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Overview
Jules Witcover has covered every election since 1952. According to his analysis, never before in history has so much money poured into a presidential campaign as flowed into the election of 2000.
In this lively, story-filled account, Witcover examines the many ways in which politicians themselves have condoned or encouraged these developments and how they are responding to the new demands of a media-driven, money-conscious age. He assesses the effects of campaign funds, both "soft" and "hard," and of a press corps that practices invasive, "gotcha" journalism.
At the same time, Witcover shows us how television dramatically, even destructively, distorts the election process, discouraging voter participation and dissuading some of our most promising public figures from seeking higher office.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780759521230 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grand Central Publishing |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2000 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 486 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction: Then and Now
One early evening more than forty years ago, in my first professional involvement in presidential politics, along with perhaps twenty other reporters, I boarded President Dwight D. Eisenhower's campaign train at Union Station in Washington. We were bound for Philadelphia, where the president was to speak in pursuit of a 1956 reelection victory over the Democratic nominee, Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois.
En route, White House and campaign aides circulated texts of Eisenhower's speech so that we members of the traveling press could meet early morning-edition deadlines. The aides strolled through the small compartments of the train, answering reporters' questions or just passing the time. As we cracked away on our noisy and cumbersome portable typewriters, Western Union clerks moved through the train collecting parts of our stories, page by page--"takes," in the jargon of the precomputer news business--for wire transmission to our newsrooms around the country.
It was all very low-key, although to a neophyte like myself it seemed a glamorous exercise of the sort that in those days drew young reporters to the craft of journalism (then seldom called either a craft or journalism). Legendary figures like Merriman Smith of United Press--"Smitty" to his contemporaries in the press corps and on the White House staff, but an unspoken "Mr. Smith" to an awestruck me--toiled with sleeves rolled up past their elbows and cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths, in a scene out of a Hollywood movie, wisecracking as they wrote.
Four years later, in 1960, in my first exposure to a presidential primary campaign, I strolled down the Main Streets of small mining towns in West Virginia accompanying, with only three or four other reporters, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts as he canvassed for votes. He would pop into local stores, shake hands with storekeepers and customers, and somewhat deferentially identify himself as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, asking for their consideration on primary day.
As Kennedy moved from town to town, he would often share his car, driven by an aide, and his thoughts with a reporter or two. And as primary day approached, the candidate would ride in a single bus with his campaign staff and reporters, sometimes sitting up front talking with a selected reporter he knew from Boston or Washington, other times sauntering to the back of the bus to banter with groups of us relaxing there, sipping beers or harder stuff, always in adequate supply. At day's or night's end, the candidate would join us in a nightcap, discussing the day's events or anything else that came into his mind, or ours.
Kennedy seldom felt it necessary at these times to stipulate that what he was saying was off the record, or "on background" and none of us tried to take notes or make a tape recording of our conversations. This was a time for the candidate to relax and for the reporters to get to know him a little better--not necessarily in the details of his thinking or actions that day, but in making an informal assessment of the man himself with his hair down.
Much has changed in presidential politics in the intervening time since the Eisenhower campaign of 1956, beyond the mode of campaign transportation and the replacement of reporters' typewriters with laptop computers. And the easy access and relationship to the candidate that reporters enjoyed in the Kennedy campaign of 1960 is largely a nostalgic memory today. Presidential campaigns have become marathon exercises in complex logistics, and except for the longest long shots in the early primaries, presidential candidates are often remote and inaccessible to the traveling press attempting to take their measure for American voters.
Candidates and presidents harmed by news-media disclosures of their personal peccadilloes and shortcomings of character have learned to be more protective of themselves. A new generation of reporters, grown more skeptical or even cynical toward politicians in the wake of the deceptions of the Vietnam War period and the Watergate scandal, has adopted more demanding standards for them than those of earlier journalistic generations.
