I think you can also do what I like to call an investigative reporting of ideas. We do a reasonable job, for better or worse, about telling readers, viewers, and listeners what candidates did in their past lives. We tell them whats good about them and especially whats corrupt about them. That is fine. There is a legitimate place for that. But when candidates say something at election time or talk about issues, we dont really explore enough either how this thing they said relates to what theyve said over a very long period of time are they contradicting themselves? We get the cheap and easy contradictions, but we dont really explore in detail how what this candidate has said today about the environment relates to what he might or she might have done in the past as a governor or senator or mayor.

     We also dont talk very much about what that implies about the package of things they might do if they won the office they were running for. I think its possible to be as tough as we are in the sphere of peoples personal lives and turn our attention to being not unfairly tough, not gotcha tough, but just tough-minded about how words said on the campaign trail or in advertising relate to what people have done and might actually do.

     I would say parenthetically that we look back a lot at the writing of Theodore White, the author of the great Making of the President series. It is often said that Teddy White mislead us because White was the first guy to take us into the backroom of politics and he showed us that these things arent as magical as we thought they were: there are all these guys making these decisions, thinking about constituencies, and how you move them. In the first place I think that actually was a service, better for people to know that than not to know that.

     But secondly, I think that analysis of White misses two of the greatest contributions his books made. The first thing White did is, if you go back through all of his books, you notice is that there are these huge sections from speeches the candidates gave. I discovered this in particular when I was writing one of my books. If I was looking for a particular speech, before I went to some archive, I actually opened my Teddy White books. At least one time in three, some very important speech that was given in the campaign was reported at great length by White in the book. Then he went back and analyzed: What did the speech say? What was he trying to do? How did this relate to other things? So White taught us that you really should pay attention to what people say in campaigns. A lot of times politicians do what they say they will do in campaigns. (I think thats an overlooked fact).

The other thing Teddy White did is use the campaign to paint a portrait of the country. Thats where I think it is possible for us to use campaign coverage to draw in, rather than repel, readers. In the beginning of The Making of the President 1960, the whole first chapter of that book is about the 1960 census and he talks about how these huge changes in America in the fifteen years since the end of World War II conditioned the battleground on which John Kennedy and Richard Nixon fought. And he does a wonderful job of saying how the nature of our country effected the nature of that election.

     If we go back to Teddy White and learn not only the lessons about the need to go into the backroom and talk about the consultants, but also these other two things look at your country or your city or your state and also look at what people actually say and take it seriously I think we could improve on what we are doing.

I think there is a terrible danger right now that those of us in journalism want to be phony populists. We want to say, the people are right about absolutely everything and we are going to do what the people say we should do. We take polls, we look at what issues people care about. Half of that that is very right, I think. It is quite legitimate to look at the issues that voters care about and try to do more coverage on the things they care about, because voters tend to care about things that matter. Right now, there is a lot of concern about education, about health care. In the debates, journalists dont always ask those questions. Questions on those issues often come out of the audience. I think that half of it is quite legitimate, but I think there is another half of it that we ought to question.

     Voters themselves or, if you want to put it another way, all of us as citizens, ought to question ourselves when people say, I am detached from politics because it doesnt matter. Well, thats not true. They say, I am detached from politics because there is no difference between these candidates. Well, that is rarely true. I am detached from politics because these guys spend all of their time fighting with each other. Well, yeah, sometimes the fights are phony, but sometimes those fights are about real things that actually matter to those voters whom we say we honor with our coverage.

Congressman Barney Frank once said a wonderful thing, he said, We politicians are no great shakes, but you voters are no day at the beach, either. And I think thats a reasonable view and we can think of ourselves as journalists and voters. And I think that we ought to challenge the people we write for, we ought to respect them enough to challenge them. We ought to respect them enough to say, You are citizens whether you like it or not. You confront choices in these elections whether you like the choices or not. You can choose not to vote. You can choose to get engaged. But it is your choice.

     I think that a kind of phony populism often leads us not to do what I think real populists do, which is to say the people in the country ought to run the country but rather to create rationales for disengagement or disinterest. I dont think that ought to be our job. I think we need to make a case that this matters. Taxes matter, spending matters, particular programs matter, and I think there is a way in which journalism can bring that home all the time. It is easy, in principle, to tell people how this tax plan will work and how it will affect you, how this Medicare proposal will work and how it will affect you, how this student loan program will work and how it will affect you. If we want to be serious about relating to voters, we ought to make the case that whether the differences between the candidates are big or small, whether the candidates are popular with the voters or not, the choice the voters face actually could affect the way the live their lives.

     One of the issues that Jan told me has been under discussion a lot in this group is education and I think education is one of the most difficult issues to cover especially in campaigns that involve presidential candidates and also candidates for the senate or the house. It is difficult because the federal government plays a very limited role in education, at least when you look at the spending. I think roughly seven percent of what we spend on our schools comes from the coffers of the federal government. Just because it is difficult does not mean it is impossible.

     I think it is clear that even when you are covering federal candidates, the federal governments choices in spending seven percent of all of the money we spend on education, which is still a lot of money, even here in Washington, that the way the government spends that money, what incentives it creates with that money, is enormously important to what happens on the local level. The federal regulations that are written here in Washington have a huge effect on what happens in local school districts. Just because the money doesnt come from Washington doesnt mean Washington doesnt have any power.

     The second thing that goes wrong in education coverage is that we get the problems mixed up, or we tend to oversimplify them. There is a tendency to argue, in a kind of simplistic way, about whether Washington should or should not be involved in the schools. I think that argument, which often really does take place on the ground in election campaigns, is something worth challenging because there is a kind of inevitability to Washingtons involvement. We also often talk about this issue as if the choices are: there is a catastrophe in the public schools, or there isnt a catastrophe in the public schools.

The truth is, I think, that if you really look at the nature of the education problem, you have three completely different problems in different parts of the country, and you need to cover each of them in an honest way. In some of our school districts, especially in the big cities, there is a catastrophe problem. The systems are broken, they do need radical reform, and there is a big argument to be had over how you bring about that reform. But in a lot of our school systems the problem is what you might call a mediocrity problem. Its not that the schools are terrible. The schools are doing okay, but they could do a lot better and parents would like that.

     In the case of the mediocrity problem, the solutions required arent so radical, and things like testing and a little bit more information to parents could lead to the kinds of reforms on the local level that people would want. And then there is a money problem. If you look especially at our poorest rural school districts, you see they are totally incapable of competing for the best teachers, of drawing people into their districts, or of paying for anything they need. There is a tendency in this debate to say, Money doesnt matter. Look at X school district that spends so much per pupil and they still fail. That school district exists. Cities like that exist. Many of us are familiar with such cities. But that doesnt answer the question at all.

     I think it is important to identify those parts of the country that have problems that could be solved simply with money. Sometimes throwing money at a problem solves the problem. And so I think that when you look at education, you shouldnt let people get away with (people in this case being candidates or ourselves who are covering the candidates) the notion that these are simple bifurcated choices. In the education debate, especially, there are very few bifurcated choices.

» »