A Two-Man Race?
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 5, 2003; 9:12 AM
When a whole lot of candidates face off in a debate, the press is desperate for a story line, real or manufactured.
Otherwise you get stories that read like this: "Nine candidates took the stage last night and expressed their views on issues ranging from health care to Iraq in generally staid affair with few fireworks." I'm yawning even as I type the words.
But if reporters create a subplot -- in effect declaring that nothing else matters except the dynamic between two of the candidates -- then you have a bit of drama to liven up the rhetorical overload of listening to the second-tier, third-tier and non-tier contenders.
That's why the New Mexico debate was billed in advance as a Kerry vs. Dean showdown. The press has been building up Dean and tearing down Kerry in recent months -- never mind that no one will be voting until next year -- and that has put considerable pressure on the Massachusetts candidate to take on the Vermont candidate.
Just look at yesterday's setup piece by the world's most dedicated Kerry reporter, the Boston Globe's Glen Johnson:
"The debate within the campaign of Senator John F. Kerry about how to deal with Howard Dean is over.
"As he tries to reinvigorate his Democratic candidacy for the presidency, Kerry has made it clear he is not going to wait and see if Dean's surging campaign will fade. Since Sunday, the Massachusetts senator has criticized the former Vermont governor, who leads in the latest polls in New Hampshire. . . . "
Hours before the debate, Fox's John Gibson asked: "How bad is it for John Kerry?"
"It's very bad," said reporter Carl Cameron.
Unfortunately for the predetermined story line, Dean and Kerry didn't glance in each other's direction during the debate. It was Joe Lieberman who took a swing at the good doctor on trade policy, saying under his plan "the Bush recession would be followed by the Dean depression." Dean, perhaps worried about his reputation for testiness, laughed it off.
At least in the non-Spanish part of the session I could understand, Kerry said nothing especially memorable, although he did work in a reference to the "lesson of Vietnam" where (hint) he served. Kerry also said of Bush, "I and others warned him not to rush to war," conveniently forgetting that he voted to authorize the use of force against Saddam.
Dean was more restrained and less angry than when he was an underdog and, seemingly concerned about being the antiwar candidate, declared that if necessary he would send American troops anywhere in the world.
The formerly boring Dick Gephardt won the prize for most improved speaker, although he did overdo it by declaring Bush a "miserable failure" four or five times.
I don't recall much that John Edwards said, except that he won the Latino panderfest by promising to create a National Translation Center.
The morning papers, deprived of a Kerry-Dean dustup, had to take the traditional approach. The New York Times:
"The Democratic presidential candidates hammered President Bush tonight for the turmoil in Iraq, but they disagreed over whether the United States should send more troops there to try to stabilize the region.
"The candidates, in the first official debate of the Democratic presidential contenders, united in denouncing what they said was Mr. Bush's failure to orchestrate international support for invading Iraq. And they repeatedly criticized his handling of the economy, upbraiding him in particular for what several described as a near-catastrophic loss of manufacturing jobs.
"Still, the debate made it clear that the candidates have also begun to compete more intensely with one another. That was reflected by the attacks offered by some candidates, like Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who went after Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont.
"But while many of his rivals consider Dr. Dean an increasingly formidable figure in the field, he was the subject of far less criticism than many Democrats -- including he himself -- had expected going into tonight's event."
Or that the press had expected.
"Democratic presidential candidates attacked President Bush on Thursday night for failures in planning for postwar Iraq and sought to emphasize their own national security credentials and experience," USA Today said. "But in the early minutes, the field avoided internal squabbling in a major party-sponsored debate. . . .
"When he was obscure and needed attention, Dean got it by attacking his rivals. But now some of them are targeting him. Lieberman has called him unelectable because of his opposition to the Iraq war.
"Kerry, who has seen his poll numbers plummet as Dean surges, said this week on his campaign plane that 'Howard Dean's opposition to the war was wrong' because 'you can't just walk away' from a threat like Saddam Hussein."
Of course, he said nothing like that during the debate.
Even the Boston Globe couldn't find much of a Kerry angle:
"Democratic presidential contenders, appearing in their first nationally televised debate, overwhelmingly denounced President Bush last night for his handling of the war in Iraq and economic policy. They avoided angry exchanges with one another, however, even as they tried to distinguish themselves in a crowded field . . .
"But few sparks flew, despite predictions of a showdown between former Vermont governor Howard Dean and Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the two closest rivals for front-runner status in fund-raising and the polls."
And whose predictions would those be?
Roger Simon questions Kerry's new southern strategy:
"If former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean really does pull off an amazing double-win in the first two contests, Iowa and New Hampshire, then South Carolina is where anti-Dean forces must coalesce around one candidate to stop him from getting the nomination.
"Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who once upon a time was a front-runner, is now hoping he can be the stopper here. Kerry once had a northern strategy: win New Hampshire and possibly Iowa.
"Now he has a southern strategy: Stop Howard Dean in South Carolina and keep hope alive.
"Which is why Kerry gave his presidential announcement speech here this week, in front of the USS Yorktown, rather than in Boston, in front of Old Ironsides, as originally planned. . . .
"Kerry's emphasis on his Vietnam service is a high-risk strategy. Americans are still very conflicted over that war, as was Kerry himself: He both fought in the war and protested against it.
"And being a war hero is not what is used to be in American politics: Bill Clinton, who dodged the Vietnam draft, faced off against two war heroes, George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996, and beat them both."