In Kennedy's time, the yardstick for reporting on the personal behavior of candidates and presidents was whether such conduct appeared to affect the performance of their official duties. Now, in the era of gossip-sheet journalism, the Internet, and all-scandal-all-the-time radio and cable television, it appears that almost anything that can be learned is fair game for disclosure. Much is made by younger reporters today of the fact that Kennedy's womanizing before and after he entered the White House was not reported at the time. They assume that his behavior was widely known among the press corps, but that was not so, at least in my case and among my circle of reporter friends. It was not difficult for a sitting president to keep such things secret. Even if it had been known, however, it probably would not have been reported, given the journalistic standards of the time.
Today's presidential campaigns as a whole are as different from the campaigns of 1956 and 1960, or of 1952 for that matter, as the supersonic jet is from the horse and buggy. Eisenhower in 1952 and John Kennedy in 1960 each started campaigning openly and in earnest only after the campaign year itself had begun; each ran in only a handful of primaries to achieve the nominations of their parties. Each had only a few political strategists whispering in his ear; they relied largely on party chieftains around the country to generate support. Television and public-opinion polling were only beginning to become important to their campaigns, and the cost of running was a mere fraction of what it was to become.
The political parties, and voters' loyalty to them, played much greater parts in the 1952, 1956, and 1960 campaigns than they do today. Now, the explosion of television channels enables both Democratic and Republican candidates to reach many more voters, though at an astronomical cost, and polls help the candidates' strategists read the voters' minds in more refined ways, also at considerable expense. At the same time, the Internet has emerged as a huge campaign tool for direct communication with voters, bypassing the news media, not only to propagandize but also to recruit, organize, and even solicit money. Meanwhile, party loyalty has disintegrated so much that no presidential campaign goes by today without the presence of several independent or third parties to challenge the old two-party fortress. Poll after poll reports a widening public yearning for more choices, a fact fed on by Ross Perot in creation of his Reform Party in 1996.
Yet, for all that, the system by which Americans choose their president today still does resemble in essential ways the one that elected Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Kennedy in 1960, and every president thereafter. Major-party candidates still have to compete for public support in state primaries, though in many more of them, and (except for the self-financing Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000) they have to raise money to pay their expenses in those primaries. They have to accumulate convention delegates in various ways in all the states. And those who win their party's nomination have to collar a majority of votes in the electoral college to claim the presidency.
The results of this system since the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy--the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton--have not been particular testimonials for it. Of these men, only Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton were deemed by the voters effective enough to warrant a second term. At that, Nixon was forced from office early in his, in the worst political scandal in the nation's history, and Clinton had to survive House impeachment and a Senate trial. With each succeeding election year, millions of Americans have demonstrated their loss of confidence and interest in the system and in the candidates it produces, boycotting the voting booths in droves.
Also, more and more distinguished Americans have turned their backs on seeking the presidency, including heroes like General Colin Powell in 1996 and longtime political figures like Governor Mario Cuomo of New York in 1992 and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and former representative Jack Kemp of New York in 1996--men to whom attainment of the White House might have been expected to be their Holy Grail.
In Kemp's case, he did agree finally to be the Republican vice presidential nominee, but he had to endure only the two-month general campaign in the fall, paid for in full by taxpayers. As the year 2000 campaign geared up, Bradley decided that the time was right for him, but the road to the White House is no less daunting. It has indeed become such a wrenching ordeal, exacting such a high price in time, money, reputation, and personal and family privacy, that many of America's best real or prospective leaders decline even to consider subjecting themselves to it. Among the early dropouts from the 2000 campaign were Senators Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, John Kerry of Massachusetts, John Ashcroft of Missouri, and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota (for health reasons) and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri.
Now, as the United States marks its first presidential election of a new century, one deplorable fact has become crystal-clear: the process by which the nation chooses its leader has been hijacked--by money, ambition, and, yes, the ingenuity of the men and women who practice the art of politics in all its forms.
