All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid

by Matt Bai

  8

  A LESSER LAND

  THESE DAYS, WHEN I CONSIDER what’s happened to political journalism in the years that I’ve been doing it, going back to the late 1990s, I think of my strange experience with John Kerry. At the time he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, after a plodding but efficient run through the party’s raucous primaries, Kerry seemed like a decent bet to unseat George W. Bush—which was precisely why Democratic voters had chosen him over more exciting candidates like John Edwards and Howard Dean. Here was a decorated Vietnam veteran and an experienced hand at foreign policy, an unobjectionable if uninspiring alternative, running at a moment of deep anxiety over terrorism and the flagging war in Iraq. His record of service and patriotism seemed unassailable, which was exactly the message he sought to underscore in the only truly memorable line from his acceptance speech in Boston: “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty!”

  And yet, to Kerry’s great surprise, the coverage of his campaign focused almost entirely on questions of his character. In Kerry’s case, the issue wasn’t sex or recklessness, but rather chronic insecurity and inconstancy. He had signed up to fight in Vietnam and gotten himself a plethora of combat medals (which, Republicans asserted in an unconscionable attack, he hadn’t actually earned), but then he had turned around and thrown those medals over the White House fence when public opinion shifted. He had, according to his own infamous admission, voted for the war appropriation in Iraq before he voted against it. He was a Massachusetts liberal masquerading as a Clintonian centrist, a wealthy windsurfer with a mansion on Nantucket who pretended to be a regular guy. To the modern media horde, every candidate was a hypocrite waiting to be exposed, and Kerry’s brand of hypocrisy was that he claimed to believe in things but never really did.

  That summer, my editors at the Times Magazine had the idea for a long cover piece about Kerry’s philosophy when it came to terrorism and national security generally. Although most Democrats in Washington thought it was enough just to know that Kerry wasn’t Bush, and they assumed the electorate could be made to feel the same way, the candidate’s specific views on the most pressing topic in American life remained maddeningly opaque. (He resorted mostly to vapid lines like, “The future doesn’t belong to fear, it belongs to freedom,” and so forth.) And this inability to clarify an argument seemed to be adding to the sense that he was a man without conviction, generally. In a Washington Post poll that fall, only 37 percent of voters agreed with the statement that Kerry would make the country safer. A Times poll, meanwhile, found that while half the respondents thought Bush would make the right choices to protect the country from terrorists, only 26 percent said the same of Kerry.

  After some customary wrangling back and forth, Kerry’s campaign ultimately agreed to have him sit with me for three long interviews—the first aboard his campaign plane on a flight from Nantucket to Denver, and the others in hotel suites in Seattle and Santa Monica. I assumed Kerry would welcome the opportunity to elaborate on his actual plan for governing, rather than having to answer yet more questions about the authenticity of his war medals; that I assumed wrongly was evident in our very first meeting, when Kerry delayed our interview for almost the entire flight and then threw me out of his cabin after a few hard questions about Iraq. (An aide apologized, saying he had fallen asleep and woken up irritable.)

  Kerry, who was surrounded by layers of media coaches, did his level best to be more civil in our subsequent conversations, but his contempt was unmistakable—and perhaps, given his experience to that point, not unreasonable. He seemed to regard me not as someone who sought to explain his views (which is how I saw myself), but rather as a hired assassin who had just walked through the front door without so much as a struggle. He had no doubt I had been sent there to kill him; what he couldn’t understand was why he was being forced to sit there on the couch across from me, making a big, fat target of himself.

  At the outset of our second meeting, before asking a single question, I tried to put Kerry at ease with the kind of idle chatter at which politicians excel. He had turned down a bottle of Evian, instructing his aide to go out and find some of “my water.” I wondered aloud what he didn’t like about the Evian.

  “I hate that stuff,” he said. “They pack it full of minerals.”

  So I asked Kerry, without any particular interest in the answer, what kind of water he preferred. This is what you sometimes do as a writer when you’re trying to transcend the usual, transactional dynamic that exists in more typical and hurried campaign interviews. I ask you what kind of water you drink, you ask me something in return, and before you know it we’re having an actual conversation, like normal people who don’t suspect one another of treasonous crimes.

  “Plain old American water,” he replied gruffly.

  This confused me, since I hadn’t thought of Evian as being un-American, although technically it is. “You mean like tap water?” I asked.

  Kerry froze. It was as if I had laid a series of mines that now had to be carefully, gingerly sidestepped. Was I going to write that he made a show of drinking tap water like a regular person, even though we all knew he could afford to buy Evian’s entire spring if he wanted? That he made a point of eschewing French water, so as not to underscore the fact that he speaks fluent French? Did I have a picture of him drinking from an Evian bottle somewhere in my saddlebag? Exactly what kind of “gotcha” game was I running here?

  “No,” Kerry said carefully. “There are all kinds of waters.” He tried to think of some while I sat there waiting, awkwardly. “Saratoga Spring,” Kerry said. Then, after a pause: “Sometimes I drink tap water.” The rest of our conversations went more or less like this.

