So to apply that framework to a couple specific candidates, Mitt Romney is generally regarded as the Republican front-runner. But he doesn’t seem to be generating much enthusiasm, and there a variety of things that may make him objectionable, from his religion to his record on health care. The overriding media narrative seems to be whether he can make himself acceptable to the party. If you were a reporter covering the Romney campaign, what would you be looking for?
I think that basic narrative is pretty accurate, and it speaks well of the journalism community that they’ve settled on that. The basic question is the right question: What can Romney do to make himself appeal to elements of the party that don’t trust him on his religion, on health care? And even beyond health care he had a fairly liberal record in Massachusetts that he was flip-flopping away from in 2008. Those issues still continue.
The thing that I would emphasize is that the people he needs to please are not the voters in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina. Ultimately he has to do that, but the path to doing that is to please important leaders on those issues in the party. So when he gave his speech at the University of Michigan awhile back, the response to that really mattered. And the response within the Republican Party wasn’t very good. I don’t know what the polling results would be about how ordinary voters responded, but what mattered was the National Review, which endorsed him in 2008, was not excited by his effort to explain his health care position.
To take a candidate who occupies a very different position in the race, what would you look for if you were covering Michele Bachmann’s campaign?
Remembering what we were saying a little earlier, the party base is expanding and shifting. The Tea Party leadership might have a stronger voice now, and her support among them matters. But she’s got to have some support outside the Tea Party, or else she’s a factional candidate, and that’s not going to be enough to get her through contests that are not in Tea Party-friendly states. So I would be looking for, are there major party leaders who are either hostile to the Tea Party or just not deeply involved in the Tea Party who are supportive of her?
I don’t think many of the individual claims in your book would draw a lot of objections from serious political journalists. At the same time, the standard model for covering a primary campaign is to assign reporters to follow around candidates, which may reinforce the candidate-oriented frame you’re trying to push back against.
You earned your undergraduate degree from Medill, and worked for a few years as a journalist before starting your scholarly career. So to ask you to put your editor’s hat on, how would you structure campaign coverage to reflect the story as you see it?
One thing you could do is—and I don’t want to overstate the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire; they are important but they’re not the end-all and be-all—you could have someone be responsible for learning about what’s going on in Iowa. So they would go and talk to the various party leaders in Iowa, various activists, people who have been influential in earlier campaigns. You would cover Iowa, rather than covering Michele Bachmann in Iowa. It’s daunting to say, go and understand a whole state. It’s harder than it is to follow around a particular candidate. But that is the place where the questions need to be asked.
"The Party Decides" sounds like a great read. A couple of logical conclusions based on the book's argument:
1) The news media should start to focus more on the "behind-the-scenes" power players in each party if they want to really get a scoop on which candidates are likely to be nominated. On the Republican side, who do the Koch brothers like this year? Who is T. Boone backing? Who is Rupert Murdoch channeling funds to? Imagine the sound bites the public could get if a reporter was able to infiltrate one of these closed-door, high-powered conservative retreats in Aspen or Palm Springs: http://nyulocal.com/national/2011/02/01/conservative-retreat-demonstrates-lack-of-donor-transparency/ AND http://usuncutmn.blogspot.com/2011/06/prominent-closed-door-conservative.html.
2) It seems to me Professor Noel overlooks local media's potential value in understanding the electoral terrain of a given county, state or region. While the task of understanding Orange County, Florida, might be daunting for the New York Times, the Orlando Sentinel probably (hopefully) has a decent grip on it already and could therefore prove more accurate and insightful than the national media when it comes to covering primary action in that area.
3) Finally, though I haven't read it, I hope the book does not miss the chance to emphasize the importance of this peculiar American primary system to the overall functioning of our democracy. Out of over 300 million citizens, the primary system narrows America's choice, essentially, down to two people. That process of narrowing our collective choice, if corrupted by outsized corporate influence, say, or hijacked by radical ideologues, can obviously produce candidates who are, shall we say, not entirely preoccupied with the public interest.
#1 Posted by Taylor W., CJR on Wed 6 Jul 2011 at 10:08 AM
You didn't talk about public opinion polls -- not at all! That's a major omission, since all the hoopla about front-runners and the rise and fall of Iowa candidates in 2011-12 was based on the repeated polls, and the paucity (I write this in early January, I know it will change) of such polls in South Carolina.
#2 Posted by howard, CJR on Thu 5 Jan 2012 at 11:58 AM