MEDIA POLITICS : Fascination With Tactics Dominates Political Coverage

The polls are in: According to a Washington Post survey, Americans think the tactics and campaign organization of Vice President George Bush are more effective than those of Michael S. Dukakis by a large margin.

A majority considers Bush’s campaign operation superior, the Post reported this week, and his tactics more aggressive. By almost 2 to 1, Americans think his ads are better.

Excuse me? Was this a poll of voters or political consultants?

Every campaign year revives the complaint that the media focus too much on the horse race--who is ahead or behind. This year, there is an added complaint: that the press is also paying too much attention to strategy and campaign process, at the expense of serious issues.

“The media are teaching the American public how to run a campaign rather than where these men stand,” argues Kathleen H. Jamieson, communications professor at the University of Texas.

Consider, for instance, that after the first presidential debate this year, Time magazine’s cover featured not the candidates, but their campaign managers. “Battle of the Handlers,” said the headline.

Or note that the Post, in a major story this week outlining why Bush is ahead, began with a description of Bush operatives testing attack themes in New Jersey focus groups and emphasized the critical failure of the Dukakis camp to respond.

Or take most any night on network news. Trying to sum up Dukakis’ campaign appearances Tuesday, for instance, ABC’s Sam Donaldson concluded: “Dukakis’ strategy is simple. Revisit as many battleground states as possible, hit the populist themes as hard as you can.”

It may be that the focus on tactics is an appropriate if sad reflection on the state of the political art. But in any case, the reasons that tactics have become a national passion this year are complex.

Issues Hard to Find

For starters, campaigns are too long, and issues get stale. This year, moreover, many observers contend, the candidates have so thoroughly avoided substantive issues that tactics are deciding the race.

And in this era of cocooned candidates, powerful handlers, test-marketed rhetoric and used car-lot honesty, the workings of a campaign may be one of the best places to probe for insights into what these men are like.

Indeed, some argue that the media’s focus on tactics has intensified the public’s disgust with this campaign. If this is so, it may hasten a backlash finally against the packaged presidency.

“We are not creating a reality” of tactics, said Linda Wertheimer of National Public Radio. “This is the reality we found.”

It is not a new reality. Covering tactics stands in the great tradition of Theodore White’s “Making of the President 1960,” which made the struggle for the presidency seem epic and fascinating by looking at it from the inside.

But campaign coverage has set new standards this year in such moments as the Time cover, or when network anchors described George Bush as doing a good job in his convention speech of delivering speech writer Peggy Noonan’s text.

Some consider it another sloppy journalistic habit, at least in part. “Scratch any reporter out here and you’ll see a frustrated political consultant or a campaign manager underneath,” says Dukakis Press Secretary Dayton Duncan. Journalists are just fascinated by tactics.

Some Suspect Laziness

Other journalists, privately, think reporters fix on tactics out of laziness, because strategy is easier to master than issues. Other reporters counter that the public and even their editors grow tired of issues stories. It is an endless debate.

But there are other, more structural reasons why the nation’s media are teaching the electorate to be a political consultant.

For one, time. Long before election day, reporters have heard every speech, written every issue story and done every profile. It’s like a football game that started 18 months ago.

And as time goes on and reporters hunt for new things to say, “tactics help organize a story, offering a story line, a plot, a protagonist, some insight, some intrigue,” said Paul Taylor of the Washington Post.

The reasons, also, go deeper and have something to do with the nature of modern campaigns, and modern media.

Jim Lake, senior communications adviser to the Bush campaign, believes the fascination with tactics comes in part from the proliferation of polls and other tools of market research.

Rarely do reporters spend time any more in distant states chatting with fry cooks and cabbies and gas station attendants to learn what the country wants politically. Instead, reporters “stay in their offices, look at their poll data and then compare what they see there with officials in the campaigns,” Lake said.

“Politics is an industry now,” said John Buckley, former press secretary to Jack Kemp. “Because reporters are seeing themselves as part of a larger industry, they report on the industry as an industry instead of simply conveying what the candidate said.”

Both sides have been shameless at dodging issues, especially the most important questions, such as how they would deal with the budget deficit. They have relied instead on tactical arguments, attacking their opponents with political symbols, such as the Pledge of Allegiance and prison furloughs.

Understated Response

When the subject of issues comes up now, reporters respond with dark understatement. “As has been said a million times, this has hardly been a good year for substance,” said Taylor of the Post.

“It is also a reflection to some extent of a generalized media view of George Bush as a bad campaigner,” ABC’s Brit Hume suggests. “The concept of Bush as a weak politician died hard,” so if he gives a good speech, introduces a new idea, goes harshly negative or suddenly more positive, there is a perception that the handlers, not the candidate, are responsible.

And there is a widely held view now among political professionals and journalists that tactics this year have proven decisive--a view derived in part from looking at polls.

Bush set out to define Dukakis as a liberal, Dukakis didn’t respond, and indeed the polls changed and showed people started viewing Dukakis as a liberal, notes Richard Morin, pollster at the Washington Post. And when that happened, Dukakis’ lead, 17 points in July, slowly shriveled to a 13-point deficit this week, according to the CBS poll.

Campaign tactics are “one explanation of how a close race turned into not such a close race,” said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. “The press has arrived at the judgment that the Bush campaign did a great job and the Dukakis campaign failed miserably.”

Finally, there was the last war, the lingering memory of how Ronald Reagan won. He did it while campaigning inside a hermetic seal. By severely restricting press access, the campaign was able to carefully control what images and sound bites the public would receive.

This year, both candidates are trying to duplicate that method with varying degrees of success. They rarely give press conferences. On a typical day, reporters might see Bush for a total of 50 minutes, and usually from a distance.

What reporters see, instead, is a cocoon--a tightly wound system of advance men arranging backdrops and camera placements, speech writers working the phones and the fax machines, and advisers, lips pursed, rocking on the balls of their feet, with that annoyed, nervous and slightly bored look of a theater director during a performance. In the center, guarded by Secret Service machine guns, is the candidate.

The media, too, see the phantom of Reagan, and part of the fixation with tactics and handlers this year, particularly on television, is a conscious attempt to be not used again.

“One of the things we have to do to avoid being a conduit for their image merchants is we have to have a lot of analysis” of what those merchants are doing, said Engberg of CBS.

To some, the fascination with tactics and handlers has gotten out of hand.

ABC’s Hume contends that the media this year are conveying an erroneous impression that handlers are deciding this race, that politics is all sound bites and backdrops, and that nothing is real.

But others believe that the readers are benefiting from the focus on tactics.

“Character is a big part of presidential elections and people should look closely at how they campaign,” argued Owen Ullmann, who covers Bush for Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

And Maslin, in his polling for Democratic candidates around the country, is discovering that the tactics are part of how voters decide now.

“It is not linear: It’s not ‘He runs a good campaign so he would make a good President,’ ” Maslin explained. “It is something more indirect, that campaigns tell you a lot about a candidate.”

Maslin also suggests that the press’ focus on tactics has contributed to the growing cynicism about the nature of campaigns, a cynicism that, many journalists and campaign professionals agree, could reach a critical mass and eventually force politics to change.

“This backlash is real, and it is clearly being helped along by the press focus,” said Maslin. “And personally I think what will happen in ’90 is people developing positive strategies. We will have to see, though, if they have the guts to stick with it when the rain comes down.”