  As it turned out, Kerry’s paralyzing suspicion was well founded, though not because of any subterfuge on my part. My final, eight-thousand-word cover piece, titled “Kerry’s Undeclared War,” was an exhaustive attempt to find some cohesion in his ideas, using his interviews and his long record in office. About halfway through the piece, I noted a significant difference between Bush and Kerry when they talked about the nature of terrorism: Bush always talked about his “global war on terror” as an unending, almost apocalyptic struggle that probably couldn’t be won with any finality, whereas Kerry seemed to regard stateless extremism as containable and controllable, and not necessarily the framework for an entire foreign policy.

  “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” I quoted Kerry as saying. “As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

  By the time that Sunday’s Times appeared on newsstands, less than a month out from Election Day, the Bush campaign was already running an ad featuring that quote. And for at least the next forty-eight hours, Kerry’s “nuisance” quote dominated the coverage on cable TV. All this punditry had virtually nothing to do with any real debate over the nature of terrorism and ideas for combating it; it was about character and hypocrisy. Once again, Kerry had been caught pretending to be something people wanted him to be (in this case, a fervent antiterrorist), when in fact we now had proof that he didn’t consider terrorism to be a problem any bigger than an illicit game of Texas Hold-’em. That he hadn’t said that, exactly, and that I had offered a more thorough explanation of his point in the piece, was irrelevant. Context required too much explanation, and it was only going to get in the way of the overarching objective, which was to expose the flaw in Kerry’s character that everyone already assumed to be there.

  When it was over, when Kerry had narrowly lost Ohio and thus the election, Democrats in town were looking to blame just about anybody for his defeat. A few of them even blamed me,
at least in some small part. Within a few weeks of the election, I ran into Joe Lockhart, the former White House press secretary and an advisor to Kerry, on a train from New York to Washington. Lockhart and I had always gotten along, but he was still wounded from the election, and he made very clear where he felt that he and his team had failed their candidate. “Our mistake was in talking to you at all,” he said angrily, by which, I gathered, he meant not just me specifically, but my entire industry. “We don’t need you, and he shouldn’t have talked to you.”

  On one hand, I found it hard to conjure much sympathy for Kerry. He had run, I thought, a timid campaign, premised more on who he wasn’t than on who he was. Kerry, the former Swift boater, had made it his goal to simply complete the mission without taking risks that might get him blown up, rather than trying to advance any bolder argument for what he would do as president. If others had succeeded in twisting his words or distorting his character, it was chiefly because he had left such an obvious vacuum in the public mind, waiting to be filled.

  And yet I also came to have a certain admiration for Kerry, especially when I compared him to the candidates I wrote about in the next two campaigns. However much he may have disliked spending time with me, Kerry had nonetheless accepted that interviews like these were part of his responsibility to the process, and he had subjected himself to four hours of intense questioning on global affairs from someone who knew a lot less about the topic than he did. In his tortured way, Kerry had actually endeavored at some length to make the nuances of his worldview understood, just as generations of other presidential candidates had done. Looking back at that moment later, I realized how unlikely it was that any nominee of either party would ever feel compelled to do that again.

  • • •

  Candidates for president—and for most other significant offices, really—don’t try to explain their ideas or their theories of the moment anymore. It’s hard to know if they really have any. Technology had a lot to do with this, of course. Kerry’s controversial quote overwhelmed his campaign, at least for a few days, because of the twenty-four-hour cable news cycle that hadn’t even existed when Hart ran back in 1987—a senselessly competitive environment where inexperienced producers fixate on whatever minutiae seems new, to the exclusion of all else, and where reporters and pundits rush into TV studios armed with little more than vague impressions. (It struck me, watching some of the coverage of the Kerry “nuisance” controversy, how few of the commentators seemed to have actually read the piece they were talking about.) But the reverberation of that one comment would have been exponentially louder just four years later, with the sudden popularity of blogs and sites like YouTube and Facebook, and it would have been downright deafening four years after that, after Twitter had taken over the world.

  By now, every candidate knows that a single misspoken line, a single emotional or ill-advisedly candid moment, can become a full-blown, existential crisis by the time the bus pulls up at the next rally. And if there’s not much room for nuance in a cable TV report, there’s none in 140 characters, which means that even a well-articulated argument can (and almost certainly will) be reduced and distorted by the time it reaches the vast majority of voters who will pay attention. Rarely is any candidate willing to risk sudden implosion by actually thinking through the complex issues out loud, as the most talented politicians of Hart’s day were accustomed to doing; it’s safer to traffic in poll-tested, blandly comforting gibberish about “middle-class jobs” and “ending business as usual,” which disturbs no one and does no harm. It’s safer to tell yourself, as Joe Lockhart did, that you really don’t need to cater to reporters anymore, because you can talk to your own email list directly instead. Candidates routinely complain that reporters never talk to them about the actual substance of governing, but the truth is that with few exceptions, when you ask them to do exactly that, their reflexive response is no.

