Jack Shafer

Having secured the nominations of their parties, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have set their campaign throttles to late-spring idle with a speech here, a speech there, a commencement address over there, and fundraisers and soft TV appearances everywhere. Eventually, the two candidates will stop coasting, but until they do, reporters will continue to lard their work with exercises in meta-journalism, such as today’s 1,800-word Politico piece, “Obama and Romney’s common foe.”

The common foe, don’t you know, is the press! According to Politico’s Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, Barack and Mitt both “disdain” the “political news media” because they believe reporters are “eager to vaporize them for the sheer sport of it.”

Is there anything new about presidents and presidential candidates having bad feelings for the press? Does nobody recall John McCain’s low regard for the New York Times coverage of his 2008 campaign? Or of George W. Bush’s attitude toward the press? Bill Clinton’s scorn? George H.W. Bush’s hatred? Carter’s? Nixon’s? Johnson’s? Sometimes candidates do charm the press, as McCain did in 2000, and the anti-war candidates of 1968 and 1972, but it’s the exception, never the rule.

No, there is nothing new about presidents and presidential candidates having bad feelings about the press, something the Politico piece readily admits. As Haberman and Thrush write: “Media-hating has been an occupational hazard among presidential candidates for decades, and it’s deeply self-serving.”

Then, Haberman and Thrush abandon the idea of media-hating being a campaign constant in their next paragraph, writing: “But 2012 is shaping up to be an especially sour cycle for the campaigns and the media, amplifying the natural tension between candidates and the press in the absence of an uplifting storyline.”

Attacking Politico for contradicting itself or for confusing a lightning bug with lightning (hat tip to Mr. Twain) may seem to be a fool’s errand. The people who edit and write for the site know good journalism from bad, but that self-knowledge doesn’t prevent them from serving half-baked, rancid dishes like this. Politico, which has become influential and ubiquitous in our political culture, depends on patrons like me to send entrees like this back to the kitchen and to summon the health inspector to do his thing. Only then can America be safe.

The evidence presented by Politico that this campaign is “shaping up to be especially sour” is so thin it almost vanishes. Obama has said vague things about being disappointed by the press, such as in his commencement address at Barnard College, and he delivered a cheap shot about Huffington Post’s aggressive aggregation in his White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner speech. But that hardly constitutes press hatred. Straining to come up with material, the Politico piece quotes David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win, the Obama adviser’s 2009 memoir about the 2008 campaign, on press-candidate relations. Exactly how Plouffe’s views on his candidate’s relations with the press in the last campaign help show candidate-press relations approaching some new “sourness” plateau in this campaign is not explained.

Indeed, it shows that Politico doesn’t really have the goods to prove its thesis, as the piece zigs back to note that there is at least one outlet the president admires: An anonymous “onetime Obama press adviser” tells Haberman and Thrush that Obama “likes the New York Times,” which he thinks is “serious” as opposed to “the rest of you guys.” Also, Obama told Rolling Stone that he read all the Times columnists.

Perhaps Politico has conflated Obama’s dislike of Politico into a hatred of the entire press corps? I hope Haberman and Thrush pursue this angle with the anonymous onetime Obama press adviser.

Establishing that Romney hates the press should be a cinch, but Politico doesn’t even try. It reports that Ann Romney didn’t like a 1994 profile done on her by the Boston Globe during Mitt’s failed run for the Senate. That would be admissible evidence if Politico were attempting to show that 1994 was the nastiest year in press-candidate relations, but that’s not what the site is up to here, is it? It also tells us that Romney “walled” himself off from beat reporters during the primary campaign, that he has kept reporters off his “rope line” to prevent them from asking questions, that his camp thinks the Washington Post story about his Cranbrook days was a hit job, that he dislikes the extreme scrutiny (such as what brand of jeans he’s wearing) and that he has a “handful of favorites” in the press, including Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. This sounds less like conflict to me than baseline candidate-press relations.

As presented by Politico, Romney’s most urgent media problem isn’t the conventional press, it’s the world of conservative bloggers, “who view him as a moderate,” as well as other conservative writers. Only Politico would dare conflate a Republican candidate’s inability to please conservative bloggers and conservative writers into confirmation of a candidate’s poor relations with the press.

