Political Reporting

Synopsis

John McCain's speech was a big story for only a few days, but that was long enough to raise a host of questions. And while this speech was more dramatic than most, the problems it posed are by no means extraordinary, even at the non-presidential level.

Take away the cross-country travel and reduce the number of reporters and cameras covering the event, and something along these lines could confront a journalist covering a campaign for county commission, city hall or the state legislature-a major event that is a political turning point with ramifications surprising even to the candidate and his campaign staff.

The point of the case is whether there is a right way to cover this speech.

1. How would students in your class cover the speech? Would they follow one of styles discussed in the narrative?

2. How fair is it to characterize the meaning of McCain speech?

3. How much do you accept the words of the politician in terms of what he means?

4. How much should reporters just stick to the words in the text?

If time permits, additional questions could include:

• Did some reporters in this case get too friendly (or too hostile) to the candidate they were covering?

• Do reporters need special expertise in covering a religion-based political movement?

Dealing with these questions in a classroom poses a challenge because much of the discussion has to focus on what was not in the newspapers or on the air. This is a discussion about politics, democracy, and some of the technological and social changes in American life as much as about the techniques of covering a story. Thus arises the inevitable temptation to wander too deeply into the cosmic, always difficult to distinguish from the fatuous. Teachers will have to make individual decisions on how and when to guide the class back to the specifics.

Teaching Plan

One way to teach this case is to give the students the speech itself first, before they read the text of the case, and ask them to write a news story based only on the text of the speech.

Then teachers could give them the narrative to read outside the classroom and rethink their first version. They could either rewrite the pieces or simply rethink them.
When they return to class, having absorbed their narrative and rethought their story, the teacher could open the discussion around the two versions.
Alternatively, a teacher could give students the narrative as is and then, as the opening to the class discussion, ask students how they would write the story.

Opening the Discussion

On its face, this would seem to be quite a simple story. It was a speech. The reporter's job is to tell the reader/listener/viewer what was in the speech, right?
Well, maybe not.

The first thing to be said about the coverage of this speech is that most of it was accurate in the strictest sense. Wherever the discussion comes out, any perceived flaws were largely a function of omission, the sort that most who have covered a presidential campaign would not judge harshly. The working reporter, unlike the journalism critic, writes for that evening or the next day.

Still, each of the approaches the different reporters took led to different outcomes. Even if almost all the stories contained essentially the same information, differences in tone and manner may have produced different responses among readers and viewers.

Question: Was there a right way to cover the speech? If so, was it one of the four approaches outlined in the narrative?

To give the discussion some structure, we suggest following the four categories of story in the narrative, beginning with the most literal: Avoiding Interpretation.
It might work best if the discussion goes through the advantages and risks of each approach. Thus, the teacher might suggest that:

Some reporters took the most literal approach to the story by simply quoting McCain's speech and avoiding interpretation. What do you think of that? What are the pros? What are the cons?

At first glance, this would seem to be the safest approach. Not that these reporters ignored political context-the Cox newspapers lead noted that the speech came on the eve of the Virginia Primary-but they avoided broader social-political interpretation of the attack on Robertson and Falwell.

This approach has one obvious advantage. It sidesteps the danger of saying more than the reporter knows, of reading more into the speech than the candidate intended.

But the disadvantages are equally obvious. McCain's attack on the two Christian conservative leaders summoned, whether or not he wished to, questions about the role of religion in politics and the power of the religious right in the Republican Party. In this case, sticking with "just the facts" poses the risk of insufficiently informing the people. The consumers of this news are also the voting public, who deserve to understand the nuances of political events, not just the facts.

Often, the candidate or the candidate's staff solves this problem for the reporter. In a press briefing, or at least in a "deep background" session on the bus, plane, or tarmac, the press secretary or the chief strategist, if not the contender himself, will reveal the strategic thinking behind a speech, announcement, or advertisement. Indeed, McCain staffers did some of this later in the day. But thanks to the hectic, cross-country schedule, by then it was already too late for some reporters, and this was one occasion when the usually voluble candidate provided no guidance. Each reporter, then, had to make a personal decision about how much interpretation was warranted.

