The Media Swarm to Bauer for a Political Nonevent

Gary Bauer summoned the media to a small hotel conference room here Wednesday to announce what he had not done. But the real news was the wall-to-wall press throng that showed up to listen.

Most Americans have probably never heard of Gary Bauer, a Republican White House wannabe, let alone the allegations he vociferously denied.

Still, it was standing room only for 45 minutes of question-and-denial, as 50 journalists--including eight TV crews--chronicled the latest turn of Washington’s Wheel of Scandal.

Just last week, when Bauer delivered a 15-page address about his views on U.S.-China policy, a measly five print reporters and three local TV crews showed up and the event garnered scarcely a line in most newspapers.

But advance word that Bauer would deny a rumored affair with a young aide drew a relative mob, once more demonstrating the media’s seemingly insatiable hunger for naughty nuggets--regardless of the public’s seemingly well-sated appetite.

“It’s the hypocrisy thing,” said one reporter, who didn’t want to be quoted by name, because she really didn’t want to be there (but was, because everyone else was). “When a family values guy gets accused like this, you got to come.”

“It’s the Republican food fight,” said another reporter who also didn’t want to be quoted by name. “Last year every Republican who got caught in a scandal blamed the [Democratic] White House. Now you have Republican against Republican. It’s a new twist.”

The rumor was rumored to have been spread by rival Steve Forbes’ camp, which denied trafficking in personal gossip even while suggesting that an “appearance of impropriety” was one of the reasons several staffers have recently left Bauer’s campaign.

“No one on our campaign was talking about it,” said Forbes spokesman Keith Appell. “To the contrary, we were actually trying to knock it down.”

At the Bauer event, Joan Lowy of the Scripps Howard newspaper chain was one of the few reporters willing to be quoted by name:

“I’m the office’s expert in scandal. I did Hyde; I did Livingston,” she said.

She was referring--as those who savor scandal might recall--to Illinois’ Henry J. Hyde and Louisiana’s Bob Livingston, Republican congressmen caught up in revelations of their own adultery in the wake of Bill Clinton’s travails with Monica S. Lewinsky.

Bauer--a former Reagan aide and longtime conservative activist--is certainly no naif in the ways of the national media. For all its indignity, his public profession of fealty to Carol, his wife of 27 years, wasn’t a half-bad political move, said press analyst Marvin Kalb.

Reporters are “attracted to the whiff of scandal,” said Kalb, head of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. “A politician desperately in need of publicity is aware of your need. . . . In doing so, he knows you must write about him. That brings out the pack and gives him the visibility he feels he needs.”

Bauer opened his press conference saying he and his family had been subjected to five weeks of rumors, which finally saw the light of ink this week in a gossip item in a New York tabloid. That, in turn, was picked up by an online political tip sheet, leading to an article in a San Francisco newspaper that was distributed on the national news wires.

“The core idea of these rumors is that I violated the vows I made to my wife 27 years ago,” he said. “These rumors and character assassinations are disgusting, outrageous, evil and sick.” When reporters repeatedly pressured Bauer to deny specific details about the rumors and how or why they may have evolved, he declined, prompting an exasperated Ralph Z. Hallow, a political reporter for the conservative Washington Times, to bark at him, “I really don’t want to get into this either, but it’s your press conference, Mr. Bauer.”

But Bauer did become specific when he said, “I have not had any physical contact with anyone in my campaign or out of my campaign other than my wife.”

Jake Tapper, a reporter for the online magazine Salon, noted that a lot of people would be introduced to Bauer for the first or second time on the evening news in the context of an indiscretion he vehemently denies. “What does that say about your political judgment?” he asked.

Bauer, calmly, replied: “If you don’t deny something people in this town will think it’s true. . . . I didn’t know how else to do this.”

A Washington Post religion writer tried to get Bauer to talk about the concern of conservatives who might not feel comfortable with men and women working closely together as they often do in a campaign. She noted that the Rev. Billy Graham and other religious leaders make it a point not to travel with female staff members for just that reason.

“I’m not a minister. I am not a pastor,” Bauer replied. “I’ve spent 25 years working in public policy and I’ve conducted myself in a campaign the same way I have for 25 years.”

When it became apparent that no one else in the room had anything left to ask, a Chicago Tribune reporter drew a collective laugh asking Bauer his opinion of Democrat Bill Bradley’s new health care plan.