For the past two weeks or so, we’ve watched as a largely press-manufactured story has made its way from a little noticed CNN.com column to The Washington Post op-ed page to an Associated Press dispatch to a Jodi Wilgoren-penned piece in today’s New York Times. The central claim of most of these pieces — that, as CNN’s Carlos Watson wrote two weeks ago, “Kerry’s Inner Circle Lacks Color” — seems dubious at best, but that hasn’t stopped the national media from turning the story into this week’s tempest in the teapot.
Let’s have a look at how we got here.
The Watson column kicked things off with the complaint that Kerry’s closest advisors are mostly white. Whether or not that’s correct depends upon how you define what Watson calls the “inner circle.” The six people whom Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill described in The Washington Post last week as “real insiders” are indeed white, but beyond that there are a number of minority advisors who are close to Kerry, including Marcus Jardotte, Art Collins, and Paul Rivera. In addition, according to Watson, other “key advisors and people of color” close to Kerry are Rep. Harold Ford, Greg Meeks, Rep. Juanita Millender-MacDonald, and Henry Cisneros.
“Despite these facts,” wrote Watson on April 16, “if Kerry’s inner leadership circle remains the same, do not be surprised if Bush points out the inconsistency, a more effective issue than many Democrats can imagine.”
As it happens, the Bush campaign had no need to point out this “inconsistency.” Watson’s column bounced right into the Campaign Press Echo Chamber (CPEC), where variations of it have been appearing ever since, like a houseguest who keeps coming back no matter how often you show him to the door. And as the allegations kept coming, in the form of news stories and op-ed page commentaries, they gained a certain faux legitimacy through little more than repetition. Eventually, as we’ve noted before, this sort of thing can become conventional wisdom, and at that point it does do more damage than any rhetoric from an opposing campaign.
Colbert King of The Washington Post op-ed page was the first to pick up on the CNN story. On April 24, King wrote that he called Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter for a rebuttal to Watson’s allegations, and when she argued that the answer hinged on what was meant by “inner circle,” he complained that her answer was “truly Clintonesque.” Cutter, wrote King, identified a number of minority senior staff members, but King doesn’t tell us who they are; he also employs a mocking tone when discussing the campaign’s “community outreach senior leadership,” which is made up largely of minorities.
Once Watson and King had gotten the ball rolling, AP gave it a kick, in the person of reporter Genaro C. Armas, who wrote a piece asserting that Kerry was being criticized for “a lack of minority representation at the upper levels of [his] presidential campaign.” For evidence, Armas highlighted a core group of seven key Kerry staffers who talk strategy with the candidate each morning. Whoops — turns out, as Armas acknowledges, two of the seven are black and one is Hispanic. That means the group, as described by Armas, is over 40 percent minority — as compared to an American population that is approximately one-third non-white. (He does mention three more white Kerry advisors further down in the story.)
Apparently unconcerned that he himself has just cited real evidence to the contrary, Armas pursues the story, repeating that nonetheless “some black officials and independent analysts” have expressed concern about the racial makeup of Kerry’s campaign. We spoke to one of the three Kerry critics Armas cites, David Bositis, a political scientist at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank focused on black issues. He told us his remarks in the AP story were “severely limited.”
“It’s mainly the media that’s driving this story,” he says. “The media loves these kind of stories,” he continued dryly, “in part because they tend to ignore stories about minorities. This gives them a chance to write a story about the Kerry campaign and have it count as a story about minorities.”
Today The New York Times’ Jodi Wilgoren picked up the bouncing ball and, upon examination, found it actually deflating. Fortunately, Wilgoren’s piece takes a deeper look at the issue than those that came before it, noting that critics — who she actually names and interviews — are as much concerned about Kerry’s modest minority outreach efforts as they are about the makeup of his inner circle. She also quotes Paul Rivera, a senior Kerry advisor, who is at pains to note that Kerry already has made four campaign sweeps through Harlem and that he won by large margins among blacks in the Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri primaries.
Wilgoren ends her piece with an interpretation from The Rev. Al Sharpton, who attributes the complaints to old rivalries extending as far back as Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign against another Massachusetts politician, Michael Dukakis. Sharpton slyly adds that he’s uncertain whether the critics really want to see Kerry’s inner circle more diversified or whether they’re just launching “a job application through the media.” (Since Sharpton is a man who has freely acknowledged that he hopes to use his own candidacy in the Democratic primaries to find a cushy job on cable TV, it may be that he’s on to something.)
Wilgoren’s piece is just multifaceted enough that it may finally silence the parrots of the echo chamber — or at least reduce their screeching to a few muted squawks.
It won’t take long to find out.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.