Veteran White House reporter James Deakin posited the inevitability of confrontations between the president and the press in his 1984 book Straight Stuff: The Reporters, the White House, and the Truth and documented them in their many flavors. Likewise, presidential candidates and the press are equally apt to mix it up, and do, as readers of Teddy White and his successors have learned.

When Politico asserts that “Romneyland, like Obamaland, is inherently mistrustful of the press corps,” it’s hardly breaking news. Of course Romneyland and Obamaland are inherently mistrustful of the press corps, as were Santorumland, Gingrichland and Perryland, and for good reason. It’s the job of the press to expose things about candidates that they would rather not have you hear.

As a practical matter, voters and readers need never worry about the state of candidate-press relations. Until, of course, the unfortunate day comes when Politico reports everybody is getting along swell.

******

It’s not the job of the press to be liked by anybody. Or did I make that point already. Send your hate-the-press notes to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. There’s plenty in my Twitter feed to dislike. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns, and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: President Barack Obama’s teleprompter, with the White House press corps in the foreground, shown in the East Room of the White House in Washington, September 10, 2010.  REUTERS/Jason Reed

Has opposition research finally reached a big fat dead end?

Not that there is no fresh dirt to dig up on candidates. Each day, the morning editions bring us additional sleaze, flip-flops, and embarrassments from the candidates’ pasts, some of which comes ladled from oppo-researcher notebooks. We learn about our candidates’ legislative histories, their leveraged buyout histories (that would be you, Mitt and Newt), their adventures on K Street (take a bow, Newt and Rick #2), the filth and fury discovered in their back pages (hello, Ron!), the casual racism of a parent (Rick #1), and their military resumes (if they have one). And if they’ve generated any sort of paper trail from tax liens, divorce proceedings, campaign-finance filings, or civil actions—or if there is reusable disgrace from past campaigns—we read and re-read all about it, too.

But how much of this stuff actually sticks anymore? Beyond the undoing of Herman Cain’s candidacy by an avalanche of romancing-while-married stories, it’s hard to imagine any campaign revelation that, by itself, could burn any of the current candidates out of the current race or remain sufficiently hot to scald them in November’s general election. Dirt just doesn’t stain like it once did. (Even if some of this dirt sticks, it won’t alter the outcome for candidates like Rick Perry. The worst that could happen for him is to go from 1 percent to 0 percent support.)

That’s not how the political operatives feel. Today, Talking Points Memo reports how bummed the Democrats are that Newt Gingrich has already attacked Romney with the Bain story. Democrats had been holding Bain in reserve to use against Romney in the general election—as they did in 1994 in his race against Sen. Edward Kennedy (D, Mass.)—to portray Romney as a vulture capitalist of the most craven sort.

The past no longer matters to the political present the way it once did, because we have such better access to it today. Just 15 years ago, investigations of politicians and opposition research were largely limited to professionals with access to Lexis-Nexis or those who knew how to conduct a document search at the county courthouse. Digging dirt back then was like mining gold in the 1800s: labor intensive, and requiring both expertise and expensive tools. Widespread digitization and cheap information technologies haven’t eliminated the professionals from political dirt digging, only lowered the barriers to entry.

Leaping over those low barriers this cycle is Andrew Kaczynski, a 22-year-old history major at St. John’s University, who quarried C-SPAN archives for political gotchas and posted more than 160 of them on his YouTube channel, alerting the press to the best, he tells me.

“Once the channel took off I really didn’t need to send them to anyone because [they] could just go to my page and click refresh and see my latest upload,” Kaczynski says.

By December, Kaczynski’s diligent work on Romney, Paul, and Gingrich had earned him short profiles in New York and the New York Observer and an appearance on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources. He quickly landed a job at BuzzFeed, where he now burrows into the political archives for a living. Today he posted a lovely cap-and-trade flip-flop by Jon Huntsman.