The next approach is "A Tactical Frame." This approach was expressly political, concentrating on the campaign strategy motivations of the speech. Thus the lead of the Washington Post story stated that McCain "sought to tie rival George W. Bush as tightly as possible to the Christian conservative movement," and the second paragraph said McCain was trying "to portray himself as a mainstream conservative."

Question for class: What do you think of that?

One advantage here is that the reporters who took this approach knew what they were talking about. They had been covering the campaign. They had been listening to McCain's speeches and monitoring his television commercials, and in that context the conclusion that McCain was trying to associate Bush with the extremists was reasonable. Besides, in calling Bush "a Pat Robertson Republican," the speech did link Bush squarely with Robertson and Falwell. McCain, after all, was not running against Robertson or Falwell. He was running against Bush. All his attacks were really on Bush.

Another advantage is that in political coverage, context is vital. A campaign is a cumulative process, and campaign reporting has to keep that in mind. Campaign events do not occur in isolation; each one does not simply follow what occurred before; it is formed by what occurred before. If seeing patterns that do not really exist is one danger that awaits a political reporter, another is ignoring patterns that are real.

Many political journalists might argue that political coverage is, at least in part, about politics. Thus this is what the story should focus on. This may seem obvious, but in fact it is easy to forget in the tumult of the moment, and in the effort to dig behind the superficial meaning of an event. McCain was not delivering a sociological treatise about church-state relations. He was delivering a campaign speech in a tough battle against George W. Bush. Hence, focusing on the political tactics of a campaign speech, then, is usually one "right way" to cover it.

But there are also downsides to this. One is that reporters risk saying more than they know. McCain never said in so many words that his goal was to tarnish Bush by association with Robertson and Falwell, portraying himself as more mainstream in the process.

The second, perhaps even greater risk is that by focusing on the politics of McCain's speech reporters imply that the politics was the real point, that McCain didn't really mean what he said, he was only saying it for political advantage.

The fact is there are multiple levels of reality in most political events, and this one was no exception. First, there is McCain's message about Robertson, Falwell and how they have hijacked control of religious conservatives. Second, there is the fact that Robertson and Falwell are raising money to hurt McCain, and his favorite issue campaign finance reform. Third, there are the political advantages of linking Bush to Falwell and Robertson. All three co-exist, and it is difficult if not impossible for a reporter to know, unless McCain says so, which ones are most important to him. The difficulty a journalist faces is in deciding how much weight to place on each. Should a reporter assume a tactical purpose simply because there could be political gain?

The third approach to the story identified in the narrative, which the authors labeled "A Broadside Against the Christian Right," was to portray the speech as an attack on the Christian Conservative movement in general. In some ways, this was the riskiest method. It required not simply discerning what McCain did not explicitly say, but rejecting something he explicitly did say, that some "evangelical leaders are changing things for the better," and that his quarrel was not with the movement as a whole but with some of its leaders.

Question: What do you think of this approach?

It seems to the authors of this case that this approach could and did produce bad journalism. This was especially true for the New York Post story that began by saying, "John McCain yesterday delivered a blistering attack on the religious right," without mentioning McCain's praise for other Christian leaders. The brevity of the story (444 words, about a third of what most papers used) no doubt contributed to its failings.
But there were more sophisticated treatments taking the same approach, such as the Los Angeles Times story which led with McCain attacking "leaders of the Christian conservative movement" as entrée into examining what it called "the religious tensions inside the GOP presidential race," as it fit the political context of the race.
Here again, there are rewards. These stories were based on more interpretation in the interest of providing more information, more context, more nuance.

While still essentially political, this approach steps cautiously into the broader sociological realm. Unlike the New York Post story, the Los Angeles Times mentioned all the relevant facts, including the presence of Gary Bauer in the gym with McCain. But it was bolder than the other approaches in dealing with the intra-party tensions between the Christian conservatives, especially powerful in the South, and the more pragmatic Republicans who win elections in the East and Midwest.

The risk is in asserting more than the journalist can confidently support, on making assertions based on the journalist's own opinion rather than supported analysis. How does this added interpretation serve the public? Could a journalist provide the added context and nuance without making such an assertion?

Question: What do you think of the fourth approach to the story, what the authors called "Focusing on Falwell and Robertson."

