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By Brian Montopoli
Sixteen years ago, Paul Taylor of The Washington Post covered one of the most contentious presidential elections in recent history. It was during the 1988 Bush/Dukakis campaign that vice presidential nominee J. Danforth Quayle saw his reputation change from that of a promising young senator to that of a national laughingstock; it was also during that campaign that the foreboding image of African-American murderer Willie Horton was used to scare white voters into reconsidering their support for Dukakis. In the primaries that year, frontrunner Gary Hart came under fire (and was eventually forced to drop out of the race) after facing accusations of adultery — and it was Taylor, a rising star of journalism, who, first publicly asked the candidate about the charges during a televised press conference.
In 1990, Taylor wrote a book about the campaign called See How They Run: Electing the President in an Age of Mediaocracy. He also left journalism and embarked on a nearly two decade-long crusade to force television broadcasters to give candidates free airtime in the weeks leading up to an election. That effort has thus far been stymied, thanks to the lobbying of powerful broadcasters and the worries of incumbents concerned that increasing the level of political dialogue isn’t in their best interests. But the points Taylor laid out in See How They Run haven’t lost their relevance — particularly now that the press is once again charged with covering a campaign between a Massachusetts liberal and a Bush.
As Taylor points out in the book, Republicans have long been able to exploit a paradox concerning Vietnam: Despite the fact that most Americans now believe that the war was a bad idea (in 1988, three out of four Americans said sending troops had been a mistake), Republicans have long benefited politically for supporting it, while Democrats have been hurt for being remembered as doves. There’s no easy explanation for this, but one plausible theory is that we’re hesitant, on an emotional level, to turn our backs on those politicians who led us in periods of national crisis, even if, deep down, our rational side is critical of them. The implications of this for President Bush — and the political fallout from the war in Iraq — have been largely been ignored by the press. “We wrapped our arms around Bush,” says Taylor, who now works for the Pew Charitable Trust. “We wanted a strong leader, and we put our faith in him. For us to say he’s wrong — well, that means we’re wrong too. And it’s not easy for us to accept that.” Americans are likely to support Bush on Iraq longer than they might otherwise because they don’t want to believe their heavy personal investment in him post-September 11 was a mistake. Recognizing his failure, after all, would be tantamount to recognizing our own.
In other ways, however, as Taylor notes, the electorate is surprisingly savvy when it comes to judging candidates. In 1988, George Bush may have told the country, “Read my lips — no new taxes,” but seven out of ten Americans didn’t believe him, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll taken a week after the election. Yet they voted for him anyway. Why? Because voters understand that campaign-speak is presented in a certain way, and they know how to decode it. “People get that the candidates overdo it,” says Taylor. “They understand that its part of the game. They may not think that Bush isn’t going to raise their taxes, but they figure that maybe he’ll raise his taxes less than the other guy — and that’s enough to get their vote.”
George W. Bush seems to understand this dynamic well, a fact that goes a long way towards explaining why he favors vague rhetoric and is reticent to admit mistakes. Voters may not entirely believe him, but they’d rather hear consistent rhetoric that they can decode, as opposed to specifics that leave little room for distillation into a basic idea. Republicans — particularly Bush — seem to better appreciate than Democrats that voters respond better to big ideas, even if they don’t really believe the candidate who is articulating them. “How can candidates be expected to speak in anything but code language,” asks Taylor, “if their audience punishes truth tellers, rewards panderers and expects to be deceived?”
The press crafted a story for each candidate over the course of the 1988 campaign — as Taylor says in the book, “the candidates were belittled as laughingstocks (Hart), lightweights ([Joe] Biden), dwarfs (the rest of the Democrats), nerds (Dukakis), wimps (Bush) and bimbos (Dan Quayle) by journalists who seem to grow more cynical with each election.” Now the press is looking to define Kerry, and Taylor says the corps hasn’t yet found its footing. “There was the storyline in the primary, which was Kerry as the institutional establishment favorite. An aloof guy, who, after Dean really caught on, was sinking like a stone. And then, with Iowa, there was the comeback. All of a sudden you had the story about a haughty frontrunner humbled, having to dig in, and becoming a better candidate because of it. The press loves a story like that. But now that he’s in the general election, the media doesn’t have that angle anymore. Now they don’t really have a fix on him.”
The press’ unstated feelings about a candidate often come out when they find a symbolic event that they can jump on and use to empty out their notebooks. Al Gore had Love Canal and the Internet; Dan Quayle had the potato(e). Kerry’s symbolic event has yet to come, but Taylor says it’s only a matter of time. “They’ll put him through the wringer a few times,” he says. Ultimately, these seemingly small events — the ones that blow up into bigger controversies than seem really appropriate — often lead to coverage that tells you more about the press’ feelings about the candidate than the candidate himself.
This “trial by media ordeal” has become ritualized spectacle for the voters, who’ve come to view political apologies (and, sometimes, the candidate’s subsequent redemption) as popular entertainment. “At some point, like Romans in the Coliseum, they will have to point their thumbs up or down,” writes Taylor. The voters decide whether a candidate deserves to transcend his scandals by looking both at his public performance and whether they think he’s gotten a fair shake from the press. “The voters can accept the [press’] judgment and let the story run,” writes Taylor, “or overrule it and let the subject survive.” In a press-saturated world, that counts as a form of democracy.
After the 1988 election, Taylor wasn’t the only journalist who spoke out. The New York Times’ Anthony Lewis, for one, gave a speech in which he said that, during the Reagan years, the press had forgotten the lessons of Watergate and Vietnam. “The established press in this country has to a large extent reverted to the symbiotic relationship with the executive branch. We are an adversary only at the margins, not on the fundamentals that challenge power … In Ben Bradlee’s phrase, there has been ‘a return to deference.’”
Leslie Janka, a former Reagan press secretary, has perhaps best articulated the reason. Janka said Reagan’s advisors discovered early on that “the media will take what we feed them. As long as you come in there every day, hand them a well-packaged, pre-masticated story in a format they want, they’ll go away.” The present administration, as Ken Auletta has noted, tends to view the press in a similar light, which may explain why many believe the media was insufficiently skeptical during the run up to the Iraq war.
Taylor, who received hate mail after questioning Hart about adultery, isn’t convinced that an adversarial approach is always the best strategy, however. “If you get too aggressive, I’m not sure you do your own cause, or the cause of journalism, much good,” he says. “A press conference is a confined space. Tough questions might contribute to the view that the press is a bunch of smart-asses — and not get answered regardless.” Still, he does not regret his provocative question to Hart, which, at the time, made Taylor himself into a transient celebrity, saddled with his own 15 minutes of fame — or, perhaps, infamy.
Ultimately, it’s not hard to draw a line from Hart’s downfall to the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the present media culture, in which it’s taken for granted that the personal lives of politicians are fair game. These days, the same press that is hesitant to question candidates’ substantive failures is focused on their personal predilections — a combination that makes the public, politicians, and the press corps itself even more cynical than they were in the past.
Asks Taylor: “How long would President Kennedy have survived in a media culture so far removed from the see-no-evil ethic of his era? When did the nation have a more satisfying relationship with its leaders — then or now?”
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