Schlock season.
At the Talking Points Memo/TPMCafe blog complex, everyone was complaining yesterday, and rightly so, about the latest dumbass bit of political "observation" in the New York Times. Mark Leibovich's Week in Review piece is another one of those articles in which a reporter pulls some stock Washington theme -- say, Nancy Pelosi is shrill! or, in this case, failed Democratic nominees get stigmatized! -- out of his back pocket and then calls around to a bunch of DC insiders to make their familiar points about the familiar theme. Because it's about politicians rather than celebrities, it passes as news.
Still, reading the piece, I wonder how possible it would be for a smart political operation to totally offset this sort of article by crowding out the reporter's lazy storyline with irresitable quotes in praise of the target. During the 2004 campaign, the very smart Ryan Lizza wrote an article complementing the Kerry campaign's ability to separate the national and local press storylines without the populism-averse national press ever realizing it. Yet it's the Kerry people who provide the saddest evidence of how difficult it is to control the flow of these insider perspective pieces:
"The bitterness towards Kerry is much greater from the chattering classes in Washington," said Michael D. McCurry, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry during his 2004 presidential campaign. Mr. McCurry posits the example of his father, a Democratic activist in South Carolina, who still admires Mr. Kerry and resents the ridicule that's been heaped on him by onetime loyalists. Mr. Kerry's current staff is quick to share news of the large turnouts and ebullient receptions the senator is getting as he travels the country, exploring another run in 2008.
Basically, when the protestations of an army of aides can be mushed into "Mr. Kerry's current staff say he's still cool", you've lost the the deflection battle. Maybe what a successful politician needs to do is cultivate his own roster of Eccentric Quotable Hacks: James Carville or Marshall Wittman or even Chris Lehane-style quote machines whose verbal filibusters must, by press corps law, be quoted at length in articles like this. (Would Leibovich paraphrase a Lehane yarn about his southern-fried pap's political views?) Isn't that a large part of the secret of Bill Clinton's success since he left office and became the stuff of retrospective rather than of news?
But it's not that simple either. In the quest to be Instantly Quotable, hacks can discredit themselves as well as their candidates. (Lehane's "man of sabotage" routine may have brought him close to that point. And Wittman's support could conceivably be toxic in a primary). For instance, leaving the spinning to Susan Estrich rather than cultivating a roster of more respectable and instantly recognizable flacks early in the game strikes me as a rather serious risk on Hillary Clinton's part. Anyway, Estrich is far too silly to influence the anti-HRC direction of Horowitz' piece.
Back with Leibovich and the eternal damnation of the failed nominee, the usually estimable Elaine Kamarck barely fills a paragraph on behalf of Gore:
"I've always been puzzled by all the hostility to Gore, especially after he was essentially robbed of the election," said Elaine Kamarck, a longtime aide to Mr. Gore who is now a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Gore's experience should be a plus, not a stigma, she says.
In Kamarck's defence, she's probably still exhausted from her valiant -- if ultimately unsuccessful -- effort to fill up the 2000 election chapter of Joe Klein's latest novel with printable tidbits her old boss would like. Still, my sense is that -- with a few exceptions -- the Gore people have collectively always been worse than the Kerry people at pushing articles like this one in helpful directions. What a candidate needs is not one but an army of Kamarcks, who manage to blend loyalty with respectability and can hog column inches like nobody's business. And yes, of course I'm totally being flippant here. And possibly I misunderstand the process fundamentally. And possibly we all, not least myself, overstate the importance of the press' background noise -- raise it from the level of annoyance to the level of threat. But good God I'd love to see a candidate operation that could turn Leibovich into its bitch.
Still, reading the piece, I wonder how possible it would be for a smart political operation to totally offset this sort of article by crowding out the reporter's lazy storyline with irresitable quotes in praise of the target. During the 2004 campaign, the very smart Ryan Lizza wrote an article complementing the Kerry campaign's ability to separate the national and local press storylines without the populism-averse national press ever realizing it. Yet it's the Kerry people who provide the saddest evidence of how difficult it is to control the flow of these insider perspective pieces:
"The bitterness towards Kerry is much greater from the chattering classes in Washington," said Michael D. McCurry, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry during his 2004 presidential campaign. Mr. McCurry posits the example of his father, a Democratic activist in South Carolina, who still admires Mr. Kerry and resents the ridicule that's been heaped on him by onetime loyalists. Mr. Kerry's current staff is quick to share news of the large turnouts and ebullient receptions the senator is getting as he travels the country, exploring another run in 2008.
Basically, when the protestations of an army of aides can be mushed into "Mr. Kerry's current staff say he's still cool", you've lost the the deflection battle. Maybe what a successful politician needs to do is cultivate his own roster of Eccentric Quotable Hacks: James Carville or Marshall Wittman or even Chris Lehane-style quote machines whose verbal filibusters must, by press corps law, be quoted at length in articles like this. (Would Leibovich paraphrase a Lehane yarn about his southern-fried pap's political views?) Isn't that a large part of the secret of Bill Clinton's success since he left office and became the stuff of retrospective rather than of news?
But it's not that simple either. In the quest to be Instantly Quotable, hacks can discredit themselves as well as their candidates. (Lehane's "man of sabotage" routine may have brought him close to that point. And Wittman's support could conceivably be toxic in a primary). For instance, leaving the spinning to Susan Estrich rather than cultivating a roster of more respectable and instantly recognizable flacks early in the game strikes me as a rather serious risk on Hillary Clinton's part. Anyway, Estrich is far too silly to influence the anti-HRC direction of Horowitz' piece.
Back with Leibovich and the eternal damnation of the failed nominee, the usually estimable Elaine Kamarck barely fills a paragraph on behalf of Gore:
"I've always been puzzled by all the hostility to Gore, especially after he was essentially robbed of the election," said Elaine Kamarck, a longtime aide to Mr. Gore who is now a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Gore's experience should be a plus, not a stigma, she says.
In Kamarck's defence, she's probably still exhausted from her valiant -- if ultimately unsuccessful -- effort to fill up the 2000 election chapter of Joe Klein's latest novel with printable tidbits her old boss would like. Still, my sense is that -- with a few exceptions -- the Gore people have collectively always been worse than the Kerry people at pushing articles like this one in helpful directions. What a candidate needs is not one but an army of Kamarcks, who manage to blend loyalty with respectability and can hog column inches like nobody's business. And yes, of course I'm totally being flippant here. And possibly I misunderstand the process fundamentally. And possibly we all, not least myself, overstate the importance of the press' background noise -- raise it from the level of annoyance to the level of threat. But good God I'd love to see a candidate operation that could turn Leibovich into its bitch.
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