Jules Witcover has written a presidential campaign book that ranks with Jeff Greenfield’s The Real Campaign, Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960, Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and Dick Morris’s Behind the Oval Office among the best of the genre. Unfortunately, Witcover’s new No Way to Pick a President isn’t that book. His dazzler was Marathon, a tale of the 1976 presidential race that is breathtaking in its scope, detail, and analysis, and still worth reading today.
But No Way to Pick a President is a sour book — for the simple reason that Witcover, who writes a column with Jack Germond and still covers politics better than almost anyone else, now finds more bad than good in presidential campaigns. He’s tired of self-selected candidates, amoral political consultants, the deluge of money, cocky but ignorant reporters, the emphasis on television, and the tone and substance of the campaigns themselves. There isn’t much about presidential politics he wouldn’t uproot, outlaw, or alter.
You have to agree with a lot of his criticism. Yes, the compression of nearly all the caucuses and primaries into January, February, and March (which is the case in 2000) is an awful innovation that serves neither candidates nor voters. It’s true the media shouldn’t but usually do play along with the fiction that the “main event” of presidential contests is the actual campaigning across the country by the candidates rather than their television appearances and paid commercials. Witcover is also dead right that “the constant presence of television cameras and tape recorders on the campaign trail inhibits the candidates’ willingness to talk candidly with reporters.”
But though all that’s true, Witcover’s remedies for the ills of presidential politics are drastic, utopian, and elitist. He writes warmly about a proposal of consultant John Deardourff to ban all paid television commercials once the party’s nominees have been selected. That way, he says, “the clatter of negative commercials would be stilled during the period when the election campaign and the debates draw heavy news coverage on their own.” Besides being unconstitutional, this would transfer control of presidential campaigns to the arrogant, unrepresentative group of people the American public would least like to be in charge: the press.
More sensibly, Witcover wants the states, or maybe Congress, to arrange for five presidential primaries or caucuses every other Tuesday from early March through the middle of July. This would give voters more time to judge the candidates, and allow poorly financed candidates who get hot in the early primaries to raise enough money to survive through the later contests. As things stand now, only the well-funded have much chance of enduring. But this reform is unattainable. Most states wouldn’t sit still for being assigned a Tuesday to hold their primary. Naturally, Witcover would also curb the amount of money in presidential races, increase the power of the Federal Election Commission, mandate free television time for candidates, institutionalize debates, and so on. You get the picture: Witcover favors liberal campaign finance reform.
But he has more to say than that. And once you get past his pet peeves — Dick Morris, straw polls, President Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, The McLaughlin Group, celebrity journalists, the electoral college, independent expenditures — a lot of it is very smart. Very reactionary, too. Witcover has covered every campaign since 1952, and he prefers the old way of electing presidents. From the 1950s to the 1970s, political reporters got to know the candidates, who were encouraged to spend hours chatting with journalists off-the-record. If they said something spicy, no one would report it. Now, candidates can’t count on such restraint, so they rarely share their candid thoughts with the press, and the result is reporting that’s much less informed.
Witcover sees the evil influence of television in virtually everything that’s gone wrong with presidential politics. When campaign managers discovered that “television advertising is the most cost-effective way to reach the most voters,” they lavished funds on it at the expense of old-fashioned ways to stir voters. “Gone were the neighborhood storefront offices in every town of any size and in every section of the big cities, and gone were the volunteers licking stamps and envelopes there, having political discussions with neighbors who came by in search of buttons, bumper stickers, or a good argument,” Witcover writes nostalgically.
His thinking about television goes like this: Television requires huge amounts of money, plus consultants to create clever ads, and since the consultants make fat fees, they insist that campaigns be totally television-oriented, which means they get more money yet. And there’s one more thing: The emphasis on television requires the use of the most effective type of ad, which turns out to be the negative ad, aired early in the campaign to define one’s opponents unfavorably before they can define themselves. That’s how campaigns turn into mudfests. There’s some rough truth in this, but Witcover surely overstates his case. Negative ads often convey more useful (and truthful) information to voters than positive ads, speeches, or debates. In 1988, ads attacking Michael Dukakis for allowing convicted murderers like Willie Horton to spend weekends on furlough provided a valuable insight into the type of liberal governance Dukakis would have brought to Washington.
To his credit, Witcover steers clear of some of the stupider ideas about changing campaigns, notably reviving the smoke-filled room of party leaders to choose presidential candidates. Of course, this is entirely unrealistic in the first place. Party leaders of the sort that picked, say, Warren Harding as the GOP candidate in 1920 don’t exist anymore. And second, conservatives most of all should be leery of abandoning the primaries. In 1980, what passes for Republican party leaders now — mainly elected officials and consultants — would never, ever have chosen Ronald Reagan as the presidential nominee. He was no hero to his peers, but Senator Howard Baker was. You can figure out the rest.
For all the faults of presidential campaigns, Witcover’s alarmism is undercut by the course of the 2000 race. Sure, money matters, but it guarantees nothing. Texas governor George W. Bush has raised a stupendous amount, yet that hasn’t stopped Senator John McCain, with a fraction of Bush’s money, from mounting a real challenge. At the same time, the millions spent by Steve Forbes have yet to lift his campaign above the status of also-ran.
And then there’s television. The Republican and Democratic presidential races have settled into one-on-one contests, candidates have been winnowed out, and fresh issues have cropped up. Should compassionate conservatism be taken seriously? How much of the budget surplus should be devoted to health care, Medicare, or tax cuts? Must defense spending be increased dramatically? All this has happened without television playing a significant role, or any role at all. So maybe the system is starting to correct itself. At the least, let’s allow the 2000 campaign to take its course before imposing solutions to problems that may vanish on their own.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