  At the heart of this changed dynamic, though, isn’t merely a technological shift in the nation’s media, but a cultural one. There was a time when politicians and the journalists who covered them, however adversarial their relationship might become at times, shared a basic sense of common purpose. The candidate’s job was to win an argument about the direction of the country, and the media’s job was to explain that argument and the tactics with which it was disseminated. Neither could succeed without the basic, if sometimes grudging, cooperation of the other, and often, as in the case of Hart and some of his older colleagues in the media, there existed a genuine trust and camaraderie. Modern media critics might deride these kinds of relationships as coziness or corruption, but there was a very real benefit to it for the voters, which was context. Reporters who really knew a politician could tell the difference between, say, a candidate who had misspoken from exhaustion and one who didn’t know his facts. They could be expected to discern between a rank hypocrite, on one hand, and a candidate who had actually thought something through and adjusted his views, on the other.

  In his engaging book The Eighteen-Day Running Mate, about Tom Eagleton’s disastrous foray into national politics, Joshua Glasser describes how a bevy of reporters actually camped out in Eagleton’s hotel suite so they could be there if McGovern called to offer him the number two spot on the ticket. (He did, and they were.) Later, when Eagleton’s candidacy was in peril, a few reporters went down to the tennis courts at the lodge where they and McGovern were staying, because the nominee was playing a match and they wanted to ask him a few questions. McGovern invited them to ride back to the lodge with him so they could talk.

  Glasser relays these scenes as if they were commonplace, and yet they jolted me when I read them; to someone who has covered multiple presidential campaigns in the modern era, it couldn’t have sounded any more bizarre if he had reported that McGovern had personally murdered a reporter and disposed of the body. In today’s political climate, even if I could somehow manage to find out where the candidate was spending his downtime, I wouldn’t get within a hundred yards of that tennis court without being turned away, probably with a stern lecture. Today, even a phone call from someone like me requesting a routine interview mobilizes a phalanx of highly paid consultants whose job it is to deflect my questions and then, if they see any merit in having the candidate cooperate, to orchestrate and rehearse his responses.

  “You didn’t prep for a candidate’s meeting with Jack Germond,” Joe Trippi told me when we talked. “What you’d want is for a candidate to just have a beer with Germond and answer his questions, you know? And back then, frankly, most of them could.” Now, Trippi told me bluntly, “No one would walk into an interview with you unprepped. I wouldn’t let it happen.”

  That’s largely because, beginning with Watergate and culminating in Gary Hart’s unraveling, the cardinal objective of all political journalism had shifted, from a focus on agendas to a focus on narrow notions of character, from illuminating worldviews to exposing falsehoods. Whatever sense of commonality between candidates and reporters that existed in McGovern’s day had, by the time my generation arrived on the scene, been replaced by a kind of entrenched cold war. We aspired chiefly to show politicians for the impossibly flawed human beings they were—a single-minded pursuit that reduced complex careers to isolated transgressions. As the former senator Bob Kerrey, who had been accused of war crimes in Vietnam after a distinguished career in public service, told me once: “We’re not the worst thing we’ve ever done in our lives, and there’s a tendency to think that we are.” That quote, I thought, should have been posted on the wall of every newsroom in the country, just to remind us that it was true.

  Predictably, politicians responded to all this with a determination to give us nothing that might aid in the hunt to expose them, even if it meant obscuring the convictions and contradictions that made them actual human beings. Both sides retreated to our respective camps, where we strategized about how to outwit and outflank the other, occasionally to our own benefit but rarely to the voters’.

  Maybe
this made our media a sharper guardian of the public interest against frauds and hypocrites. But it also made it hard for any thoughtful politician to offer arguments that might be considered nuanced or controversial. And, just as consequential, the post-Hart climate made it much easier for candidates who weren’t especially thoughtful—who didn’t have any complex understanding of governance, or even much affinity for it—to gain national prominence. When a politician could duck any real intellectual scrutiny simply by deriding the evident triviality of the media, when the status quo was to never say anything that required more than ten words’ worth of explanation, then pretty much anyone could rail against the system and glide through the process without having to establish more than a passing familiarity with the issues. As long as you weren’t delinquent on your taxes or having an affair with a stripper or engaged in some other form of rank duplicity, you could run as a “Tea Partier” or a “populist” without ever having to elaborate on what you actually believed or what you would do for the country.

  All of which probably has some bearing on why, more than a quarter century after Hart disappeared from political life, both our elected leaders and our political media have fallen so far in the esteem of voters who judge both to be smaller than the country deserves. At the outset of Barak Obama’s second term in office, only a quarter of Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing all or even most of the time, according to Pew Research polling. (That number later dropped after a series of self-manufactured budget crises in Congress.) Meanwhile, between 1997 and 2013, trust in the mass media fell almost ten points. Four decades after the legend of Woodward and Bernstein came into being, only 28 percent of Americans were willing to say that journalists contributed a lot to society’s well-being—a showing that lagged behind almost every other professional group.