We can't resist this Salon piece by Gary Kamiya because of the headline:
"Would you like some freedom fries with your crow, Mr. President?"
"Let me make sure I've got this right. After being insulted, belittled and called irrelevant by the swaggering machos in the Bush administration, the United Nations is now supposed to step forward to supply cannon fodder for America's disastrous Iraq occupation -- while the U.S. continues to run the show?
"In other words, the rest of the world is to send its troops to get killed so that a U.S. president it fears and despises can take the credit for an invasion it bitterly opposed.
"The rest of the world may be crazy, but it ain't stupid.
"The Bush administration's humiliating announcement that it wants the U.N. to bail it out officially confers the title of 'debacle' upon the grand Cheney-Rove-Wolfowitz adventure. Not even the world-class chutzpah of this administration can conceal the fact that by turning to the despised world body, it is eating a heaping plate of crow. This spectacle may give Bush-bashers from London to Jakarta a happy jolt of schadenfreude, but it does nothing to help Americans who are stuck with the ugly fallout of the Bush team's ill-conceived, absurdly overoptimistic attempt to redraw the Middle East.
"The bitter truth is that everything the administration told us about Iraq has turned out to be false."
Kerry's choice of words on Iraq this week is starting to draw partisan fire, such as in this slam by National Review Editor Rich Lowry:
"A big question in determining whether the Democrats can take back the White House next year is: Can the party think straight on matters of war and peace?
"Judging from Sen. John Kerry's performance Tuesday, the answer is 'no.'
Let's try to follow Kerry's argument. First, he says his vote 'to threaten the use of force' against Iraq last year was 'right.' O.K., but why?
"Presumably because Saddam represented a threat to the region and to U.S. interests severe enough to justify war. Otherwise, Kerry should have voted against the resolution. Indeed, the resolution said, in part, 'Whereas Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its armed forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself.'
"Kerry tries to make it seem that his vote was only to threaten force when it was to authorize it, giving congressional approval for what everyone knew was President Bush's march toward war.
"Just threatening the use of force, after all, would have been a continuation of what had been U.S. policy for about a decade, and utterly unremarkable. Everyone understood they were voting for a departure. Kerry is dishonest to pretend otherwise. And what good is threatening force if you're not going to use it? That's worse than not threatening it in the first place."
Let us now stop and praise Bill Keller as a New York Times editor who actually understands the need to explain himself, and even to think out loud so people can understand his reasoning. He fired off a long e-mail to columnist Geneva Overholser (former WashPost ombudsman as well as former editor of the Des Moines Register) to explain the limitations of the NYT's planned one-year experiment with a "public editor":
"Certain assumptions have become almost doctrinal among advocates of ombudsry. One is that the way the Washington Post does it -- tenure, a weekly column, and complete independence from the people who make the news judgments -- is the right way. Perhaps this is because the Post played a pioneering role both in the use of ombudsmen and in the employment of media critics (the two groups who make up the most outspoken constituency for installing more ombudsmen). Perhaps this is because the Post ombudsman is so public that it's the first (and last) one people think of. Perhaps it's because the Post has got things just right.
"I'm full of admiration for Michael Getler, a virtuoso of journalism, and I like what I've read of his columns and his (regularly leaked) internal memos to the staff. But I don't know that having a hard-writing ombudsman has significantly enhanced the Post's credibility or accountability. Maybe it has, but I'm hesitant to leap from my admiration for you and Michael Getler to the conclusion that the Post's is the only right way to do this. Call it an occupational hazard, but I'm usually skeptical of assumptions that have so little reporting to back them up. I'd like to see for myself.
"An extraordinary and devoted committee of Times journalists and outsiders examined our institutional shortcomings after the crisis set in motion by (though only peripherally about) Jayson Blair. Their recommendation that we employ an ombudsman, or public editor, was persuasive, but it was also cautious. . . .
"They recommended that the ombudsman write only 'occasional' published commentaries. That is because when they considered the various models, they preferred that the ombudsman be first and foremost the readers' advocate for changes in and by the paper rather than a columnist whose subject happens to be The Times. . . .
"In your appeal to us to emulate the Post model, your main concern is that we have not ensured our public editor sufficient independence -- because of the one-year trial, because I hire the person, and because he or she will not be obliged to write a column every week. Your anxiety may prove to be fully justified, and if after the first year I'm persuaded that you are right I will have an opportunity to remedy the situation. . . .
"First, I'm not so sure that the critical guarantee of independence lies in the nature of the contract. I can readily imagine an ombudsman supplied with all the contractual assurances of independence -- long tenure, a dimissal-proof contract, a weekly column -- who would still be timid in criticizing the paper, because of lack of self-confidence or a desire to preserve relationships with colleagues or an ingratiating personality. I can also imagine a person of integrity and uncompromising judgment who would be independent even knowing that I had the power to fire him or her. . . .
"Second, the only power I will assert over the ombudsman is the power to hire and fire. I won't be prescribing procedures or deciding when to publish and when not. As I've just said, I fire such a person at my peril. But by hiring such a person, I bestow a declaration of trust and authority that should enable the ombudsman to influence the internal workings of the paper on behalf of readers. A person who has the executive editor's blessing carries some weight in a newsroom. . . .
"Finally, the weekly column. I've read good ombuds columns and bad ones. In some cases, the obligation to write something weekly, even lacking anything very interesting to say, makes the columns seem dispensable. What's so magic about a weekly column?"
Keller may be wrong or right, but he doesn't believe the New York Times is infallible.
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