Politics On Speed
CBS News Correspondent Eric Engberg tries to keep up with the high-speed delivery of political information in the digital age.
Every morning an intern plunks 30 or so stapled pages on the desk at Reality Check HQ, and I know that I'm "read in" on how my colleagues in the news business are covering the campaign. The document is called The Hotline, and in just a few years of existence it has become required reading for reporters and politicians.
Around the clock the mostly young beavers on the Hotline staff gather up almost all the printed and broadcast news and commentary on politics from diverse media across the country. They even watch Hardball, for which I presume they draw hardship pay. Hotline has done for politics what the Racing Form did for horses.
Its editors do a masterful job of packaging this information into a summary that's delivered on the net. (The fact that most of my CBS News colleagues and I take delivery on old-fashioned paper should not be interpreted as any sort of rebellion against the march to cyber-world; it's just that the thing is a lot easier to read this way when you're in a cab on the way to your next interview.) And in the 20-minutes it takes me to go from downtown D.C. to the Capitol Building, Hotline will give me a good handle on what Broder, Germond, Balz, Berke, et al., are reporting in print ... what the LA Times thinks the lead is on the upcoming California primary ... how the Detroit Free Press assesses what happened in the Michigan primary ... and the latest spin from all four remaining presidential camps. I won't know everything they say from this summary, but Ill have the gist.
The Hotline - which was invented as a journalistic tool and not a political instrument of some kind - is a prime example of how the fast-moving technology of information has altered national politics in ways the politicians are only now beginning to understand. And the case can be made that the people running George W. Bush's campaign have failed to understand these changes at all, which accounts for some of their current difficulties.
Largely because of technology, journalism was once a respecter of geographic boundaries in politics. Politics, which tends to organize itself around the structures of journalism, followed suit. Presidential primary campaigns, consequently, were conducted on a state-by-state basis. The candidates were like traveling salesmen with a route. They went to Iowa, then New Hampshire, then South Carolina, then Florida, etc., until somebody collected enough delegates to win. Each state, of course, is different, and the various campaign staffs tailored their messages and styles to the peculiarities of whatever state their candidates found themselves in.
The M.O. for campaign managers was to assume the voters knew almost nothing of what had appened before the candidate got to their state. The local media may have run a few wire stories on what the candidates were doing, but there was no way for a reporter in Portland, Maine, to inform himself on the controversies and issues moving the voters in Portland, Oregon. It was possible to run a "South Carolina campaign" as an isolated event, without worrying much about the impact of South Carolina statements and images on the primaries to come. I can remember campaign operatives confidently telling me, "Well, clean that up later," when asked about an obvious pander to Alabama voters which would not play well in, say, New York.
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This political shell game worked well in the dark ages of 1988 or thereabouts. It worked a little bit in the good old days of 1996. But now, forget it. Because of the distance we've come in welding computers to cables to screens - and on down the food chain to working journalists - the U.S. today possesses the best-informed electorate in the history of the world.
As much as I admire The Hotline, it's important to note that a specialized publication like this is only part of a still evolving puzzle. After all, Hotline - at about $4,800 for an annual subscription - has a limited audience. But that audience includes the information elites who produce the TV shows, write the political columns and host the talk shows.
At the same time, the country now has three full-time all-news cable-TV channels, C-SPAN, and the four over-the-air networks determined to keep the cable-boys from stealing their audiences when news is breaking. And there are dozens of Web sites like this one doling out political news.
A move that a candidate makes in ultra-conservative South Carolina - say, for example, a friendly visit to a college with a record of anti-Catholic, anti-African American bias - will rocket across the political landscape to the next battlegrounds. There is no time for the candidate's legmen to clean it up. That is exactly what happened to W. in the Bob Jones caper.
Reports The Hotline's editor-in-chief Craig Crawford, "I hit the ground in Michigan Monday (a day before the primary). The first thing I did was turn on the radio in the rental car. The talk shows were alive with big arguments over the visit to Bob Jones." So, the Michigan journalists covering the Bush-McCain race not only knew, from the cross-pollination that stems from the informaion explosion, what the controversy was about; they knew that their readers and listeners also knew at least something about the issues involved. They could approach the story as a running story, not a brand new, vaguely alien political occurrence.
Now, the Bush campaign would have us believe that McCain's people had stirred up the controversy with an unfair telephone campaign in Michigan. But it's hard to believe that even the most effective phone banks could have turned out the independent and Democratic voters - including many offended blacks and Catholics - who went to the polls last Tuesday. These voters already knew the score; they didn't require any phone hectoring.
If Bush thought he could use a South Carolina-specific tactic without paying a price for it in places where Catholics and blacks and more moderate Republicans generally would have an important voice, he made a huge miscalculation. Politics doesn't work that way any more. Electrons move at 186,000 miles-per-second and can't be cleaned up the way pols used to do it. And that simple but elegant fact means the political scientists and party elders can stop arguing about whether we should institute a national primary election to pick the presidential candidates - we already have a national primary; it's just that the voting occurs sequentially.