The final approach, "Focusing on Falwell and Robertson," not only laid more stress on distinguishing between the two leaders named in the attack and their broader movement, but also delved into deeper interpretation in making the point that McCain's real quarrel with them was over their opposition to his campaign finance proposals.

This interpretation was based firmly on something McCain said in the speech, that Robertson and Falwell "have turned good causes into businesses," but where McCain mentioned this only in passing, a few reporters highlighted it and examined its context.

Again, it was the reporter, not the candidate, who emphasized this aspect of the speech. The reporters who did so took a greater risk, but still dealt with something McCain had said. These reporters also availed themselves of the opportunity to give their readers information that was arguably more pertinent to their lives and to the current political reality than much of the rhetoric in the speech.

Only David Barstow of the New York Times and Bob Kemper of the Chicago Tribune took this course. They both used that quote in their leads. Barstow returned to the point several paragraphs later: "(A) subtext of the speech was Mr. McCain's campaign finance proposals, including limits on advertisement by advocacy groups. Mr. Robertson and anti-abortion advocates have said those restrictions would stifle their influence and were one reason they opposed Mr. McCain."

In the view of many political observers, McCain's campaign finance proposal would not simply stifle the influence of these groups; it would put them out of business. None of the stories elaborated on this point. But then neither did McCain.

Question: How far should reporters go in examining points that a candidate merely mentions, without elaboration? If the reporter thinks a brief allusion points to a matter of significance, should the reporter pursue this angle even if the candidate has de-emphasized it?

Reporters, of course, are safest when they only write what they know, not what they surmise. Usually this is not a problem because one antagonist says plainly what the other wants to avoid, in this case that Robertson and Falwell supported the existing campaign finance system because they and their friends were using it to make a tolerably good living.

But McCain didn't co-operate. Neither in his speech nor in later interviews did he discuss in detail the relationship between the campaign finance laws and the growth of politics as a profitable business. Instead of asserting, McCain hinted. And as it was placed in the speech, even the hint was almost a throw-away, as though McCain assumed that his listeners would get the point.

Most reporters didn't. They used another quote, in which McCain said that the Christian conservatives opposed him "because I don't pander to them, because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money is our message."

That isn't really their philosophy; it's just their tactical situation. In fairness, for most of them it isn't just the money. Being a professional political agitator has become their personal raison d'être as well as their livelihood. Nor is the phenomenon confined to the political right. Similar situations and similar attitudes prevail at the offices of the Sierra Club and People for the American Way.

After this discussion, the teacher may want to take a class vote of the best method of coverage to see if views have changed.

The discussion by now should have demonstrated one of the truths about covering a political speech-that context is everything. To the beginner, covering a speech might seem simple. Armed with an advanced text, a reporter can't get the story "wrong," even when, as in this case, copies of the text were not distributed until a few minutes before the event. Assuming basic literacy, accuracy is not a problem. The challenge comes in understanding the political situation, paying attention to the mood, the tone of voice, even the body language of the candidate, remembering that what is not said can be as important as what is, and getting all these elements into the story in their proper place.

To a certain extent it is impossible to decide what is the best approach to the story and how interpretive should one be until the journalist grapples with a more fundamental reporting question: How much do I really know?

But even the experienced political reporters never dealt with another question raised by McCain's speech: Why has the Christian right become an arm of, rather than a goad to, the central Republican Establishment?

It isn't that political reporters were unaware of the phenomenon. On CNN the evening after McCain's speech, analyst Bill Schneider noted that while Robertson himself challenged the GOP establishment by running for President in 1988 against the elder George Bush, since then "something interesting has happened." Instead of supporting Pat Buchanan, leaders of the Christian conservatives "succeeded in holding religious right voters in line for President Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996. Now this year the religious right is again making common cause with the GOP establishment against John McCain."

This was a valuable insight. But neither Schneider nor anyone else seems to have wondered why religious conservatives and the Republican leadership are locked in mutual embrace. All of this would be but prelude to trying to determine how and why the Religious Right is now part of the Republican leadership. Have the religious conservatives effectively won control or enough influence? If the motivation is pragmatic ("We want to win") what does that say about a movement based on moral fervor?