It is an art that, over the span of fifty-three presidential elections, has come to resemble not an exercise of civic-mindedness but rather an orgy of no-holds-barred warfare. It is fought out first in a relentless pursuit of campaign money, then state by state in the trenches of primary elections and caucuses, and finally nationwide through the new high-tech weapons of mass communication, increasingly under the generalship of mercenaries. From beginnings when no political parties existed, no presidential primaries, caucuses, and national conventions were held, and candidates seldom spoke publicly in their own behalf in brief campaigns, the process has evolved into a seemingly endless partisan, highly structured, and bitterly personal combat for the presidency.
Over the 209 years since George Washington took the oath of office as the first president, a complicated and tremendously costly obstacle course to the White House has been constructed. It has required ever-increasing commitments of time, energy, and money not only from the candidates but also from their friends, family, and, more and more, armies of political professionals generating profit and celebrity for themselves in their involvement.
Candidates by and large have become self-selected, deciding to seek the presidency as much out of personal ambition as personal and party achievement and acclaim--even to the point, as the billionaires Ross Perot and Steve Forbes demonstrated, of buying their way into the process.
Joining the campaigns, and often replacing high-minded individuals devoted to a single candidate in a single election, have been "hired guns" who may or may not have a close attachment to the candidate and who are driven primarily by the lure of influence, money, or notoriety, or all three. The time when campaigns were run by one-horse jockeys--friends or professional associates of the candidate motivated by devotion to him and his ideas and involved only so long as he is involved--is largely gone. Now we live in the era of the political technocrat--the hired campaign strategist, pollster, media consultant, fund-raiser--who auctions off his expertise to whichever candidate offers the most money or the best chance to wield influence and gain celebrity. What the candidate himself stands for may not matter; more and more, these hired guns are like geography teachers who can lecture that the world is round or flat, provided the price and potential for success and prominence are right.
Hand in hand with this attitude comes a campaign mentality that preaches that anything goes. Whatever it takes to win is done, the only caveat being that one's tactics should not be so egregious that they backfire, and even that caveat is often ignored. What it takes to cause a backlash against sleazy campaigning seems to increase with every election. Negative politics, which candidates and campaign managers once shunned as self-destructive except in the most dire circumstances in the waning days or hours of a campaign, have often become the first tactic to be used, to throw the opponent on the defensive at the outset. In the process, generations of young Americans, drawn into politics by good intentions, are witnessing and learning the dark underside of a calling that not too long ago was regarded with at least a measure of high purpose and public service. Under the tutelage of the growing breed of win-at-all-costs political operatives, idealism is a casualty.
These highly paid political technocrats have become more and more visible and vocal, not only in shaping the candidate's strategy and persona but also in speaking for his campaign. As the technocrats build their reputations as political magicians, they are in greater and greater demand, not only to run campaigns but to work the lucrative celebrity circuit in lecture halls and television studios. Responsibility for the tone and content of a political campaign, let alone a presidential one, which should rest with the candidate, is shifted to his professional handlers, often to his ultimate political detriment and to the public's.
Campaign finance laws, originally intended to clean up presidential politics, are riddled with loopholes and instead have lengthened the obstacle course and the price to run it, widening the opportunity for the political technocrats to gain profit and fame. The clock starts running twelve months before the presidential campaign year, when a politician must build his qualifications for the available federal campaign subsidy, so candidates go into a campaign mode then. They stump the states holding the earliest primaries and caucuses, and states where big fund-raisers can be found, and the news media follows them as they crisscross the country. This means that the spotlight focuses on them at a time when complaining voters are still recovering from the last inundation of politics in the previous presidential election.
Even an incumbent president like Bill Clinton in 1995-96, with no primary opponent in sight, worked the early money circuit assiduously. Indeed, his fund-raising proclivities, indulged in on an unprecedentedly avaricious scale, were a persuasive discouragement to any fellow Democrat who might have been toying with the prospect of challenging him.
