Pundits Boost Edwards
Howard Kurtz
The suspense was over in seconds.
As soon as the South Carolina polls closed at 7 p.m., the networks declared John Edwards a comfortable winner in his home state.
But the real suspense was whether the prognosticators would portray the senator's backyard boost as shaking up the race or just spitting in the face of the Kerry hurricane.
The answer was that they cast their votes, figuratively speaking, for Edwards as a growing political force.
The "final dynamic," Howard Fineman said on MSNBC, is "Kerry in the lead and Edwards challenging him."
CNN's Judy Woodruff called Edwards "the chief challenger to John Kerry for the nomination," although she questioned whether the Southerner would be able to raise enough money.
"John Edwards is now credible," ex-Gore aide Donna Brazile said.
Bob Novak was less impressed, declaring that "John Edwards has established himself as the overwhelming favorite to be John Kerry's running mate."
As a mathematical proposition, of course, it was clear even early in the evening of Junior Tuesday that this was a big night for Kerry. So you might say that journalists are just trying to prevent a premature end to the campaign. In fact, that's what National Review's Michael Graham said:
"I KNOW WE'RE ALL SUPPOSED TO BE KEEPING THE HORSE RACE GOING, BUT . . . why isn't the headline going to be 'Kerry Beats Edwards 6-1?' (assuming that Kerry wins Oklahoma)."
But after Iowa and New Hampshire, "Kerry Wins" is becoming old news. So journalists naturally gravitate not just to the Edwards story line, but also to such questions as "Can the Massachusetts senator win in the South?"
The spin began almost immediately. "The Kerry camp, obviously trying to downplay the significance of the Edwards win in South Carolina," said Fox's Carl Cameron.
Roy Neel, Howard Dean's new campaign chief, had a different take on CNN: "John Edwards's win in South Carolina show it's way too early for a coronation in this race."
Joe Trippi, recast as an MSNBC election analyst, said that "Howard Dean has the heart and he'll stay in."
But no one outside the Dean orbit had anything good to say about the doctor's prospects.
"He has to go through several phases until he's resigned to the fact he can't be the nominee," Tim Russert said on CNBC.
"It's entirely possible . . . he'll get absolutely no delegates," Cameron said. "Hard to understand how that could be a rationale for an ongoing campaign."
Edwards then displayed some unfortunate timing. He wanted to come out early and declare victory, since he was the only winner in the only contest the networks had called. But he walked out at 7:58, just as the networks would be projecting results in the states whose polls would close at 8.
CNN, for example, missed the first part of Edwards's remarks while forecasting Kerry wins in Missouri and Delaware, and a three-way tie in Oklahoma between Edwards, Clark and Kerry.
Edwards wowed the pundits with a short, passionate "two Americas" speech in which he talked about fighting for people in poverty and kids who go to bed hungry. "A very powerful speech," said CNN's Jeff Greenfield. "There's nobody his equal in this campaign on the stump."
Later on, Greenfield cited the networks' exit poll numbers for Oklahoma -- "crack cocaine," he called them, since they're often wrong. The figures: Edwards 30.6 percent, Kerry 29.7 percent, Clark 28.7 percent.
At 8:57, the AP reported, to no one's surprise, that Joe Lieberman had decided to drop out. He had pinned his hopes on Delaware and gotten only a quarter of Kerry's vote there. The guy started with big advantages but could never catch on, perhaps because his pro-Iraq war centrism just didn't appeal to Democratic primary voters.
Three minutes later, the polls closed in Arizona and Kerry was projected the winner across the dial, giving him three states under his belt.
Larry King asked Dean what went wrong. "There's an enormous amount of resistance to institutional change in this country. . . . The establishment in Washington realized I really might be the nominee. The media folks didn't like it."
MSNBC missed the opening of Lieberman's swan song as Chris Matthews chatted up Dean.
Lacking any sign of Joe-mentum, he said he was "proud of what we stood for in this campaign." MSNBC also got bored and was the first to break away for more punditry.
At 9:23, as Fox was projecting Kerry the winner in the crucial, all-important North Dakota caucuses, Edwards told Brit Hume that "it looks more and more like it's a two-person race."
Edwards must be awfully sick of the would-you-be-Kerry's-running mate question. In recent days, Matt Lauer, Judy Woodruff and Doyle McManus on "Face the Nation" have all hit the North Carolina senator with that one. Hume used clever phrasing, asking whether Kerry is "the kind of person you could be on a ticket with?"
"Does he want to be vice president?" Edwards said.
On CNN, Edwards touted the Oklahoma results as a surprise, saying he had been polling third there. As the votes trickled in, he was clinging to a 31-30 percentage point edge over Clark, a mere thousand votes ahead, the only cliffhanger of the night.