Whatever the reason, the combination is unbeatable in a fight for the Republican nomination. But what else is new? Only once since 1944 has the Republican Party not nominated the choice of its elite. That once was 1964 when a new elite supplanted the old, and even then nominee Barry Goldwater was the early front-runner in the polls. For whatever reasons (and examining them would make a good story), most Republican voters tend to do as their leaders tell them. So McCain's real risk was not in taking on Falwell and Robertson, but in taking on the leadership.

Again, this aspect of the political situation was not exactly ignored. Reporters knew that McCain was taking a gamble. Many of them put it right up front. "Risking a religious brawl within Republican ranks," were the first words of Ron Hutcheson's story in the Fort worth Star-Telegram. "A daredevil maneuver," Yvonne Abraham and Jill Zuckman called it in their Boston Globe lead, and John Marelius called it a "high-stakes gamble" in the second paragraph of his San Diego Union-Tribune story.

But the gamble to which they referred had to do with McCain losing the votes of religious conservatives, and as one story pointed out, that may not have been much of a gamble. "Long before Monday's speech the religious right was fully mobilized against McCain," wrote Mark Sherman and Ken Herman in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

The Los Angeles Times story by T. Christian Miller and Ronald Brownstein made a similar point, citing a senior unnamed McCain advisor who said the campaign "was essentially writing off the remaining Southern primaries" where the religious right is strongest.

Few of the stories discussed why McCain felt he had to gamble, and why he may have been angry enough to lash out at Robertson and Falwell. In retrospect, his loss in South Carolina may have been pivotal. Later, Mark Sherman of Cox newspapers would remember that McCain's strategist had been aware for months that their only chance to beat Bush was to "knock him out early," and that they could do this by a four-state sweep, "winning New Hampshire, South Carolina, then Arizona and Michigan."

Winning South Carolina, then, was vital to McCain's strategy. And it seemed feasible; the state was home to thousands of military retirees, precisely the kind of voters who could be expected to respond to McCain. So his loss there was not merely damaging; it was fatal, and if the reporters covering him didn't know that, perhaps the candidate did.

"He seemed very angry about South Carolina," David Barstow said of his Feb. 29 "forces of evil" interview with McCain in California. Barstow said McCain "felt Pat Robertson screwed him in South Carolina," and that it was recalling this, ten days later, that drove McCain into a sour mood.

Mark Sherman agreed that the South Carolina loss may have marked the real end of McCain's campaign. After he lost there, Sherman said, "his only real hope was to excite the middle." But there may not be enough "middle" remaining in the Republican Party.

Sherman said he mentioned this political predicament of McCain's in some of his coverage, but never devoted an entire story to it. Neither did anyone else, though all the regulars on the "Straight Talk Express" knew about the candidate's early strategic thinking. The absence of this story might have been the result of that long plane ride west on Feb. 28. Or it may have been a reluctance on the part of reporters to acknowledge how much trouble the candidate was really in.

Additional Questions and Exercises (time permitting)

1. What do the students think about the increased professionalization of politics? Do they think anything can or should be done about it? If they are interested in political reporting, does the news that the beat might be "less enjoyable" than it used to be give them second thoughts?

   It might be interesting to see how many students can name the Republican or Democratic chairmen of their own states or counties. Some students might be assigned to call the local county chairs and ask them just what they do, and whether they recognize a transformation of politics into a business. And whether they think it diminishes their offices.

   During the last ten or fifteen years, politics has become much more of a business, a transformation the national political press has largely ignored. The primacy of television and the fading power of political parties have conspired to make money far more important than political organization, the support of prominent individuals, or even a office-seeker's positions on the issues. Candidates spend this money on an ever-increasing number of consultants, pollsters, and advertising firms. There is now for all practical purposes a politics industry, lucrative and growing.

   Some political reporters may not recognize the extent to which their beat has become an industry. Some may not want to recognize it, or to call attention to it. Its practitioners are their sources. Political reporters rarely quote the Republican or Democratic state chairman these days; that role of observer has been usurped by the pollster, consultant, or occasional professor who in turn relies on polling for analysis. Twenty years ago, every political reporter worth his or her salt could identify the party chairman of, say, Cook County, Illinois, or New York County, New York (Manhattan; its chairman was the leader of the once-fabled Tammany Hall). Now few reporters know who those leaders are. They don't need to know who they are.

