In the beginning there was Vice President Al Gore, the smug preppie with the razor-edged elbows, and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the fraternity rush chairman with The Smirk.
They were shoo-ins to meet in a silver-spoon tussle amid a year of prosperity-driven political apathy and “Clinton fatigue.”
A year or so later, Harvard’s Gore has undergone a near-death experience prompting a makeover that would make Ladies’ Home Journal proud. Meanwhile, Yale’s Bush has been forced to wonder how you can spend $60 million only to have a hothead Arizonan with a harsh, corner-cutting reputation back home capture the nation’s intense interest, if not quite its heart.
And, on the sidelines of American presidential politics, one finds pollsters, pundits, reporters and consultants whose track record have approached the Mendoza Line, named by baseball cognoscenti after a slick-fielding major-league shortstop who struggled to hit .200.
Unlike the shortstop, who at least had to adroitly turn double plays, the past year has dispelled doubts that there are no minimum professional requirements to become a pollster, a pundit, a reporter or a consultant.
“We have gotten our clocks cleaned, partly because we talk to each other too much,” said Tom Squitieri,a political reporter for USA Today. “We don’t take enough time to really figure out why people do vote and don’t vote.”
Where does one start?
Coming into the presidential year, Gore was viewed as fatally tarred by association with President Clinton, Monicagate and controversies over fundraising during the 1996 campaign.
Then, within months, it was clear Clinton would survive impeachment, and Gore was the potent front-runner.
I recall being in the office of House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, the St. Louis Democrat who had run for president before and wanted one more shot but opted out. Yes, yes, there was his desire to focus on winning back the House of Representatives for his team. But there also was the belief that Gore was a lock-cinch.
On the Republican side, Bush was The Man. With a congenial air, big-state experience and that charmed pedigree, he could be the “big tent” conservative to lure Hispanics and right-leaning Democrats. When reports filtered out about his raising tens of millions of dollars, an aura was created, prompting the pilgrimage to Austin of party bigwigs and assorted apple-polishers to bow before the altar of “compassionate conservatism.”
When reports came out that he had raised more than $60 million, shattering all records and prompting him to dispense with federal matching funds, he was virtually anointed the GOP winner. After all, money was a reflection of genuine support, right?
The political class turned its sights on Iowa and its straw poll, that wacky political rite in which one essentially buys votes. The few Republicans game enough to contest Bush there, including former Vice President Dan Quayle, Elizabeth Dole and Lamar Alexander, toiled arduously, although one aspirant did not.
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He was Sen. John McCain, the subsidy-bashing ex-prisoner of war who decided not to play in ethanol-loving Iowa, focusing instead on New Hampshire, a state heavy with orthodoxy-averse independents, and South Carolina, a state laden with military veterans.
One ABC report deemed the move “political heresy” and akin to “shooting over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” Many journalists agreed. To be forgoing all the attention that they, the media, would confer on an Iowa contestant was a doomed strategy.
Meanwhile, the laconic former basketball star, Bill Bradley, was operating beneath the radar screen. He was, by all early accounts, a high-minded, if self-righteous, long shot. Then, his fundraising figures started coming in. He had raised nearly as much as Gore! Presto, instant credibility and praise for a potentially effective, soothing manner, Big Ideas pitch and scandal-free rsum.
Gore was in trouble (and, worse for the press, a bore on the stump) and what the conservative American Spectator magazine called his “transparently desperate decision to move his campaign headquarters from Washington to Nashville” reflected a consensus political class view. One Democratic strategist cited a “pall of death” around Gore’s campaign.
It was off to New Hampshire where, lo and behold, things went awry, with conventional wisdom turning to dust like so many dot.com stock options.
The GOP race was deemed too close to call (“New Hampshire is typically keeping the country guessing,” informed National Public Radio) only days before McCain creamed Bush by 19 points.
Bradley’s understated dignity, sure to appeal to the independent-minded Granite State denizens, met a resurgent Gore, who roared back with a makeover that suggested a maniacally intense, revivalist preacher on speed. On the electronic sidelines, GOP pundit-publisher-consigliere William Kristol saw a historic rebuke of both the Democratic and Republican Establishments, sure to augur well for McCain and Bradley.
