Dean Defeats Truman!
Why Political Reporters Keep Getting It Wrong
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page C01
It's time for political reporters to swear off some long-standing habits.
For decades, they have built their campaign narratives around four bedrock pillars: money, organization, polls and endorsements. But much of that has crumbled in the shifting sands of the 2004 race, most recently when John Edwards surged to a surprising second-place finish in the Wisconsin primary.
The missteps were magnified by a prediction-obsessed culture in which many pundits and journalists were all but writing off candidates as the voting began and constantly trying to push the narrative to the next phase and get on with the general election.
It's hard to fault correspondents for relying on what has usually worked in the past. But like generals fighting the last war, they wound up using muskets and cannonballs in an age of laser-guided missiles.
"Any political reporter whose humility level has not at least quintupled based on the events of this cycle should probably find something else to do in four years," says Mark Halperin, ABC's political director.
The usual indices are "a crutch because there are so few other ways to measure," says Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Dick Polman. In the case of Howard Dean, he says, "when the tech stock was rising we had no way of knowing how it was going to trade on the open market, when voters actually got involved."
At the beginning of the year, USA Today rated the Democrats by bestowing donkeys. Dean got four donkeys ("good odds") and Dick Gephardt three ("some chance"), with two apiece ("long shot") for John Kerry and Edwards. Oops.
The standard measurements of campaign progress remain "good yardsticks," says USA Today reporter Jill Lawrence. "Perhaps what we underemphasized was this really strong sentiment among Democrats to pick the candidate they thought could best beat Bush. And perhaps what we over-relied on in the conventional wisdom is the capacity for lightning-quick changes at the last minute."
A look at the scorecard reveals how the press kept getting faked out.
• Money: Journalists, including Halperin, repeated it like a mantra: Whoever raises the biggest bucks in the year before the election is a lock for the nomination. Except that Dean raised $40 million in 2003 and didn't win a single primary. Kerry had to loan money to his campaign and has taken 15 of the first 17 contests.
• Organization: Reporters love to write pieces about ground troops, phone banks and get-out-the-vote drives, fueled by the belief that this is what wins elections. Dean and Gephardt were favored in Iowa in part because they were seen as having the strongest field operations. But they finished well behind Kerry and Edwards.
• Polls: Tracking polls and other surveys have repeatedly led the press astray. There was Dean's original asterisk status, followed by his huge lead at the beginning of January. There was Kerry and Edwards being all but written off because of low numbers in Iowa. In the days before last week's Wisconsin primary, as news stories began to focus on Kerry vs. President Bush in the fall, Kerry held a 53 to 16 percent lead over Edwards in an American Research Group poll. MSNBC/Reuters/Zogby gave Kerry a 47-20 edge. Edwards wound up within six points of the Massachusetts senator, shattering the "expectations" set by the media.
• Endorsements: Reporters love them, and voters are often indifferent. Al Gore's endorsement of Dean was trumpeted as a political earthquake but did little to help him. Nor did the backing of former senator Bill Bradley or Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin. Popular South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn supported Kerry, who still lost the state to Edwards.
"The problem with all these ironclad rules set out by the 4,000 people who pay attention in the year before the election is that we don't have a very long history in the modern era," Halperin says. "A vibrant democracy can produce things that even the minds of Howard Fineman and Adam Nagourney can't fathom," he says, referring to the Newsweek and New York Times correspondents.
There are other factors, of course. Reporters (including this one) tend to give big play to attack ads because they make for good drama, but the sharpest televised exchanges -- between Dean and Gephardt in Iowa -- damaged both men. Some correspondents aren't quite sure how to handle the relentlessly positive campaign that Edwards has been running, since he stays strictly on message and rarely makes news by chiding his rivals. And no matter how many campaigns someone has covered before, stuff happens.
"There's a cognitive dissonance between the reporters who live with this every single day and a general public that's barely thinking about it" until each state votes, Polman says. "We need to get away from the traditional indicators and talk to people more."
Tightening Standards
Freelance reporter Jay Blotcher says he enjoyed being an Upstate stringer for the New York Times for more than two years -- until he was "completely blindsided" by being dismissed.
The paper is conducting a review of its part-time staffers, and someone recalled that Blotcher had been a spokesman for the activist group ACT UP in the late 1980s. He says he also did some work for the American Foundation for AIDS Research from 1995 to 1999.
In an e-mail, Metro Editor Susan Edgerley told Blotcher: "I am setting the bar high to protect against any appearance of conflict of interest that might result through the hiring of stringers and leg-people. My motivation is expediency as well as ethics -- we simply do not spend as much time checking into the backgrounds of independent contractors as we do of fulltime staff people."
Blotcher wrote back: "What puzzles me is that this policy seems applied inconsistently; I know of longtime NYT reporters who have engaged in political work in the past. . . . Why has an involvement of a decade ago become a disqualifier?"
Edgerley says in an interview that she is making such decisions "on a case-by-case basis" and that it "makes sense" to evaluate whether someone who was a public spokesman has a potential conflict. "This is fundamental, elementary kind of stuff," she says of the review.
On-Air Lecture
MSNBC anchor Laurie Jennings was conducting a routine interview with Bob Dole last week when she asked about Vice President Cheney and his former company, Halliburton.
"He hasn't been in Halliburton for years. . . . I don't think most Americans buy that, despite the liberal media's efforts, like MSNBC, to push it every day," the former Republican senator said.
When Jennings protested that MSNBC was trying to be fair, Dole retorted: "Keep trying. You're a long way from it, but keep trying. . . . Don't slant it." Dole then trotted out Fox News's trademark phrase, saying coverage should be "fair and balanced."
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