Kaczynski’s skill at dragging skeletons—and a few chicken bones—out of politicians’ closets indicates that soon, everything in a politician’s fossil record that can be retrieved will be retrieved– whether it be by oppo researchers, journalists, activists, or citizens–and put on display: Every utterance, every court filing, every public transaction, every burp, every miscue. By the time the technology really gets kicking, the new transparency will make Kim Kardashian look like a privacy hound.

Under the old rules, the only good defense to oppo research has been a good offense. In a recent Reuters piece, opposition researcher Jeff Berkowitz advised campaigns to conduct preemptive oppo-research (“vulnerability studies”) so they can develop a “response matrix” to repel anticipated attacks. Romney, as TPM notes, had kept his Bain defenses refreshed, knowing the issue would resurface.

But the velocity and volume of revelations coming out of Campaign 2012 suggest that oppo-defense won’t be able to keep pace with oppo research much longer, especially for politicians like Gingrich who have been in the game for four decades. Maybe it won’t happen this campaign, but I can see the day that a complete documentation on every politician of note, produced on the Web in Wikipedia fashion, would make opposition research redundant. When that day comes, we’ll finally be able to see our candidates in full and see that nearly every one of them has flip-flopped; made a fortune from either honest graft or dishonest graft; mistreated, divorced, or cheated on a spouse; taken drugs; lied; cheated; violated taboos; told dirty, racist, or otherwise tasteless jokes; stretched the fabric of the campaign finance laws; associated with bad people; engaged in resume inflation; taken dubious payments; or otherwise transgressed—just like you.

When the day of the Super Dossier comes, and it may even come by 2016, the power of the Web will teach us that nobody has enough character (Nixon? Clinton? GWB?) to be president. At that point, maybe all this standard human frailty will have become sufficiently normalized that we’ll have to pick our chief executive based on the policies and programs he binds himself to pursuing.

******

A word to the wise: If you’re working inside government, be careful about doing oppo research while on the clock. Authorities busted Pennsylvania state legislature employees for using state Nexis accounts to dig for dirt at the behest of Democrats in 2006. Send fresh dirt to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and monitor my Twitter feed for my transgressions. Which are many. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Participants cross a mud obstacle during the Wild Boar Dirt Run (Wild Sau Dirt Run) in Laaben, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Vienna, October 22, 2011. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner

The jobs of political reporters and sports writers are almost identical: Determine who is ahead and who is behind; get inside the heads of the participants; decode the relevant strategies and tactics; and find a way to convert reader interest into sustainable enthusiasm. Then, maintain reader enthusiasm for the months and months of caucuses or preseason games, primaries or regular season games, conventions or playoffs, and the general election or Super Bowl (or World Series).

So elemental is this eternal connection between sports and politics that even underdog presidential candidate Rick Perry gets it.

“The only scoreboard that matters is tomorrow, and it’s the scoreboard when the caucuses meet and we win the big Iowa caucus tomorrow,” Perry told the cheering crowd at his final campaign rally yesterday, sounding like the coach of a broken-down wildcard NFL team.

It’s not that the Iowa caucus doesn’t matter to the long-term prospects of the Republican candidates. It does, but not that much. Last week, while trying to inflate the relevance of the Iowa caucus, ABC News had to admit how inessential the contest is. “The Iowa caucus has had about a 50 percent ‘success’ rate when it comes to predicting the nominee” from either party, the site reported. The reason we hear so much about the caucus is because it matters a lot to the press corps, which should—but doesn’t—downplay the event into something less meaningful than a coin toss.

Who to blame for Iowa? I hold Jules Witcover responsible because he touted in his 1977 book “Marathon: the Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976″ the vital role the caucus played in Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976: He finished second to an uncommitted slate but used that showing to declare “victory” in Iowa. Some pundits say Iowa helped make him front-runner and win in New Hampshire. Even if it’s true that Iowa was the secret to Carter’s eventual success, it’s hardly fair that we should be paying for his good luck 36 years later.

Charles P. Pierce, who has covered both sports and campaign politics and is now a writer at large at Esquire, told me from Iowa today that sports writers have a greater liberty to tell the truth than do political reporters. A sports writer, for example, will encounter little resistance from his editor when he submits a story that says a young shortstop has no chance to make the big leagues. But few experienced political reporters are allowed to treat hopeless candidates like Michele Bachmann that way until the day the candidate is forced to drop out of the race.

