Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

I have a bias against reporters. In my professional life to date, I have run into some of the most talented and dedicated reporters I could imagine: people who fact-checked, held your feet to the fire and ultimately gave you a fair shot. People like those are a tribute to the profession and the freedoms they're afforded in the Constitution. Those are folks I like.

Then there's everybody else. The conduct of reporters on my last two campaigns have often left me genuinely appalled. I've written before on the blog about how uninformed reporters can be, even as they spout off on news-talk shows with utter confidence in their simply incorrect beliefs. What's truly stunning, though, is how many of them never even try. Last year in Kentucky, what I saw really confirmed the stereotype of political reporters: a lot of the news organizations (mostly TV) just never showed up if you were holding a substantive event like a jobs plan, and if they did show up, all their questions were on process and attack politics. Show a whiff of scandal, on the other hand, and they're on you like bias on Fox News. (I'm thinking specifically of the time I got one of our policy positions wrong on a questionnaire. I had to go on TV and get out of it the day after we did our health care launch and nobody came.) True, the local print and NPR reporters were generally great, but I have ten stories just like that about the extent to which the press misuses the public trust.

It's not much better on the national scene, either. I remember seeing the coverage of some Democratic debate around October 2003, and I was wondering why the pundits in the studio kept talking as if they knew so much less than I did. Granted, I was basically poring over the news as my job, but in a few months I found out whence my superior knowledge: a lot of reporters just didn't do the job. In the throes of Iowa caucus season, there were Hotline-ish insider-journalism stories detailing how hilarious it was that national reporters stayed in the Hotel Fort Des Moines lobby, because it was just too darned cold to go outside. Because of this attitude, all they did was ask each other about the hot rumors du jour while the actual campaign raged (and changed dramatically) in towns just a half-hour from the city. How they can keep their jobs after that kind of abandonment is beyond me.

So I'm not that inclined to love the professionalism of journalism. It's funny, actually, I think journalists and political operatives both tend to think of the other as having an inferior job. Journalists think of themselves as seeking the truth while campaign staffers seek to obscure it, and campaign operatives think of themselves as trying to change the world while journalists lamely sit and watch. It's not necessarily a healthy relationship. In truth it's the person, not the job, who's good or bad, but in weaker moments this is what gets brought up during fights.

So when I see the title of Walter Mears' Deadlines Past: Forty Years of Campaigning: A Reporter's Story, I snicker, "Who cares about a reporter's story? All they can do is talk about somebody else." This is true: thankfully, Mears writes about his impressions of the eleven presidential campaigns he's covered, and keeps the Walter Mears discussion to a few casual asides. Still, journalists' memoirs are usually not that great. It's admirable that a reporter give us just the facts in a news story, but that same trait tends to make their memoirs inconsequential. I read the autobiography of notably well connected sports journalist Dick Schaap a while ago, and Schaap never really gives you a compelling reason to care about the book. He just piles on the anecdotes and hopes the reader doesn't mind. With Mears, the same is true: if you care about politics, you'll relish the trip down memory lane with someone who was paying better attention than you were. If you're not interested in the minutiae, you won't find a whole lot that's compelling. At least Schaap's book had a conclusion; here's the last paragraph of Mears:

With that final story it was time for me to go. I'd had a front row seat on national politics for forty years. It was exhilarating, exhausting, satisfying, tense, frustrating, and fun - my ticket to see, hear, and write about winners and losers, flaws and failings, in the imperfect American way of nominating and electing presidents.

Really? That's it? Given that that paragraph could just have easily appeared on the inside front jacket, Mears apparently had no interest in taking the reader anywhere except through his old notebooks. When your ending reeks of "Honey, I'm done with the book, but I have no idea what to put at the end," it's worth revisiting why you're writing in the first place.

So it is what it is: the ebb and flow of the careers of other people. I personally like this stuff, so I enjoyed reading it, but I can't imagine anyone uninterested in politics being glad they read it. Even the structure is a little off-putting; devoting a chapter to each election probably makes the most sense, but it leaves important stories without a natural setting. (Where do you put Watergate? With McGoverrn or Carter?) Essentially, this is the political version of watching someone else's slides from Bermuda: you know a little more about what the trip was like, but in the back of your mind you're not sure what was the point.

