Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. excels in defining for readers the strengths and weaknesses of competing political philosophies. His analysis of American politics and trends of public sentiment is recognized as among the best in the business. Before joining the Post in 1990, he spent 14 years with The New York Times, reporting on state and local government, national politics, and from around the world, including stints in Paris, Rome, and Beirut. Newsday called his 1991 best-selling book, Why Americans Hate Politics, a classic in American political history. [  ]

E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Washington Post columnist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

Washington, D.C. Workshop
December 10, 1999

There is something very nice about being called a long-time journalist. The way I hear that now is in light of a letter I once got from a reader. If you write a column, one of the things you learn is that people are willing to take issue with you on absolutely everything and will say extraordinary things. Some newspapers actually run my picture with my column, which in my case I dont think gets any additional readers and probably loses quite a few, but I once got a letter from a reader saying Dear Mr. Dionne, I dont understand why you run a twenty-year-old picture with your column. The picture had been taken about a year before, at most. He said, I saw you on television the other day and you look very well preserved.

     That is what I think of now when I learn I am a long-time journalist. One of my very favorite letters I ever got was from someone who said, Dear Mr. Dionne, are you as dumb in person? And the one privilege everybody in this room has tonight is that they will be able to answer that question for themselves.

     One thing that Jan [Schaffer] and a lot of the people around her have called into question over the years is the tendency of journalists these days to spend most of their time making predictions and no time at all reporting on the news. I think this is true and I think its a legitimate criticism.

I was comforted about a year ago when I ran into a minister who talked about a buddy of his who had worked his way through divinity school by being a baseball umpire, which sounds like a wonderful way to work your way through school. A friend was sitting down with this minister one day and he said, Gee, that must have been great. You learned to call em as you see em. The minister, who was a very honest man, looked at the friend and said, Actually, I learned to call em whether I saw em or not. And I have always wanted to put that above my computer as a reminder.

     No one in this room shares the view of Charles A. Dana who once said, Journalism consists of buying white paper at two cents a pound and selling it at ten cents a pound. I bear this in mind, because one of the great dangers is that when we mess up, that is really all were doing.

     Writing a column, I also worry about something Adelai Stevenson once said. He was talking about somebody he opposed and he said, This guy comes before you and says, these are the conclusions on which I base my facts.  When you write a column of opinion, that is something to bear in mind.

     I cant top some of the stuff youve heard about in the course of todays meeting. I cant top Buddy Cianci [Mayor Vincent A. Cianci, Jr., of Providence, R.I.], whom I understand you learned of. I grew up down the road from Buddy Cianci in a place called Fall River, Massachusetts. One of the things I would like us to talk about tonight is the notion that politics can be fun. In the town I grew up in, everybody loved politics. You knew that you were supposed to root for the Red Sox and the Patriots and that politics was fun. People remembered grudges from twenty-five years before from races for the state legislature. My wife, who is Irish, said the definition of Irish Alzheimers is that you forget everything except your grudges. And that is what politics was like in my hometown. A friend once said that in Fall River there were only three kinds of people: people running for office, people getting ready to run for office, and people recovering from running for office. So I was raised with the idea that politics is not something that is terribly boring, its not something that happens out there, it actually happened in our neighborhoods. Kids in my town put bumper stickers on their bikes, just to give you a sense of what it was like there.

What I would like to do later is to have a conversation about How do you make politics fun for people again? In some ways I think that is our hardest challenge, but I dont think it ought to be impossible. Almost anybody whos ever been involved in politics knows that it can be fun and so I hope we get to that.

Id like to talk a little bit about some of the critiques that civic journalists have made of campaigns and also some of the critiques that have been made of civic journalism. I appreciate civic journalism for what it has said about the things that are wrong in the way we do things and so I come, in a sense, as a friendly critic. I do think that some of the things that have been said about ways of improving campaigns and the ways in which those things went wrong can be very useful to us.

