Editor's Notebook: The history of presidential campaigning can offer perspective, if not solace

The Democratic senator from Massachusetts won the debate without breaking a sweat. Literally. No, not John Kerry. That was John Kennedy, who went head-to-head with Republican Richard Nixon on Chicago television. It was the first of four debates, the most ever between presidential contenders. Kennedy scored because he looked young and energetic under the studio lights. Nixon suffered from a knee infection and a bad make-up job. The year was 1960. And it was the beginning of a new era of presidential campaigning. Former Associated Press newsman Walter Mears believes that campaign season was notable for other reasons. It heralded the rise of television in politics and sparked a shift in the nominating process. Mears, who won a Pulitzer Prize for political reporting, had a front-row seat for 11 presidential campaigns, 1960 through the overtime suspense of 2000. And he has collected those experiences between hard covers. Deadlines Past: Forty Years of Presidential Campaigning: A Reporter’s Story is part journalist’s memoir and part national history. It begins with 1960. That election was just about the last time a presidential candidate could wander the country beyond the eye of the camera or the reach of crowds, just about the last time winning votes was truly a face-to-face affair. And it was the beginning of the end of control by political bosses. Party leaders still chose the nominees in 1960, though there had been primaries since 1903. But Kennedy, Mears writes, set out to prove that a junior senator from Massachusetts, a Catholic, could win the presidency. “When Kennedy won in West Virginia — 95 percent Protestant, Bible Belt country — his only active rival, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, quit the campaign, leaving only sideline candidates, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas among them. But they couldn’t stop Kennedy after those primary victories. He had not won enough delegates to clinch the nominating majority; the reform system that enabled candidates to do that was a dozen years away. Kennedy’s winning strategy was to use the primaries to make his national name, prove his ability to win, and establish himself as a leader the party bosses could neither ignore nor snub at the national convention.” And this is what it has come to. The presidential race now entails Internet fundraising, back-to-back multicandidate debates, 24-7 television scrutiny and a scramble for percentages and delegates in a front-loaded, fast-moving, cross-country schedule of caucuses and primaries. It’s Survivor: The Campaign. Will more than one, maybe two, Democratic candidates remain on the island when you read this? Likely not. Still, history can offer perspective, if not solace. Illinoisans, who head to the polls this month to make their presidential choices, might be disappointed — and understandably so — if the game on the Democratic side is over before they step into the booth. Mears’ book provides a readable antidote, though, to these late-primary blues. What comes through, as he traces the four-decade arc of presidential selection, is just how subject to chance it can be. The intelligent strategy that doesn’t work. The surefire endorsement that bombs. The ad that backfires. The tongue that slips. The photo-op that won’t die. Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential bid comes to mind as something of a set-piece on the things that can go wrong. It will be a while before we know what to make of Howard Dean’s up-like-a-rocket, down-like-a-rock campaign. Beyond the quirky particularity of the candidates and the races are what Mears considers landmark moments. Among them, the first of the negative television commercials. “None were more adroit or more devastating than the 1964 Demo-cratic ads implying that [Barry] Goldwater would risk nuclear war.” The first was the famous daisy petal ad that showed a little girl counting backward to a nuclear explosion. It was run only once. “The [Lyndon] Johnson campaign did not have to sponsor it again,” he writes. “The television networks rebroadcast it repeatedly as news, the pictures and text were run in the newspapers.” There are technological advances that inevitably change politics. The roles of the Internet and cable TV are still in evolution. On this, Mears has some thoughts. “In theory, more voices, more outlets, and the unlimited time and space of cable television and the Internet should deliver more information and encourage more interest. Instead, imitation news, shouted opinions, and plain rumor have flowed in to fill the time and space. Instead of attracting people, the news noise level distracts them. The throngs who waited for Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, the fathers who held a small child aloft to see the man who might be president are fewer and rarer now. The familiarity of TV may have bred disinterest instead of engagement. People can see and effectively be at a campaign rally without going there.” True. But, oddly, a kind of intimacy has been recovered by the roving, nonjudgmental camera of C-Span. Yes, we could, if we chose, “attend” every rally in every cow pasture in Iowa. We could follow every candidate to every diner. We could even spend the night at a caucus. Of course, this gave us ample opportunity to observe that Iowans often seemed as befuddled by it all as the rest of us. There are critics who argue that Iowa doesn’t reflect the diversity of the country, that it shouldn’t be first in the political lineup. Or that Iowans shouldn’t be given such clout because they won’t know what to do with it. That may be true as well. Yet it is still a place where the serious candidate must pull up a chair, put his or her feet under the kitchen table and share some actual face time with voters. The rest of us can be there, too. And, in that sense, Iowa has become the nation’s caucus. There is a downside for the candidates in all this exposure. If Dean’s now-infamous speech had occurred out of the camera’s line of sight, if there is such a place, it never would have hit what Mears calls the echo chamber. That speech was replayed hundreds of times on television and set to music on the Internet. But who’s to say what was bad for Dean wasn’t good for us? There may be fewer presidential contenders by the time the road show gets to Illinois. But look at it this way: We’ll know more about the survivors than did the voters in Iowa or New Hampshire. So vote as if it still matters. It just might, over the long run anyway.