Why campaign coverage sucks

3. "We have special insight"

John Harris and Jim VandeHei, formerly of the Washington Post, are the top editors of The Politico, a new newspaper-and-web operation that only does politics. After the New Hampshire screw-up, which they called a "debacle" and a "humiliation," Harris and VandeHei asked themselves why their profession, political reporting, "supposedly devoted to depicting reality, obsesses about so many story lines that turn out to be fiction."

This is an excellent question and it's admirable that they don't mince words in framing it. "The loser -- not just of Tuesday's primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far -- was us," they write. That would be the pack, "...the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently -- and so rashly -- stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters."

A key point: "we have special insight." The current generation of political reporters has based its bid for election-year authority on its horse race and handicapping skills. But reporters actually have no such skills. Think: what does a Howard Fineman (Newsweek, MSNBC) know about politics in America? I mean, what would you logically turn to him for? It's got to be: Who's ahead, what's the strategy, and how are the insiders sizing up the contest? That's supposedly his expertise, if he has any expertise; and if he doesn't have any expertise, then what is he doing on my television screen, night after night, talking about politics?

Even if Fineman and company had it, the ability to handicap the race is a pretty bogus skill set. Who cares if you are good at anticipating events that will unroll in clear fashion without you? Why do we need people who know how this is going to play out in South Carolina when we can just wait for the voters to play it out themselves?

Among the "bogus narratives" the campaign press has developed so far, the Politico editors chose three to illustrate their humiliation. John McCain's "collapse" in the summer of 2007, which meant we could write him off; Mike Huckabee's win in Iowa, where the candidate without an organization took a state where electoral success, we were assured, was all about organization; and Obama's "change the tone in politics" campaign which, according to the Gang, was not going to be in tune with the voters' rawer, more partisan feelings in '08. All three were a bust, suggesting political journalists have no special insight into: How is this going to play out? What they have are cheap, portable routines in which you ask that kind of question, and try to get ahead of the race. This, too, is what I mean by mindlessness.

"If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race," say Harris and VandeHei about their sorry-ass performance in '08. But they're at sea in trying to explain why such things happen. They blame addiction to the game of politics, journalists and their sources hanging out too much together, and personal bias among reporters unconsciously rooting for the candidate who is more fun to cover. Those are certainly three factors. Another 23 could be listed without running out of plausible reasons, because what they're really grappling with is routine mindlessness in their institution. Explaining that is a bit harder.

4. "Removed from the experience"

A much better attempt was this short and consistently to the point entry by Christopher Hayes of the Nation magazine: "WHY CAMPAIGN COVERAGE SO OFTEN SUCKS." He starts with something that is known to everyone in the pack: Campaign reporting is an essay in fear.

"Reporting at events like this is exciting and invigorating, but it's also terrifying. I've done it now a number of times at conventions and such, and in the past I was pretty much alone the entire time. I didn't know any other reporters, so I kept to myself and tried to navigate the tangle of schedules and parking lots and hotels and event venues. It's daunting and the whole time you think: 'Am I missing something? What's going? Oh man, I should go interview that guy in the parka with the fifteen buttons on his hat.' You fear getting lost, or missing some important piece of news, or making an ass out of yourself when you have to muster up that little burst of confidence it takes to walk up to a stranger and start asking them questions."

Whereas he had once thought of it as a rookie's experience, this year he learned that the fear never goes away. "Veteran reporters are just as panicked about getting lost or missing something, just as confused about who to talk to. This why reporters move in packs. It's like the first week of freshman orientation, when you hopped around to parties in groups of three dozen, because no one wanted to miss something or knew where anything was."

It is rare to find a campaign correspondent who is inner-directed, with a vision of how to report on the election season that sends her off on her own. Campaign reporters tend to be massively other-directed. The reality-check is what the rest of the press is doing -- and the Web makes it far easier to check. Mindless.

"When you go to one of these events as a reporter, there's part of you that's aware that you don't really belong there," writes Hayes.

"You're an outsider, standing on the edges observing the people who are there doing the actual stuff of politics: listening to a candidate, cheering, participating. So reporters run with that distance: they crack wise, they kibbitz in the back, they play up their detachment. That leads to coverage that is often weirdly condescending and removed from the experience of politics."

Removed from the experience. Well, yeah. That is the number one virtue of horse-race reporting and the inside baseball mentality: speed of removal from the immediate experience. Hayes thinks the "worst features of campaign reporting" can be traced back to the "psychological defenses that reporters erect to deal with their insecurities." First line of defense: pack behavior. A second is what the Politico guys said: "the illusion that we understand politics" and with our special insight can predict the behavior of voters, anticipate a turn in the narrative, divine a winning strategy.

Maybe this illusion is reproduced for us because it is fear-reducing for them to mount the horse-race production.

Next page: George W. Bush passed his horse-race test and flunked the leadership test once in office. So did Bill Clinton, Halperin says