“You have to pretend,” Pierce said.

If they weren’t encouraged to pretend, political reporters would tell you to take an Iowa breather and wait for more consequential contests—such as the New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida primaries. Even sports writers pretend sometimes, notably around the time of the Olympics. If they were completely on the level they’d instruct fans to take an extended bathroom break between games. But the commercial demands on both kinds of news fill what should be dead air with speculation, minutiae, human interest, gossip, and commentary. One would think that readers and viewers would resent all the ephemera masquerading as news, but they actually seem to appreciate it! How else to interpret the high ratings for the Republican debates this year or, on the sports side, the proliferation of pre-game and post-game shows, or whole networks owned by and devoted to the NFL and MLB?

“Sports TV has become the template for political reporting,” Pierce said, comparing the spectacle of Iowa coverage to NFL Countdown.

Professional codes deter the sports writers and political reporters from rooting for their home team or their “home” candidate. But both still have a vested interest in their guys winning. The football writer hopes to ride his team’s wave all the way to the press box at the Super Bowl, where a book contract or something even better might ensue. The political reporter, whether he’s a Chicago Tribune reporter covering the Obama campaign in 2008 or a Boston Globe reporter assigned to Mitt Romney this year, not-so-secretly hopes his paper’s “home” candidate will win and he’ll get reassigned to the White House by his bosses or hired by the Washington Post or New York Times. On the cable dial, you can hear MSNBC hosts root for the Democrats just as clearly as you can hear Fox News hosts do the same for Republicans.

But journalists can be realists. “Do you want to be covering Michele Bachmann right now, or do you want to be with Romney and Paul?” said Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi, answering his own question. (Nobody wanted to cover the Indianapolis Colts this year, either.) Farhi, who has reported on business, sports, politics, and the media, says business coverage also obsesses on winners and numbers. “Maybe all journalism is about success and failure, and we see it more clearly in sports,” he said.

If something can be counted, it can be listed. If it can be listed, you can be sure it has been. Compare, for example, the San Diego Union-Tribune‘s five things to watch in last year’s Super Bowl with Politico’s five things to watch in Iowa from today. Guess which list instructs its readers to watch for “game changers” and “center of attention,” which insists that “not all ground games are equal,” or which talks about what will happen “if the weather is bad”?

The campaign has to start somewhere and, for reasons too arbitrary to explore here, it starts in Iowa. We can thank the Iowa caucus for breaking in the candidates, for seasoning inexperienced reporters, and for conditioning press veterans for the coming long haul. But the dirty little secret is that even though 1,500 members of the press corps are there right now covering the story, Iowa hardly matters. If you blinked, you didn’t really miss it.

******

Blink or wink with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed is almost completely free of sports clichés. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Supporters of U.S. Republican presidential candidate and Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) attend a campaign stop in Cedar Falls, Iowa, January 2, 2012. The Iowa Caucus will be held on January 3. REUTERS/Jim Young

Just what the country needed: Another political Web site.

At the beginning of the week, ABC News launched OTUS, its political news supermarket with its top political reporters (Jake Tapper, Jonathan Karl, Amy Walter, and George Stephanopoulos) hunkering on the site’s home page. OTUS threatens to dice, grind, sieve, and aerosol the complex business of campaigns and the affairs of the state into inhalable powder.

As Tapper says in this promo, OTUS (short for of the United States as in, POTUS, president of the United States, or SCOTUS, supreme court of the United States) is all about the “power moves, the mini-dramas, the scheming” in politics. Tapper promises that OTUS will flag both the “urgent and the ridiculous,” offer games, display correspondents’ Twitter feeds, and create a stock market-style ticker that assesses the rising and falling worth of candidates with social media.

ABC News has expanded its Web efforts at what is obviously a late date. Salon, Slate, Talking Points Memo, Yahoo Politics, Politico, RealClearPolitics, Red State, Huffington Post Politics, FiveThirtyEight, Mother Jones, National Review Online, Daily Beast, Daily Caller, Roll Call, The Hill, CNN Politics, NBC’s First Read, Time ‘s Swampland, National Journal, specialty sections at the Washington Post, the New York Times, New York magazine, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and Reuters, as well as numerous other sites already cover the beat, and cover it well.

