’t seem to matter much.

Ah, but there are always stories about whom the president-elect is likely to choose to be secretary of this or that. If nothing else is going on, we can fill all that airtime and cover all that newsprint with endless speculation over the impending appointments.

A big mistake. When campaigns end, political reporters should take a few weeks off, even if they have no place to go. That’s what I used to do. One year I put all the herb and spice containers in the kitchen cabinet into alphabetical order. The order did not long survive, but at least it kept me from making a fool of myself by speculating on who would be secretary of this or that.

Obviously, somebody will be secretary of this and of that. But you know what? When the president-elect tells us, we’ll all know. Until he tells us, we don’t need to know. It will be the same person whether or not we know the day before the announcement.

The rest is worse than silence; it is being used. The folks who leak the names to reporters either don’t know or have an ulterior motive (or both). The motive might be to try to pressure the incoming president to appoint a particular person, or not to appoint a particular person. Or it might be to put someone’s name out there to find out how much opposition would emerge from one constituency or another.

That last motive seems to have been what inspired the leaks [3] about former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers getting his old job back, with the leaker trying to find out if great numbers of politically potent Democratic women were still bothered by whatever it is that Summers said about the female aptitude for science back when he was president of Harvard, which he no longer is, in part because of whatever it is that he said.

When not being exploited on political errands, political reporters in the post-election recovery process can always pick a few nits. Just consider the many stories [4] about how many Obama associates held jobs in the Clinton administration, despite the winner’s campaign pledge to “change” Washington.

Not only that, but the president-elect had “soften(ed) his ban on hiring lobbyists,” according to a Boston Globe headline [5] that was typical of how many news outlets dealt with the story.

The Globe’s lead, by Washington correspondent Michael Kranish, said that Obama, “who vowed during his campaign that lobbyists ‘won't find a job in my White House,’ … would allow lobbyists on his transition team as long as they work on issues unrelated to their earlier jobs.”

But the transition team is not the White House. Besides, where do people expect a Democratic president to find senior appointees? From the telephone book? The Clinton administration ended only eight years ago. It was, by most standards, a successful administration, full of qualified people, some of whom are not very old.

Kranish is a good reporter, and his story pointed out that even Washington’s goo-goo faction (and by the way, they’re lobbyists, too) was pleased that Obama was making “a very concrete effort to avoid … a potentially corrupting situation,” in the words of Public Citizens’ Craig Holman. And reporters should hold Obama’s feet to the fire he himself lit. Furthermore, they might ask just what’s wrong with lobbyists, and whether all lobbying is equally objectionable. But when a reporter writes that the policy seems “less than the wholesale removal of lobbyists than he suggested during the campaign,” he is holding Obama’s feet not to the fire he lit, but to one the reporter or the goo-goos perceive.

Then there was the “Keeping Them Honest [6]” segment of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” on Nov. 7, when correspondent Tom Foreman proclaimed that “time and again out on the trail (Obama) said we need tax reform right now.”

Whereupon played the tape of Obama saying, at two different campaign appearances … well, nothing about right now.

But Foreman was not done.

“And he said again today early in his press conference tax relief cannot wait,” the correspondent said. “But when asked later on in that press conference, does that mean he will pursue tax reforms in 2009, he dodged the direct question.”

Obama did dodge the question. But the question was not whether he “will pursue tax reforms in 2009.” It was whether he would “seek income tax increases for upper-income Americans” next year. He could “pursue tax reforms” next year while putting off his plans to increase the top marginal tax rates on the highest earners until 2010, when they will revert to their higher, pre-2001 levels anyway. There is reason to believe that this is what he now plans. That is something of a switch, but not the one Foreman suggested.

Perhaps someone needs to keep CNN honest while it’s keeping them honest.

Happily, for those reporters who simply could not stop covering elections, there were a few elections still unresolved. Unhappily, some of the coverage remained just as sloppy.

On the morning of Nov. 13, Today Show co-host Meredith Vieira introduced a segment by saying, “If you thought the (2000) election debacle in Florida could never happen again, wait until you see the situation in Minnesota.” There, correspondent Lee Cowan reported [7] that while there were no Florida 2000-style “butterfly ballots and hanging chads” in the too-close-to-call Senate race, “ballots have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, including some found unsecured in an election worker's car.”

So were saying some Republicans, who suggested that Sen. Norm Coleman’s lead over Democrat Al Franken was shrinking because of Democratic hanky-panky. But the ballots had not appeared out of nowhere. And they were in a sealed envelope, or secured, as it is sometimes known, information that was available with a phone call or two when Cowan filed his report.

At the very end of the report – one might say “out of nowhere” –  appeared one John Lott, identified only as a University of Maryland visiting senior research scientist, saying, “I would imagine it’s gonna be a very emotional thing for a while.”

The statement was bland enough, and Lott was accurately identified. But one wonders whether any news organization should cite John Lott for anything without knowing – and reporting – that … well, let’s just say some questions have been raised about his intellectual integrity. Something about a study he claimed to have done that he could never produce. Not to mention the celebrated use of a “sockpuppet,” defined (in Wikipedia [8]), as “an online identity used for purposes of deception within an internet community.” It seems that one “Mary Rosh” went online to defend some of Lott’s controversial work. There was no Mary Rosh. Lott was doing his own defending.

Earlier this month, as if whatever gods there be were showing mercy, came news that Obama and Hillary Clinton had discussed the possibility of her becoming secretary of state. At last, many campaign journalists could get back to doing what they loved best – treating politics as soap opera. With some notable exceptions, such as the restrained New York Times story [9] by Jackie Calmes and Helene Cooper on Nov. 15, the coverage returned with glee to last spring’s motif of whether Clinton and Obama really hated each other but could work together, anyway, not to mention all her ulterior motives, there being an assumption in some media circles that this is the only kind of motive Hillary Clinton can possibly have.

Thus, on MSNBC’s Hardball [10] on Nov. 14, political analyst Michelle Bernard asserted, based, so far as can be determined, on no evidence whatsoever, (but who cares? This is soap opera) that Clinton would “run a parallel government.”

And on the same day’s edition of Fox News’ Special Report with Brit Hume, Charles Krauthammer said [11] that “what's so sort of cynically brilliant and impressive about this is that with her out of the way, Obama is not going to have to show up in Iowa or New Hampshire in 2012. He has now cinched the renomination,” a piece of political punditry so premature, and pregnant with such pompous, pediatric poppycock, that it can be presented only at peril of preposterousness.

Everybody take some time off. Five will get you ten your spice boxes could use alphabetizing.

While you're taking a breather, you can still tell Jon [12] what you think.