   Perhaps reporters don't like to recognize this change because it has rendered their jobs less enjoyable. A political reporter now spends more time writing about fund-raising, television commercials, and the latest polls than going to bowling alleys or plant gates with the candidates, no doubt because the candidates spend less time at bowling alleys or plant gates than they do raising money and making commercials. Here, Barstow and Kemper may have had an advantage: they weren't full-time political reporters. Though they had both done their share of political stories, neither man was on the political beat full time, nor were they Washington-based. Kemper works out of Chicago. Barstow covers Brooklyn.

   What is, and should be, the role of television news in political campaigns?

2. One of the conclusions of an examination of the coverage of McCain's speech was the stark difference between the way print and broadcast handled the story. Though reporters took different approaches, most of the newspaper accounts were similar. So were the television reports. But the newspaper accounts were nothing like the television reports. It was as though the two media were covering the same event, but with different missions.

   In general, the networks ignored the elements most major newspapers covered. To some extent, this is because the network correspondents simply don't have enough time. But even the shows that devote more time to the campaign-CNN's "inside Politics," or PBS's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,"-made no attempt at what a newspaper would call comprehensive coverage. Instead, they have contentious debate. The modus operandi of political coverage by the commercial broadcast networks these days is a quick headline, lots of tape with thrust and parry, and then some musing by an expert on how it will play.

   The programs that provide greater depth, or at least more time, do the same, then typically go to a debate between notable supporters of each candidate. Thus after a brief news account, "The NewsHour" on March 1 had Ari Fleisher of the Bush campaign head-to-head against McCain-backer Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona. Two evenings earlier, CNN's "Inside Politics" pitted Gary Bauer against Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, a Bush supporter.

   This raises an interesting question: Is television still a medium where campaigns are reported, or is it where they actually occur? Other studies have documented the shrinkage of the "sound bite", as TV calls the taped words of candidates on the stump, and the total amount of time network news devotes to politics. There seems to have been a metamorphosis in the role of television in presidential politics; television does not provide news and analysis of campaigns as much as it provides a public forum where supporters of competing candidates or parties can debate, or at least contend.

   It is no secret that a major goal of the political discussion programs on weekday evenings and Sunday mornings is to "make news," arguably a worthwhile goal but quite different from reporting and analyzing the news. The easiest way to "make news" is to provoke controversy, which could help explain why television news organizations seem comfortable devoting more time into providing a sounding board for antagonists, meaning less time for reporting.

   Possible Exercise: Perhaps students could be assigned to monitor the television coverage of the next state or local election. Considering that they probably all have digital watches with stop-watch capability, they could calculate how much time local stations devote to coverage, how much to talking-heads confrontations between aides and supporters of competing candidates.

   Do the students think switching reporters on and off candidates is necessary? Is a reporter becoming too friendly or too hostile to any particular candidate a problem that needs to be addressed?

3. In this case, it might be useful to get into personal proclivities. How important is peer approval to students who might want to cover national politics? Shouldn't they admit (I always did) that part of the appeal of the job is the fun of national political trips, fun which includes travel, good food, luxury hotels (along with bad food and decidedly non-luxury hotels), and the camaraderie of the campaign plane. If that's the case, what are the chances that they might be tempted, even subconsciously, to ignore a story that might make them less popular in that milieu?

   McCain's popularity with the men and women covering him made life more pleasant for both him and them; conviviality is always more fun than antagonism. But it also created a quandary for the reporters, and, whether or not they knew it, for their bosses back home. Were some journalists becoming cheerleaders for the candidate they covered?

   This became evident right after the speech, in the wake of David Barstow's New York Times story about McCain referring to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "forces of evil." Even a few reporters (though none who would later admit to it) joined the McCain campaign grumbling about Barstow not understanding the bus protocols because he was "an outsider," not one of the regulars.

   Later, at least some of the reporters would wonder whether they had given McCain too much of a pass. "Maybe a fresh pair of eyes and ears wasn't a bad idea," said Mark Sherman of Cox Newspapers. "I'm not sure I would have written it, but maybe I'd been on the (McCain) bus too long," said Bob Kemper of the Chicago Tribune. A few reporters, Kemper said, thought Barstow had been unfair, "but mostly it made us question ourselves."