The further errors in judgment that followed would overload most Palm Pilots.
Relying heavily on dubious, overnight tracking polls, the media declared McCain to have instantly wiped out a huge deficit in South Carolina. It ballyhooed his claim of receiving $1.5 million in Internet contributions within 24 hours and warned of the declining strength of the Christian right, presumably Bush supporters. McCain’s face on every national magazine cover this side of Scientific American was assured.
Forget the assumptions of national apathy or disdain for negative advertising. The electorate was energized, so it was a given that the higher the vote total in South Carolina, the more independents and Democrats would swing McCain’s way (complementing his inherent advantage among vets). Ditch, too, the mantra about nasty ads keeping folks locked in their rec rooms.
Oops! Bush, getting down and dirty, crunched McCain. There was a record turnout, in part inspired by the negative campaign, and it helped Bush, not McCain. As for veterans, the ex-POW did win them, but by a mere 4 percentage points. Magazine covers now prepared for the “inside story ” about the Bush comeback. Then there was the Michigan “firewall,” with popular Gov. John Engler marshaling his vast troops for Bush. Well, the assumption of a Bush lock there was errant, inspiring “McCain Fights Back” tales. For the many who assumed the catalyst was Democrats sabotaging the GOP by rallying for McCain, subsequent polling showed that Democrats voted for him because, well, they liked him.
In Virginia, his lashing out at Christian right leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would energize voters wary of them. It did not, and McCain was whipped there too.
“We prematurely wrote the obituary for the Christian right days before South Carolina established its power as a kingmaker, at least within GOP primaries,” said Richard Morin, The Washington Post’s director of polling and a staff writer. “But we never get them right. Culturally, they aren’t our people, and we treat them more as a cult.”
“I assumed 2000 would be the worst turnout in modern political history,” concedes GOP consultant-pollster Frank Luntz. “Then I realized you don’t need awful times to bring out voters. You need interesting politicians.”
Even the smartest people threw aside history and caution. They lost sight of how awful early polls are in predicting general election outcomes (remember that big lead for President George Bush in 1991 and Bob Dole’s in 1995?); the inherent instability of primaries; the vast differences that can mark states; the folderol of instant “tracking” polls; the limits of money (earth to Steve Forbes); the diminished impact of paid advertising in our 150-channel universe; and the perils of being sucked into the echo chamber of the Washington chattering class.
The consistently aberrant reliance on polls suggests “too much emphasis on measurements, not enough on what they mean,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, in a declaration that can be repeated after every presidential election.
“There was an environment in which, beneath the surface, there was a desire for continuity and change,” said Kohut. “But all we saw was an affirmation of the Establishment, and not enough of people who voted out of frustration. So the big initial Bush lead was not challenged enough.
“The most difficult thing is that polls tend to confirm group-think,” Kohut said. “Either polling analyses or poll findings, which run at variance, are often disregarded. Polls that reinforce the group-think are given more credibility.”
“People took the invincibility of Bush hook, line and sinker. We had a campaign where a majority of candidates dropped out because somebody was going to win and one, McCain, wondered, `What are you talking about?”‘ said Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist and author of the upcoming “Politicians Don’t Pander” (University of Chicago Press).
Jacobs also derides “sitcom journalism,” in which he claims entertainment values override sober judgment and melodramatic plots are concocted. “Tune in to see if the war hero can scale the rock-faced fortress and get inside!” he said, asserting that fundamental policy matters, notably concerning taxes and Social Security, get short shrift.
Curtis Gans, director of the non-partisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, doesn’t think folks have been wrong “any more than in the past” (which is, inadvertently, rather damning). He disputes the notion of a revived electorate (“turnout has increased only where McCain is running and may be a transitory phenomenon”) but concedes most everybody, himself included, blew it on even the possibility of a viable McCain run.
Now what is one possibly left to conclude?
Well, Bradley’s slow act of political immolation seems virtually complete (“worst campaign since Dukakis,” says a once-admiring Democratic strategist). And McCain, clearly hoping that his base (the media) will pull him through, is shaky.
It seems to mean that we now await a nepotism battle royal, Gore vs. Bush.
Hmmmm. Come to think of it, that would mean the conventional wisdom was right in the first place.
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