Those Who See Only Dwarfs Today

Are the Sort Who Belittled Giants Past

December 3, 1987

By EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Edward M. Kennedy is the senior senator
from Massachusetts. This commentary is adapted from a speech that he
gave recently at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

My
experience in national campaigns, winning and losing, from 1960 to
1980, has left me with a sense of a widening gap between the real
issues and the reporting–a feeling that the voters are not seeing
candidates whole or clearly, but through a journalistic lens
increasingly honed to the prism of People magazine.

Nothing more
clearly manifests the distorted political bent of the coverage than the
obsession with polls. Everybody takes them, everybody trumpets them and
everybody treats them as the near-equivalent of an election. Candidates
move up and down, gain or lose attention and money, are perceived to be
stalled or surging–and nobody bothers to ask how accurate such
pre-caucus and pre-primary surveys are likely to be, or have been in
the past.

They did not predict the rise of Jimmy Carter in
1976–or the decline of Walter Mondale in 1984. In 1979 the November
polls said that there was no way I could lose Iowa–and in 1980 the
March polls said that there was no way I could win New York.

The
polls did not pick up the McGovern movement early in 1972 or the
McCarthy breakthrough of 1968. Yet now polls have become the
quintessential pseudo-events of the pre-primary campaign. They may tell
us something, but they don't tell us everything. Perhaps we cling to
them because they offer us numbers–and the numbers confer a certain
appearance of reality. It is the statistical analogue of false
consciousness; it is false objectivity. Or perhaps the seductive pull
of the numbers reflects a resistance to the harder work of dealing with
issues on their own terms.

Instead, serious candidates can be all but read out of the race before a single election is run.

And
as each candidate's season passes, much of the press, in
self-fulfilling disappointment, renews the suggestion that they are all
dwarfs anyway. If there is a pack journalism this year, that is its
common chord.

The complaint that there were giants in other
days, running in other campaigns–a complaint amplified by the
question: "Where are they now?"–represents an even deeper disregard
for history than the obsession with pre-primary polls.

Often the giants, too, were at first dismissed as dwarfs in their own time.

Lincoln
was derided as a party hack, with no executive experience. Wendell
Phillips assailed him as "a huckster"–and William Lloyd Garrison
called him a "coward" who would block emancipation.

Franklin
Roosevelt was dismissed by Walter Lippmann as an "amiable man" of no
consequence. The New Republic weighed in that he was "not a man of
great intellectual force or supreme moral stamina"–which sounds like
some of what the New Republic writes about candidates today.

Listen
to some of the other things that were said of F.D.R.–and you will hear
the cliches of 1987. Here are sentences from the Nation magazine:

"His
candidacy arouses no real enthusiasm . . . . (There is) no evidence
whatever that people are turning to Roosevelt . . . . There is small
hope for better things in his candidacy."

Come forward a
generation, to 1960, and Lippmann does it again. He urges that John
Kennedy step aside so that Adlai Stevenson can be drafted. And later in
the year Arthur Schlesinger has to write a book to refute another
journalist's view, widely repeated, that there is no difference between
Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

Obviously, in 1987, there are many
who have forgotten history, for they surely are repeating it. But now
the message of mediocrity is applied to a field of candidates, is woven
like a thread through most of the coverage and magnified by the
increasingly powerful technology of the information age.

People and politicians, candidates and non-candidates alike, are left asking: Is this any way to pick a President?

No
system is perfect–and who would want to return to the time when a
controlled convention could deny the clear preference of the people?

I
think that the press can do a better job of reflecting on its own
role–and recognizing that the choice ultimately belongs to voters, not
reporters.

But here are some things that we can do:

–Candidates
should be able to discuss campaign coverage without fear of being
assailed as "whiners" or "complainers" or agents of repression. I see
no prospect for a resurgence of Agnew-ism, which in any case consumed
its own perpetrator.

–At the same time, the press can resist
the standard of the lowest common denominator, the rationalization that
all news is fit to print that has appeared anywhere else, in any barely
respectable newspaper. Handicapping the race is irresistible, but it
should not be the ceaselessly beating heart of campaign journalism.

–Finally,
we can approach presidential elections with at least a minimal sense of
consequence and history. Why not give stories historical context?
Theodore White told us what went on inside a campaign, but he also
related it to what had gone on in other generations and other
campaigns. And those who borrow his approach should not leave half of
it behind.