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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Everything the press has said about Gore, down to Christopher Matthews' spittle-flecked call for him to concede, has been wrong.
Nov 8, 2000 | As the nation watches Florida to find out whether George W. Bush or Al Gore will be elected president, one thing is clear: Every theory floated by the press about the Gore campaign was wrong.
During the final week of the presidential run, the press said that Ralph Nader was going to cost Gore victories in traditionally Democratic states like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Washington. They said that union voters were unenthusiastic about him. They said that blacks didn't support Gore the way they did President Clinton, that Clinton fatigue was an impossible weight around the vice president's neck, that must-win states like California and Illinois were slipping away, that Bush backers were more energized than Gore supporters. They said that this election was essentially a popularity contest and that Bush's winning personality (competing against Gore's supposedly grating style) would be the deciding factor.
Wrong on all counts. But it wasn't surprising that the press had Gore dead and buried. For a variety of reasons -- primary among them the desire to take revenge on Bill Clinton by bringing down his partner -- they've been itching to count him out from the outset. (Be sure to expect a drumbeat in coming days for Gore to bow out of the race, "for the good of the country." MSNBC's Chris Matthews sounded this note today, suggesting that Gore should concede.)
That was obvious from the way they handled the Bush drunk-driving flap. Despite the fact that the Texas governor had to admit that as a 30-year-old he'd been arrested for drunk driving and yet as a presidential candidate had never informed voters, the dominant focus of the homestretch coverage, incredibly, continued to be Gore's flawed character, his shortcomings and how he'd lost this race. People, the pundits smugly concluded, just don't like Al Gore.
Then why did more Americans vote for Gore than Bush? Virtually no press player predicted that popular vote outcome. (Polled last week about who they though would win the election, 55 percent of newspaper editors and publishers gave the nod to Bush; just 14 percent thought Gore would pull it out.)
Of course with the Florida reversals, and re-reversals, the electronic media will be forced to reassess their exit poll "calls." But perhaps when this race is finally over journalists will also do some hard thinking about how they cover presidential campaigns and figure out why their collective contempt for one candidate proved so difficult to mask.
Of course, journalists would deny that they were unfair to Gore. They would claim that they were just taking a tough-but-fair look at his strengths and weaknesses. The problem with this defense is not just that the press consistently played up his weaknesses over his strengths (which is why they got the election so wrong), but that those "weaknesses" themselves were in large part merely received, unexamined, passed along by the worst kind of pack mentality until they became conventional wisdom. It's all too easy for reporters to use the tough-guy facade to put their own prejudices in play -- which then, of course, become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The examples are numerous. Just days before a badly outspent Gore strung together hard-fought, and often come-from-behind, wins in tossup states like Minnesota, Iowa, New Mexico, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Washington, Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine and perhaps even Florida, Joe Klein of the New Yorker suggested, "The wasting of Gore has been a stunning, and quite unexpected, phenomenon." (Appearing on MSNBC, Klein told host Brian Williams with a straight face that Gore's tendency to get "goofy" in public was a "serious" problem for the candidate.)
