Newswatch: Being Candid About Deception

By common consent, this has been a sorry campaign. With Super Tuesday’s passing this week, it is dawning on the public that instead of being turned off by all the candidates, it now must recognize that one among them may be the next President. As the campaign enters this new phase, one reassuring fact goes unrecognized: how well the press is doing at showing the campaign as it actually is.

Theater is the clue to understanding how we are choosing the successor to our first actor President. This may be one of Reagan’s lasting legacies. Onstage the candidates offer performances of calculated civility, feigned rage and planned ad libs. Backstage the underlying hostility is real enough, among competitors not that far apart on the issues. It surfaces in moments of phony drama contrived to catch another fellow off guard, breaking the rhythms of his planned explanations and evasions. This the public sees in the televised debates; but with more candor and detail than in past campaigns, the press has been able to report the strategies behind the tactics. First comes incessant polling to test a rival’s vulnerabilities, then the devising of advertising slogans and one-liners for the candidate to exploit such weaknesses. Candidates call press conferences to exhibit their latest negative commercials, while consultants explain their psychological subtleties. Campaign strategists boast how they put in the candidate’s mouth his most successful ad libs. It is as if acknowledging phoniness makes it honest.

One explanation for the increased candor is that this is the first election in 20 years in which a sitting President is not running. In an overcrowded field only now beginning to narrow, candidates and their strategists have all had to be supplicants for the press’s attention. How odd that a significant campaign moment should be the Bush camp’s decision to sass back CBS’s Dan Rather and that Bush should proudly describe the encounter as “Tension City.”

Such “big” moments illustrate how much this is a campaign of the technicians. The candidates talk not of issues and programs but of their self- proclaimed character and capacity for leadership and of their rivals’ flaws. For this, Hodding Carter III, writing in the Wall Street Journal, blames the electorate: “Whatever tendencies any of them might have to talk turkey to the voters is withered by the clear evidence that the voters are not yet ready to hear it . . . They know the day of accountability is coming, but they are in no hurry to reach it.” But you can’t play “morning in America” again either.

Unrepresentative as the small samplings of opinion in Iowa and New Hampshire were, they did put all candidates through the same hoops and pressures. (Perhaps the major failing of press reporting of these races is the way it played the game of candidates doing Better Than Expected or worse, which may tell more about the accuracy of small-scale polling than it does about shifts in opinions.) The candidates themselves have gradually changed; once as vulnerable as soft-shell crabs, they were unprepared for unexpected questions; now they have grown hard shells able to withstand attack. They are practiced at countering tough questions with an answer that suffices even if it does not satisfy. Soon they will even be able to handle ABC’s aggressive Sam Donaldson, who in a poll by the Washington Journalism Review has again been chosen by press colleagues as television’s best reporter.

The lackluster list of presidential candidates suggests that they don’t make them like George Washington anymore. But the way Washington’s reputation was gilded by his contemporaries reminds us that they don’t make them like Parson Weems anymore either. Weems, as a moralizing biographer, reported an anti- environmental action by young George Washington (chopping down a cherry tree) in order to absolve him of attempting a cover-up. Having witnessed too many flawed presidencies recently, the press is in no such mood to soften its searching examination of a candidate’s deeds and character. The mythmaking, or even the celebration of a President’s heroic qualities, has to come much later.