Still, Mears isn't a bad guy. He freely admits that reporters always think they could do a better job than the candidates they cover, yet the journalists who run themselves rarely justify the assumption. While you can tell, more or less, that Mears is a Democrat, he never says so explicitly and gives a pretty fair shake to all the candidates. In fact, he helped cure me of one of my biggest complaints about reporters, namely the rank hypocrisy. A reporter asking a candidate why he's stonewalling on releasing potentially damaging documents will turn around two weeks later and ask him why he released such damaging documents. There are, of course, still jerks in reporting, and I don't mean to absolve those idiot columnists whose sage advice contradicts itself from week to week. Still, Mears offers a much better sense of the journalistic mentality. The questions sound accusatory because they have to provoke to get an answer. The journalist usually neither knows nor cares what the answers are, but it's his job to get an answer, and that's all he wants. In retrospect it should have been obvious, but now it'll be much easier for me to exclude journalists from those who have to be responsible enough to be consistent. They have a job to do, nothing else.

Unfortunately, Mears is still prone to making the same mistakes as most reporters. Like all national journalists, Mears has an annoying tendency to make blunt statements, the real story he couldn't tell you in the papers, even though he's usually wrong. When it's someone like Humphrey, I have no way to judge for myself, but I do know a fair amount about Bill Clinton's presidency, so there the errors and assumptions became annoying. Further, he has the annoying journalistic habit of focusing more on new material than on importance. Say you're a candidate who unveils a health care plan, and goes on the road to support it. Most reporters these days will report on the substance of the first health care event, and spend subsequent events waiting for the candidate to do something different. I suspect this mentality comes from two sources. First, there aren't many forms of competition between news organizations, so they're all driven to find new material and get it out first. Second, I'm pretty sure they teach you early in journalism school that "dog bites man" isn't a story, and "man bites dog" is a story. So if a candidate says something a little wild in a post-health care event press conference, that becomes the story, and any readers who don't know about the candidate's health care plan find out exactly nothing. This is why I wish journalists would consider "dog bites man" a story if the man, the dog, or the bite were important enough. In any event, Mears isn't doing himself any favors by assuming this is acceptable behavior.

So, in the interest of journalistic fairness, I'll conclude with one useful correction and one amusing anecdote. First, the correction: Mears says "While Dole was trying to transform himself, Clinton already had, adopting an old-fashioned strategy with a newfangled name: triangulation. ... Triangulation meant blaming the Republicans on the right when things went wrong, scorning Democrats on the left, planting Clinton back in the middle."

Triangulation was not old-fashioned, it certainly wasn't a blunt centrism, and it was more policy than politics. Back in reality, triangulation is the process of solving the other side's problems with your side's solutions to convey a sense of effectiveness and bipartisanship. The best example for Clinton is probably crime: Republicans had railed about liberals being weak on crime for years, without much in the way of a Democratic response. Clinton became the first national Democrat to focus on crime as a problem, but instead of the standard Republican solution (tougher sentences) he went with a more Democratic solution (more cops on the street). Clinton's triangulation appealed to liberals because he was using the power of government for good, to conservatives because he was solving one of their pet peeves, and to moderates because he looked like he was abandoning politics for the good of the country. And it's not just Clinton who did this: when George W. Bush decided to take on education by emphasizing accountability, that's triangulation too. He took a Democratic problem and solved it (I know, but bear with me here) and he used a Republican strategy. Sure, blunt centrism is easier to get your head around, but triangulation isn't that hard to understand either. I don't know why reporters don't get this.

So here's my favorite anecdote from the book:

While Goldwater campaigned by chartered jet, sometimes taking the controls himself against federal aviation rules, his running mate, a little-noted congressman named William E. Miller, traveled by turbo-prop, which took longer and gave him more time to play cards. Goldwater said he picked Miller, an upstate New York representative who had been party chairman, because the man drove Johnson nuts. That wasn't the case in 1964, when the LBJ Democrats welcomed the nomination of a candidate so anonymous then and later that he wound up appearing in American Express commercials about the power of the card even in the hands of the obscure.

The Miller campaign became a nonstop card game. The plane would taxi to a stop and he'd tell the aides and reporters in the game to put the cards down while he went to make his speech. When he got back they would pick up the hands and resume the game. One stop was in Phoenix, where he met with Goldwater at the airport, returned to the cards, and said, "Poor guy thinks he's going to win." Late in the campaign, a reporter offered him long odds on a bet for the Republican ticket. "I may be a gambler, but I'm not crazy enough to bet on this election," Miller said.

So if you're looking for stories like these, and you don't mind an RNC chair being referred to as anonymous, Walter Mears is your man. If you're looking for solid, accurate, insightful and good-looking commentary, stick with me.