   The question news executives may have to ask themselves is whether it is a good idea to have one reporter cover the same candidate throughout a campaign. There is an obvious advantage to this practice; the regular reporter gets to know the candidate, develops sources in the campaign staff, and is well-placed to spot inconsistencies.

   The equally obvious disadvantage is that some reporters can get so attached to a candidate that they fail to see his or her faults, and so comfortable with a campaign that they begin to feel more loyalty to it than to their news organization and its audience.

   Though this did not come up during McCain's candidacy, the opposite problem-dislike of a candidate-can also distort a reporter's work. Later in the 2000 campaign, some observers speculated that the personal distaste some reporters had for Vice President Al Gore was having an impact on their stories. In his dealings with the press, Gore was in many ways McCain's opposite. He was rarely available, and when he was it would be at a formal press conference or a photo opportunity where reporters might get in a quick question or two. No wonder that he also acquired the opposite of McCain's reputation for candor.

   There is nothing new about the flying fraternity house aspect of a presidential campaign. Away from home, hard at work, and on unlimited expense accounts, even nominal grown-ups tend toward post-adolescent behavior, and that includes developing a "we band of brothers' attitude for the duration of the campaign.

   The qualitative--and dangerous-mutation occurs when the "we" includes the candidate and his staff, not just fellow-reporters. A bit of that mutation may have taken place on the McCain campaign among the reporters who considered Barstow "an outsider," as opposed to a reporter accurately quoting an on-the-record, news-worthy statement by a candidate for President of the United States. Yes, he might have provided the setting, and had he been one of the "Straight Talk Express" regulars he might have explained that McCain was often flippant while schmoozing on the bus.

   But welcome to the NFL. The regulars go off the bus sometimes and get replaced.

   But then there are advantages to being a full-time political reporter. For instance, only about half the newspaper accounts compared McCain's speech strategy to Bill Clinton's "Sister Soljah" speech in 1992. Like McCain, Clinton was demonstrating his independence from an important constituency in his own party when he attacked the African-American singer's endorsement of violence, and did it right from the podium of Jesse Jackson's political organization. The fact that Jackson expressed his irritation no doubt only helped Clinton get across the message that he was not beholden to him or any other black leader.

   It was an interesting, and relevant, piece of political history, but a reporter-or an editor-had to know that history and remember it to get it into the story. Only a few did, and only the Los Angeles Times, and Curtis Wilkie in the Boston Globe, pointed out how much more dangerous McCain's situation was, and how much better Clinton pulled off his political maneuver. Clinton had already wrapped up the Democratic nomination when he criticized Sister Soljah. By then, Clinton had a rapport with black voters unlikely to be shaken by criticism of an entertainer. As seasoned political reporters, Wilkie and Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times were aware of these distinctions, which enhanced the scope of their stories.

   Possible exercise: A potentially interesting exercise would be to have some of the students cover a local campaign, assigning them to write stories but also to remain aware of their own reactions. Do they want the other reporters (older, and real professionals) to include them in lunch and cocktail plans? Is it pleasing to have the governor, mayor or city councilman call you by your first name? Those who do not deny the ego gratification that comes with the job are less likely to allow it to distort their work.

   Do reporters need special expertise in covering a religion-based political movement? Assuming that most journalists, even those who attend church or synagogue, have basically secular outlooks, should they make a special effort to understand voters whose political motivation is faith based? Have today's reporters studied enough history to know that earlier, not-so-conservative, political movements-civil rights, peace, temperance--were also based at least in part on a religious foundation.
   

4. Some students might want to visit one of the local fundamentalist churches, or to attend a Conservative Christian political event, just to look and listen, in an effort to find out what motivates the rank-and-file of the movement.

All of this would be but prelude to trying to determine how and why the Religious Right is now part of the Republican leadership. Have the religious conservatives effectively won control or enough influence? If the motivation is pragmatic ("We want to win") what does that say about a movement based on moral fervor?In other words, failure to pursue these stories may lie with the Pack and The Narrative. Reporters didn't want the McCain campaign to be over because they liked him, and because his success had been predicted by The Narrative they had created.