Wolf Blitzer asked Edwards if Dean should drop out. Edwards didn't bite.
Meanwhile, some strikingly candid comments from Wesley Clark Jr., before the results were in, about his dad's campaign, as reported by Slate's Chris Suellentrop:
"Of politics, he says, 'It's a dirty business, filled with a lot of people who are pretending to be a lot of things they're not.' The press never looked at his father's record, he says. They didn't treat the other candidates fairly either. Howard Dean got unfair coverage, he says. So did John Edwards. So did John Kerry. So did everyone.
"What about the president? Does he get fair coverage from the press? 'If the president had gotten fair coverage, he never would have gotten elected in the first place,' Clark says. Has the media done a poor job of getting his father's message out? 'It's not the media's job to get his message out. The media's job is to sell advertising.'
"A reporter asks, do you think your father has been well served by his campaign? For once, Clark declines to offer an opinion. 'Uh, I'm not going to comment on the campaign. I'll put it this way. I think he was the best candidate.' Then he adds, 'I wish they would have competed in Iowa, personally.' Because elections don't matter, he says. The media's horse-race coverage is all that matters, and by skipping Iowa, Clark got left out of the horse race. 'It's all horse-race questions,' he says. 'My favorite was Dad wearing a sweater in New Hampshire one day. Maybe he was wearing a sweater because he was cold.' "
A fascinating Kerry detail in this New York Times report:
"He will still never be cuddly. He is too tall, too gaunt, too lantern-jawed, too serious for that. His Iowa caucuses victory speech was solemn and windy, and he sat watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night with a band of firefighters from Fargo, N.D., whose union has endorsed him, tapping his right thumb and forefinger nervously against his teeth without making much effort to converse or connect.
"Two years ago, Mr. Kerry's advisers tried to get him to loosen up by showing him tapes of Senator John Edwards's easygoing style."
Shades of Al Gore having to watch reruns of Darrell Hammond!
By the way, Dean once spoke of making his post-Feb. 3 stand in Michigan on Saturday. But a new Detroit News poll gives Kerry a 56-13 lead. And Dean isn't buying any ads there; too expensive, says Roy Neel.
Dean also took another whack at Fox, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, saying of the coverage of his campaign: "There was no conspiracy except for Fox News and people like that. Fox has a clear ideological agenda." He obviously believes his voters aren't Fox fans.
On the Kerry front, Salon raises the Morgan Fairchild factor:
"John Kerry is the country's stiffest, most entitled-looking politician, no matter how much time he puts into activities like drinking, windsurfing, or catting around, as he did in the years following his divorce. It was during that period that he had flirtations with the gossip columns -- dating actual nighttime soap stars like Morgan Fairchild (Jordan Roberts on 'Falcon Crest') and Catherine Oxenberg (Amanda Carrington Bedford von Moldavia Carrington on 'Dynasty'), as well as C.Z. Guest's daughter Cornelia Guest and Ronald Reagan's daughter Patti Davis.
"He was on to something. It's all well and good to be the straight man with hidden depths of history and experience. But those deep-running waters don't amount to squat until you have a drama queen to gussy you up, to light your fire. He needed a catalytic partner. The depressive Julia Thorne [Kerry's first wife] -- by all accounts a lovely woman who is now happily remarried in Montana -- had not done the trick.
"A round of applause for the 65-year-old Portuguese-accented, party-switching, stump-shaking, nervous-making philanthropist widow Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry, more commonly known as 'Ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz.' "
In Time, Andrew Sullivan still pines for Dean, sort of:
"A question keeps bugging me. Why have I been rooting for Howard Dean to win the Democratic nomination? I'm not a Democrat or even, in contemporary parlance, a liberal. In pure policy terms, I'm probably closer to John Kerry and John Edwards. What's more, Dean's insistence that war against Saddam was wrong strikes me as morally and strategically misguided. His loose accusations of lying in the White House, his airing of notions that George W. Bush had a warning about 9/11, his bad temper and his occasional nastiness are all reasons to back his opponents.
"So why do I keep coming back to the fireplug from Vermont? No, I'm not cynically trying to engineer a Bush landslide. And, no, it's not because John Kerry seems such a tired and faded figure (although that's part of it). I just think that the Democrats' sudden panic about Dean's electability is overblown and that the urge to find someone more superficially 'presidential' is a trap. It won't help the Democrats in November (I don't know any Democrats who are actually excited about Kerry), and it will deny all of us a real debate about the future direction of the country.
"Dean offers, to purloin a phrase, a choice, not an echo. His pugnacity in defense of his liberal instincts is obviously genuine. After eight years of careful Clintonian positioning, it's refreshing. Compared with Kerry's packaged, tested, hollow rants against 'special interests,' Dean's straight talk is invigorating."
- By Howard Kurtz |