Individuals of great wealth like Perot in 1992 and 1996 and Forbes in 1996 and 2000 can circumvent the federal campaign finance laws and the considerable burdens imposed by them by spending millions of dollars of their own money. Such blatant attempts to purchase the presidency--or at least gain entry into an election process that their personal experience would never otherwise have earned--further undermine the credibility and integrity of the system.
In the first half of 1999, one Republican presidential candidate, Governor George W. Bush of Texas, accumulated so much campaign money in an unprecedented fund-raising effort involving wealthy and well-placed friends--$37 million--that he too was able to duck federal spending restraints imposed on other candidates, placing them at further disadvantage.
As states compete for larger shares of the publicity and financial benefits of staging early caucuses and primaries, the obstacle course has become unduly demanding in terms of time, money, and endurance. In 1996, a record forty-two Republican state primaries were held, nearly three quarters of them in the first three months of the year. For 2000, the calendar was accelerated even more, and forty-six Republican and at least thirty-seven Democratic primaries were scheduled. Because of the early start in fund-raising, the presidential campaign remains at least a two-year marathon, often a longer one, and now also requires a built-in wind sprint from January through March of the election year. The pace is exhausting for the candidates and puts an additional premium on early money; for the voters, the task of assessing the candidates and digesting the rush of information about them is equally exhausting and confusing.
The party conventions that follow have become mere confirmations of decisions reached in the frenetic caucuses and primaries. And the general-election campaigning is essentially a competition for crowds and television evening news coverage, rather than a revealing debate on the key issues facing the country, except in formal debates that also have their shortcomings. The result more often than not is voter disgust and, by election time, apathy, resulting in abysmally low turnouts. In recent presidential elections, only about half of all eligible Americans voted, a performance worse than that in most other advanced countries, including those in the former Soviet bloc. The winner goes to the White House as the choice of perhaps one in four voters who could have had a say.
In all this, the news media that traditionally played watchdog, holding the candidates (and their handlers) to account for what they say and do, has been reduced to being either bystander or accomplice in the artful manipulation of politics by the hired guns. At the same time, the advent and proliferation of radio and television talk shows have encouraged the phenomenon of the celebrity journalist, whose participation often undermines his credibility in reporting on presidential politics and the credibility of his whole profession, already the target of wide public skepticism.
Weighing in as well are burgeoning political action groups and other special-interest groups from big business to labor, and an assortment of single-issue advocacy movements that with money or other political pressure try to influence and even control the candidates for their cause. And as we saw in 1996, foreign contributors either are sought by the major parties or insinuate themselves into the American electoral process to gain influence at the highest levels of government.
Is this any way to pick a president? Does the road to the White House have to be a disreputable trial by ordeal for the candidates and also for the public, who must endure its length, its noise level, its corruption, its divisiveness, and its cost, not simply in money but in the price it exacts in public incivility. Just as important, does the existing process discourage the best potential presidents from seeking the office? The roster of presidents going back at least to the end of World War II has not been particularly distinguished, and public respect for the office has steadily diminished. The intellectual and character flaws of its occupants and aspirants have been unveiled by news organizations that have helped to convert the election process from the educational exercise it should be to a running exposé of the worst in American public life. Campaign managers occupy themselves in "damage control" for their candidates and in damage proliferation against their opponents. The result sheds little light on the critical issues before the country or on the ideas the candidates have about how to deal with them.
This depressing state is not what our Founding Fathers envisioned. They never foresaw the election of the American president evolving into an all-consuming competition for campaign funds to feed a political technocracy dominated by people whose first and often only loyalty is to themselves--to their own influence, power, celebrity, and greed. Examining how this money-driven technocracy in all its manifestations emerged, how it has come to have a stranglehold on presidential politics, and what can be done about it is the objective of the following pages.
Copyright (c) 1999 Jules Witcover