There is no point getting huffy or moralistic about this. People who work together all day every day are going to associate with each other and influence one another. If their job is to chronicle and explain events-to provide a narrative-one of the things that will come out of their conversation will be…a Narrative. The temptation to conceptualize is irresistible.

In fact, The Narrative can exert a positive influence. The campaign 2000 version was nicely summed up in Newsweek by Jonathan Alter, who explained McCain's success by noting an indisputable, if little-discussed, political phenomenon.

The secret of McCain's appeal, Alter wrote, was the widespread "dissatisfaction with both parties that is becoming a permanent condition of the American electorate." Calling it "the biggest and most elusive political story around," Alter wrote that "The underground reservoir known as the independent vote is huge, nearly 40 percent of voters. Ross Perot and Bill Clinton tapped it; Bill Bradley tried. John McCain has had the most success of late."

But like so many explanations, this one raises its own question: is the political press partly responsible for the dissatisfaction Alter mentioned? Another interesting explanation of McCain's appeal in a Sunday analysis in the Chicago Tribune by Lisa Anderson:

"John Wayne couldn't do it any better," Anderson wrote. "He comes out of the West, packing honesty and heroism like a pair of righteous six-shooters. He blasts Republican politics-as-usual. He fires up new voters of every stripe."

So McCain is appealing because he's against "politics-as-usual." Among those to whom he appeals are political reporters. Does this mean political reporters don't like politics as usual? Is there something about covering politics that tends to make one dislike politics and politicians? If so, what are the implications?

One implication might be that, having found their anti-political politician, journalists have trouble seeing his defects. Because the other untold story of this story was how John McCain's bold gamble laid bare John McCain's political weakness, which was not being a maverick but being a self-absorbed maverick.

One thing reporters barely had time to do on February 28 and 29 was to read McCain's speech-really read it, not just scan it for the good quotes. Because to read it is to be struck by how flimsy it is. Oh, it was newsworthy enough, hard-hitting and full of punchy quotes. But it never makes a substantive case against Robertson and Falwell. It's not really about them. It's about McCain, who calls the religious conservatives into the political dock for the offense of...not supporting him.

Some reporters nibbled around the edges here. In the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 2, Larry Eichel noted that McCain himself said that his speech was in part "a reaction to the personal attacks directed at him by Robertson and others...that contributed to his loss in South Carolina."

As Jill Lawrence pointed out in USA Today on February 29, McCain's entire candidacy was based less on policy or social vision than on "biography," what his aides called "the story," the compelling account of how he endured years in a North Vietnamese prison camp with both his honor and his sense of humor intact.

It wasn't that McCain ignored issues. On most of them he was, as he said in his speech, "a proud conservative," with a position on taxes, spending and Social Security slightly to Bush's left. This did win him some support from the remnants of the Republican moderate wing, but most of his support was non-ideological. It was a response to the appeal of his story.

That's what made it part of The Narrative. If McCain wasn't really John Wayne he was close enough for government work. And such was the power of The Narrative that very few political journalists dared to question whether this was really good politics, much less good government.

National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" came closest on the evening of February 28 with University of Maryland Professor Eric Uslander, who noted that McCain is "not on very good terms with any of the Republican leadership in the Senate...he's one of the least liked people in the Senate and can never really be an insider or a power broker."

A President of the United States who can't be a power broker would be in quite a pickle, and perhaps so would the country. But aside from these few seconds on NPR, the political press seems to have ignored-avoided?- any discussion of how McCain's words might just be as much a sign of petulance as of courage, of prickliness as of conviction. It was as though many reporters, having helped create The Narrative, had trouble seeing beyond it.

At the very least, someone might have looked into recent history to note how the anti-politician who is revered largely for being blunt and "taking on the Establishment"-Ross Perot being the most clear and recent example-often does well several months before the election. It's in the fall, when folks begin to realize that they are electing a president, not venting their spleen or making a statement, that they turn to someone who can be...a power broker. Politics as usual is usually politic, and someone should have noted that John Wayne would probably never have been elected.

ⁱ Full disclosure. Ms Anderson was once a colleague and is still a friend. Others mentioned herein with whom I have been and remain on friendly terms are Curtis Wilkie, Tom Oliphant, Jonathan Alter, John Marelius, Larry Eichel.