White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Media-Pollster Axis Stole the Election

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Politics is the hot ticket in journalism these days. Young reporters long to cover Capitol Hill, when once they longed for the exotic life of the foreign correspondent. “Timbuktu or bust” has become “Washington or fail.” Journalism's stars today are those who can reel off the precincts of Iowa or the hobbies of senators, not the wonders of rural Sri Lanka.

Yet the passion for politics that has seized the Washington press corps and those who want to join it across the country has not been reflected in the public – not, at any rate, by the abysmally low national turnout of 36. 3 percent on Nov. 4, arguably one of the most important midterm elections in a long time.

It was the lowest voter turnout in 72 years: a seeming monument to voter apathy. Certainly not the sign of a seething, unhappy electorate which believes the bums should be thrown out because the country is on the wrong track. That may be so, but you wouldn't know it from the voter turnout.

The voter turnout wasn't large enough for anyone to claim that the country has veered to the right, or that the victors have a mandate. Yet we know President Obama is held in low esteem, although not as low as the risible contempt in which Congress is held.

If the voters didn't come out in large enough numbers to give us a clear reading, how do we know that Obama is on the ropes and that Congress is despised? We know it, without doubt, from the innumerable opinion polls which are now part of the journalistic toolbox.

There is no doubt about the public mood. So why didn't the public vote when there was so much journalistic enthusiasm for the election; when an amazing amount of television time, especially on cable, was given to politics; and when radio goes at politics 24-7?

The paradox may be journalism and its commitment to opinion polls, largely funded by the media. If you know who is going to win the match, why buy a ticket?

The passion in journalism for politics has made politics a victim, robbed it of surprise and tension. I voted without passion because I had a very complete picture of the outcome before I did my civic duty. It was like reading an otherwise gripping who-done-it, when I already knew it was the butler.

The metadata people, like Nate Silver, aren't helping either.

When newspapers are cutting their staffs and budgets are tight, why is political coverage and polling out of Washington thriving? First, it is cheaper to create news than find it. With polls, you scoop the election result. Second, there is a large pot of money for “political issues” advertising that has given rises to a raft of new outlets, forcing old-line media to double down.

Washington politics is no longer a franchise of The Washington Post and The New York Times. It has its own trade press, led by the upstart and well-funded Politico, a big news predator in a school of hungry fish. There is The Hill, Roll Call, National Journal, RealClearPolitics and more than a dozen others, like The Cook Political Report and Talking Points Memo.

It is these new entrants, with their access to instant electronic delivery, that have led the change and fueled the frenzy. They are in danger of becoming the game instead of covering it. They have become more interested in what the polls say than what the politicians say.

On Capitol Hill, members of Congress are in bunker mode. They are afraid to say anything or look a bit tired, distressed or unkempt because these ill-considered words and unflattering images will be flashed across the Internet – there to be retrieved at any time, for all time.

There is a joke around Washington that if a member of Congress breaks wind, Politico will have the story. In this new world, every trifle is recorded and archived. Is this the way to foster statecraft in a dangerous and unforgiving world? Let's poll that question, shall we? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Voting

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I shall be voting today. I shall toddle down to the Episcopal church hall in my town, once described by Washington Post writer Hank Burchard as “a hotbed of social rest.”

Polling place volunteers will check my ID, and apologize for so doing. All very civilized, like a Norman Rockwell painting. None of the ugliness of the campaign will penetrate the faux England of the Virginia Hunt Country.

A wretch like myself, though, will wonder which of our billionaires, so decorously standing in line with farmhands and exurbanites, gave big money for attack ads or whether one of the nice lawyers, with his multimillion-dollar, class-action practice, has paid to have a politician’s private life made public.

Yet, when it comes to voting, my cynicism is contained. I carry the scars of failed democracy, but my passion for voting is undimmed.

It all goes back to the late 1950s, when I was a wild-eyed teenaged reformer—is there another kind? The place was Southern Rhodesia and the issue was white minority rule.

We, the wild-eyed, had an almost messianic faith in the curative powers of voting. We even believed that democracy in Africa would be more gentlemanly and idealistic than it was in Europe or America. Oddly, this belief later affected liberal American newspaper columnists like Meg Greenfield of The Washington Post and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times.

Our belief, naive and well-meaning, was that without the old colonial restrictions, stronger, better societies would rise in Africa than had existed in the rest of the world. Our belief was akin to that of Jews who had high hopes that the State of Israel, informed by the suffering of European Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, would produce a kinder, gentler nation than the world had yet seen.

In looking back the odd thing is how kind and gentle, though skewed to the whites, Southern Rhodesia was. There was little crime, no measurable social unrest, but a profound sense that things would change for the better when one man, one vote was the law of the land.

Democracy was the balm and elixir that would move Africa to Winston Churchill’s “sunlit uplands.”

In 1980, after a brutal civil war, Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, got its vote. It was rigged from the beginning, and Robert Mugabe began to lay waste what had been literally and figuratively a sunlit upland.

His first action was one of genocide in the southern part of the country, called Matabeleland. Mugabe’s troops killed an estimated 25,000 people who, being of a different tribal grouping, had had the temerity to vote against him in the first free election.

The new reality of African democracy was “one man, one vote, once.”
Even so, the idealists clung to their hopes. As late as 1996, the dwindling white minority was still hopeful. At that point in time, they had not suffered direct reprisals; Mugabe’s evolving hatred of the white minority had not been seen. It soon would, with seizure of the farms and later businesses.

Zimbabwe elections lost all validity with intimidation, violence and phony prosecutions. Yet the people voted even if they risked brutality for doing so. They had signed on to the hope implicit in voting.

Sadly, democracy elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, excluding Botswana and South Africa, also failed awfully in Uganda under Idi Amin and foolishly in Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda. Democracy had become a contrivance to set up a dictatorship.

We, the boy soldiers of democracy marching around Salisbury, the Southern Rhodesian capital, with placards, did not understand that democracy is learned and it thrives only where it is husbanded by the voters and protected by a phalanx of independent institutions.

We were not alone in not seeing this. Neither, by the way, did the British, French and Portuguese governments. Neither, one fears, did the advocates for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, get out there and vote. Cherish the moment. You will not get a gun butt against your head outside the polling place.