That ABC News would join the specialists speaks to both the audience’s insatiable appetite for political news and the network’s confidence that nobody owns this market. It’s a good call: Such is the Web audience’s fickleness, the ease with which they can skip pages, that nobody can own the market for news anymore. They can’t even rent it. News organizations can’t own their journalistic stars the way they used to, either. In the old days, the only place for a reporter or editor at a top-tier newspaper or magazine to migrate was another top-tier newspaper or magazine, or maybe a TV network, or maybe a career in books. But not anymore. Reporters now move from the New York Times to the Huffington Post with such regularity that the MTA is thinking of digging a special subway line to accommodate them.

Not to oversell the current scene, but the proliferation of political news sites—and my apologies to those I didn’t name—means we’re living in a bit of a golden age of political reporting. At least when it comes to national politics and national government, there have never been more reporters competing to break news. Not everything on the menu tastes great, but there’s no denying it’s a feast.

If the winners are readers, the losers are the Times, the Post, and the evening news broadcasts, which have lost their quasi-monopoly power over political coverage, and especially the print versions of the newsweeklies, which specialized for so many decades at giving the quanta of political news a narrative context. Ned Martel, who covers politics for the Post, says it wasn’t that long ago that how much you knew about Washington was measured by how many pages in the last issue of the print version National Journal you’d turned. Also taking a hit has been the political press; The New Republic, which went from weekly to fortnightly in 2007, in part because they didn’t have the money to sustain a weekly any more and in part because weekly was no longer frequent enough to stay on top of politics. The job of wrapping politics into comprehensive narratives now belongs to the monthlies like Vanity Fair and the Atlantic or books like Game Change and Renegade.

Other winners include the cable news chat shows and the Sunday morning programs, which gorge on the baitball of Web news like hungry yellowfin tuna. The cycle is completed when the Web news hounds attack the baitbail formed by the chat show chat, and the chat shows eventually dine, somewhat cannibalistically, on the remains.

For political journalists, this is the best of all possible worlds. They’ve gained new leverage over their editors, who in the green-eyeshade days of journalism could use their power of the limited number of column-inches available in print to cut and otherwise simplify their stories. Now, with there being no shortage of space to fill, the writer calls the shots and the editor, fearful that he’ll get the blame if he’s beaten by the competition, is more likely to approve stories he might once have dismissed as too technical, too inside baseball, and too complicated for a news outlet. (“Save it for your book, kid.”)

Thus liberated, the political journalist can write at wire-service speed, even availing himself to tiny microbursts of reporting, while dumping many of the conventions that make wire reporters miserable—such as the inverted news pyramid that puts the most important news at the top so that distant newspaper editors can cut two, three, four, or five paragraphs at the bottom to make it fit their pages.

The newly liberated political journalist need no longer dumb down his story so that everybody can understand it. He can point to explanatory information with a link or skip it all together, figuring that anybody who is reading him already knows what the Federal Reserve Bank is and what it does. (You laugh, but I recall Washington Post stories from the past that paused to define “pinata” and “slam dunk” when it used those phrases metaphorically!) As victors over their beaten-down editors, political writers can now insert humor, opinion, history lesson, minutiae, and policy wonkery in their pieces without having to justify the digressions and elaborations. (Of course, another part of the new culture can be, depending on the outlet, lower salaries and reduced job security. But that’s my problem and that of my colleagues, not yours.)

Not that long ago, Ben Bagdikian was publishing the seventh edition of his book-length argument, The Media Monopoly. Bagdikian’s neverending gripe was that the news business was consolidating into fewer and fewer voices, and that government action was needed to break up newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters. We don’t hear much of that talk anymore–you’re more likely to hear people complaining about too much political news. The current state of our political press ain’t perfect, but when the exemplar of the new order is Ezra Klein and not Joe Klein, how bad can it be?

Welcome, OTUS, you goofy-named little bastard. I hope you have a good 2012.

******

Send your soiled green eyeshades to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and think about buying my collected Twitter feed as an ebook. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.