Political Soothsayers Read The Wrong Signs in Iowa
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 21, 2004; Page C01
Back in the distant past -- okay, it was 25 days ago -- Dallas Morning News columnist Ruben Navarrette wrote that John Kerry "must accept the fact that the game is over. . . . The last time John Kerry was engaged in this hopeless a mission, he was dressed in fatigues and running around Southeast Asia."
This was three weeks after Slate columnist Mickey Kaus held a contest to help Kerry drop out of the race, saying the Massachusetts senator "faces not just defeat but utter humiliation in the New Hampshire primary."
That would be the same John Kerry who won a smashing Iowa victory Monday night, climbing out of the spider hole in which many pundits had buried him as they fell all over themselves to declare Howard Dean an unstoppable force of nature. Until, of course, he was stopped in the first contest of 2004.
Humble pie, anyone?
"Mistake number 51 of the 98 mistakes we make every four years is to forget that only about 11,000 people are paying attention in the year before the election," Mark Halperin, ABC's political director, said yesterday. "The conventional wisdom was that Kerry was toast and [John] Edwards, despite being an early golden boy, never jelled. Journalists who lock in and say those kinds of things are victims of the instant analysis culture that demands these snap judgments."
Reached in Des Moines, Time correspondent Karen Tumulty said: "Reporters are like bad generals -- we're always fighting the last war. Traditionally, Iowa has always been about organization." But the intense media focus on how Dean (third place) and Dick Gephardt (fourth place) had Palm Pilot-equipped armies ready to turn out supporters underestimated the surge of Kerry and Edwards, who finished a close second, she said.
Navarrette, whose piece declaring that Kerry "doesn't have a prayer" was reprinted in The Washington Post, asked yesterday whether a reporter was "calling to rub salt in my wounds." But he dug in his heels, saying of Kerry, "I still don't think he wins the nomination," and in that case "the column's fine."
Kaus noted that he dropped the withdrawal contest after Saddam Hussein was captured, writing that Kerry now had a shot. But he hasn't undergone a post-Iowa conversion: "Kerry seems like a phony to me, both opportunistic and impulsive, pandering and condescending, pompous and narcissistic. . . . I'm a blogger so I get to say what I think!"
Journalists, of course, aren't soothsayers, and they spent much of last year (after initially underestimating Dean's rise) measuring the things they are accustomed to measuring in presidential campaigns. They reported, accurately, that the former Vermont governor had raised the most money, harnessed the Internet, built a huge organization, fashioned the most passionate message and garnered the most important endorsements. Reporters love endorsements, apparently more than voters, and Al Gore's decision to back Dean was treated as earth-shattering news.
"Part of it is the boys on the bus and the concept of pack journalism," said Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University's College of Communication. "The press became enchanted with the Internet as a political tool and got carried away with that."
When Kerry, the media's original front runner, fired his campaign manager in November, his candidacy was described as "troubled" (The Post); "faltering" (USA Today); "in disarray" (Boston Globe); and "struggling to convince campaign donors and supporters that he has more than a fleeting shot at the party's nomination" (Los Angeles Times). When the senator appeared on "The Tonight Show" and was mocked by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, news organizations pounced on what they cast as the perfect metaphor.
Many journalists, particularly in his home state, "respect the guy but don't particularly care for him," Berkovitz said. "He comes across as aloof and arrogant." The feeling was sometimes mutual; before he got pink-slipped, campaign chief Jim Jordan called the Globe's coverage "distorted, insignificant, irrelevant and vindictive."
Edwards, meanwhile, was drawing modest coverage for his upbeat campaign style as conflict-craving reporters gravitated toward the fisticuffs between Dean and, particularly, Gephardt and Kerry. In the poll-driven media world, Edwards was a single-digit man, at least until he picked up the Des Moines Register's endorsement.
In his New Republic Web log last month, Gregg Easterbrook -- under the headline "EDWARDS: QUIT BEFORE YOUR TAIL IS BETWEEN YOUR LEGS" -- urged the North Carolina senator to "drop out now so that your campaign ends on a high note."
Easterbrook said yesterday he likes Edwards but still believes that he needs more experience before making a serious White House run. Besides, Easterbrook said, "no matter how many pundits and demographic breakdowns and anchormen you bring to Iowa, the media is always wrong about it. I was totally wrong about Edwards doing better than expected."
Halperin, for one, argues that news organizations that covered the candidates every day, as opposed to Beltway pontificators, began reporting Dean's mounting problems and signs of Kerry and Edwards connecting with Iowa voters.
"I don't think this was a case of egregious failure to see what was going on," Halperin said. "We were all largely right about 2003. But as they say in the financial business, past performance is no indication of what might happen in the future."
Anti-Dean sentiment reached critical mass as rivals hammered him, newsmagazines hectored him (Newsweek's "Doubts About Dean") and investigative reporters scrutinized him, aided and abetted by Dean's own verbal missteps. On Monday, when an uninvited Dean had to leave an event honoring Martin Luther King Jr. without getting a chance to speak, he blamed his traveling press corps "because you guys are behaving so badly; you've got to get a new life."
Even as polls showed Kerry and Edwards rising and Dean slipping, many commentators stuck with the man who began January as a strong favorite to win the nomination.
On "Fox News Sunday," Brit Hume, Mara Liasson and Juan Williams, although admitting they weren't sure, picked Dean to win Iowa.
But Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol forecast "a comfortable victory" for Kerry, saying Dean could finish "third or fourth." On CNN's "Capital Gang," Mark Shields and Kate O'Beirne gave Dean the nod in Iowa, while Robert Novak predicted Kerry.
In cyberspace, where Deaniacs and Dean critics have been going at it for a year, including on the campaign's own blog, the buzz yesterday was not so much about his 18 percent showing in Iowa as about the manic, shouting speech he uncorked afterward, belting out the names of states he intends to win.
"DEAN GOES NUTS," roared a Drudge Report headline below an angry-looking picture of the candidate.
"Dean reminds me of the Hulk in that interim stage just before Bruce Banner turns green and starts to rip his clothes," National Review's Jonah Goldberg wrote.
"I kinda liked his barking madman routine; why the hell not?" blogger Matt Welch said.
Salon's Josh Benson sounded a cautionary note: "Just as the consensus drumbeat for the last several months was that the contests will be Dean's to lose, his rejection by Iowa voters will doubtless be overinterpreted as a sign that he can't win anywhere."
An equally intriguing question was raised by Entertainment Weekly co-founder Jeff Jarvis on his Web site, the Buzz Machine:
"Did blogging hurt Dean?
"Did the strong community that made Dean's organization and fundraising work so amazingly well become too insular and self-congratulatory? Did it amplify the opinions and attitudes already there? Did it become so loud inside that room that it became hard to hear the noise outside, where the voters were?"
That, and a thousand other questions, will have to wait until the media recalibrate the conventional wisdom after New Hampshire.
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