     I think that its a mistake for journalists to see campaign coverage as a war on the candidates. By that, I dont mean that you shouldnt explore what candidates have done and what their past is, but a lot of times you hear, If we really want to do this job right, we have to take this campaign away from the candidates and give it back to the voters. That can be dysfunctional in a great many ways. First of all, the voters are stuck with the candidates, whether they like them or not. And if you look at a campaign where, at the end of the process, the voters are going to have to choose between Mr. X and Ms. Y (and Jesse Venturas guy is here, so I will say Mr. Z as well) you are not doing a great service if you so skew the coverage away from the candidates what they say, who they are, what they believe youre not really helping people make the choice that they are going to have to make, whether they like it or not, on election day…or they will choose to abstain.

     If you take the idea that campaign coverage cannot be a war on candidates, that does not mean that you have to limit yourself to what candidates are saying. It does mean you should pay more useful attention to what candidates are saying because that might actually help you in the task of how to make this campaign relevant to the issues that voters care about.

     Ill give you an example. Even when they use issues that we think are phony, candidates are usually talking about something that voters out there actually care about. That is hard to believe for some of us, but it is absolutely true. These guys do not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on polling to guide their campaigns without talking about something that they think will move some significant chunk of the electorate.

I have looked back on the 1988 campaign that I covered and I think we in the press and I count myself very much in this missed some real opportunities to take issues that we kept deriding as phony and turning them into discussions that actually mattered to voters. Famous example: George Bush said that Michael Dukakiss decision to veto a law that required students to say the Pledge of Allegiance in schools meant that Michael Dukakis was somehow against the Pledge of Allegiance. A lot of flags went up and people said, Why is Bush talking about the Pledge of Allegiance? And we mostly left it at that. But what was going on with George Bush and Michael Dukakis and the Pledge of Allegiance issue?

     Well, underneath this critique was a question by Bush to the voters and to Dukakis about what the voters thought the schools should do to pass along values to children. And in this case, they were values having to do with patriotism and the contents of the Pledge of Allegiance itself. (Its worth remembering that the pledge of allegiance was written by a socialist, so George Bush was saying we should recite a socialist creation in our schools). I think we should not have just stopped at the point that said this is a phony issue, and instead explored the issues of what do parents want the schools to teach; what values do they want the schools to convey; why is this so divisive in the country? And it is legitimately divisive. How could we have enlightened our readers, our viewers, and done a better job of covering that issue?

     The same is true of advertisements. Since Im on Dukakis, Ill talk about Dukakis in the tank, that other famous ad that those of you who were around for that campaign will remember. It turned out to be a very silly thing for Dukakis to put on that Rocket J. Squirrel headgear and that may have hurt him more in that advertisement than anything else. But what was really talked about in that ad, if you looked at the text in that ad and turned off the pictures, the ad was about what should we do as a country about national defense? How do Dukakis and Bush differ on national defense? And that is a related point: if you take the candidates seriously you can bring the campaign alive to your readers.

     Weve done a pretty good job of doing all these ad watches in newspapers and weve talked about how the ads are accurate. Were doing a better job talking about why the candidates are running particular ads. As my friend David Broder said a long time ago, we could spend a lot of time using all kinds of campaign advertisements to explore the very issues of concern to the voters that we say we want to explore in our coverage. Take the ads in New Hampshire right now on health care that Gore and Bradley are running, particularly Gore in this case. The actual content of the Gore ad is pretty anodyne and you could analyze it and say, Well, hes trimming here, or hes not trimming here. But you could use that advertisement to talk about a lot of fundamental issues related to health care.

Advertising is something that viewers understand. I think advertising creates some real opportunities to create interest in the campaign. Up to now, advertising has tended to create disinterest in the campaign people kind of shut it off but precisely because advertising is visual, precisely because the average person thinks, quite legitimately, that because he or she is bombarded with hundreds of these things every day, they understand them. I think advertising can be used as a route backwards into issues and into the substance of things that we want to talk about.

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