FOR DAYS, I called the campaign of Ron Kirk, the ex-Dallas mayor running for the Senate in Texas, to find out his schedule of campaign events. Or an assistant called on my behalf. We couldn’t get the schedule. Only the press secretary could give out that information and, you guessed it, the press secretary wasn’t available but would call back. Only he didn’t call back. The most basic information about a campaign, where the heck the candidate is campaigning, simply was a secret, at least to me. This is a recurring problem in campaigns all over the country. Nobody–not a receptionist or a deputy press secretary or a volunteer–is allowed to release the candidate’s schedule. Now, you can always snoop around and discover it eventually, and I did in Kirk’s case. As it turned out, he had a reason for keeping his plans private. He was going to San Francisco and Los Angeles for two days to raise money from liberal Democrats, the kind of Democrats who aren’t popular in Texas. And he didn’t want that fact trumpeted all over the state. For other campaigns, not disclosing the schedule is counterproductive. It diminishes coverage. Maybe they’re just paranoid about the press. Schedule secrecy is the first of my pet peeves about covering campaigns, annoyances that actually have changed a bit over the years as campaigns have changed. One change is the decline of the campaign event itself, which is another peeve of mine. This started in California and quickly spread. Here’s the thinking behind this trend: Why waste the candidate’s time at campaign appearances where few people will see him, when a TV ad will reach tens of thousands more people? The answer is a candidate still needs “free TV”–coverage on local news shows. But he can get that with a single event per day. There’s no compelling reason to do five or six events when one meets the campaign’s needs. Thus, candidates spend an inordinate amount of their time raising money for TV ads and do few public events. Peeve three is campaign polls. There are more and more of them every election cycle. That’s fine. I love polls. The problem is the failure of the press to distinguish between worthwhile polls and worthless ones. The first rule is that polls by a candidate’s own pollster aren’t as credible as independent polls. A pollster for a Democrat can exaggerate the size of the Democratic cohort in the election. That’s what happened with a recent poll showing Kirk leading his Republican foe, John Cornyn. The Hispanic and black voting populations in the poll sample were far larger than they had ever been in real life. Yet many in the media treated the poll as no less reliable than any other. As a result, folks were walking around saying, “Kirk’s up by 2.” Non-campaign polls had him down by 5 to 10 percentage points. But even independent polls should raise eyebrows, as Stuart Rothenberg noted recently in Roll Call. Just before scandal-tainted Democratic senator Robert Torricelli dropped out of the contest in New Jersey, a poll by John Zogby had him leading by 5 points. In the so-called internals of that poll, Torricelli was attracting twice as many Republican voters as his opponent was winning over Democrats. Not likely. Another poll showed Republican Lamar Alexander leading in the Tennessee race for the Senate, which he was, but running 25 points ahead among women, 9 points behind among men. Again, not likely, but only Rothenberg pointed it out. Still another peeve of mine is the prissiness of the press in dealing with negative campaign ads on television. Many reporters act like attack ads are poison. TV spots that make personal attacks sometimes are. But the vast majority of negative ads deal with a candidate’s record. What’s wrong with making that a target? Isn’t that what campaigns are supposed to be about, a candidate’s record? It’s from negative ads that voters learn the most about the candidates. The media, especially local TV, are too busy covering the horse race aspect–who’s going to run, who’s going to win?–of election contests. Or, as is increasingly the case, scarcely covering campaigns at all. Finally, there’s money. You’d think from the media that money was the only determinant of who wins–invariably the candidate who has the most. Not so. The truth is, there’s a certain minimum amount needed for a candidate to get his message out and finance a reasonable get-out-the-vote effort. Beyond that, the return from spending more money decreases. Yet you’d never know this from the reporting on the subject. What fuels this problem is that figures on fund-raising are now readily accessible to the press. This makes the job of reporting easier and reporters lazier. Finally there’s something that once peeved me but not any more–debates. The press insists on them, but I wasn’t so certain they were critical to achieving an informed electorate. These days, however, with the press offering so little campaign coverage, debates are essential. The more, the merrier, within reason. Sure, some congressional and gubernatorial debates this year have been nasty, like the one in the Maryland governor’s race when Republican Bob Ehrlich was booed while giving his opening statement. But the alternative–not having debates at all–is no longer acceptable. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
