Insights: Politics

Jeff Greenfield
Published in: December 1, 1999

Published November/December 1999

POLITICS Watching the Watchdogs The media's focus on the private lives of politicians is not a conspiracy, but a sign of the times by Jeff Greenfield In the summer of 1964, as a just-graduated collegian, I watched on television as former President Eisenhower brought the Republican National Convention to a frenzy as he denounced "sensation-seeking columnists and commentators" for trashing soon-to-be-GOP nominee Barry Goldwater. With those words, many of the delegates leapt to their feet and began shouting and shaking their fists at the TV skybooths high above San Francisco's Cow Palace.   In the summer of 1992, I was one of those journalists working another Republican National Convention, this one at Houston's Astrodome, when a sudden change in logistics ordered by the Secret Service forced the members of the press to enter the arena not through the designated portal, but through an entrance high above the convention floor. As the delegates, alternates and loyal Republicans spotted our motley caravan making its way through the hall, they greeted us with a hail of boos and catcalls.   No doubt many of them saw us as part of a liberal, elite cabal working, wittingly or not, to propel Bill Clinton into the White House that year. These true believers would probably have been stunned by a comment made to me by a Clinton partisan at a pre-Inaugural gala in January 1993.   "When," my not entirely friendly inquisitor wanted to know, "are you going to get off the President's back?" She was not even thinking of the Gennifer-and-the-draft stories that had almost sunk Governor Clinton's campaign back in New Hampshire. She was responding to the spate of skeptical stories that had surrounded the Clinton transition effort. Neither of us could have imagined back then the press storm that would explode five Januarys later when the yearlong run of "The President and the Intern" began.   Indeed, there has been no campaign season for the past three decades that has been free from this dynamic: a story emerges about a prominent politician's private past; it becomes the dominant, indeed, the only story that the press pursues; every effort of the politician's handlers to talk about something else is drowned out by the clamor for details, for explanations, for proof of innocence, or a whole-hearted confession of guilt. Critics of the press begin to charge that the media are overdoing it, and that debate adds more fuel to the fire. Eventually, the crisis ends, either with the politician abandoning his quest for office, or with public indifference finally driving the press to another story. What remains is for a dozen journalism schools and think tanks to hold seminars asking whether all this is driving good people out of public life, or further convincing the citizenry toward cynicism.   What I want to do here is to offer some answers to a perfectly reasonable question I've heard dozens, if not hundreds, of times over the 25 years I've been writing and talking about politics: "Why do you people do this?" I do this not to justify our behavior--much of it is, in fact, indefensible--but to suggest that it is linked not to political bias, and not even to the ever-present hunger for ratings and circulation, but to much broader changes in our politics and our culture.   "Not linked to bias? What are you, nuts?"   Actually, no. Even if you take it as fact, as I do, that the great majority of working journalists cast their Presidential votes for Democrats, the track record of the past 30 years demonstrates that we are equal-opportunity harassers. We pursued Demo-cratic House Speaker Jim Wright out of office long before most Americans had ever heard of Newt Gingrich. We pursued Democratic vice-presidential nominees Tom Eagleton and Geraldine Ferraro with the same vigor as we did Spiro Agnew and Dan Quayle. (We did it to the Republicans longer, because they won.) And our meticulous recording of Quayle's verbal stumbles was no more dogged than the drumbeat of ridicule aimed at Sen. Ted Kennedy throughout his 1980 battle for the Presidential nomination. Four years later, Gary Hart was the perfect candidate for "media darling"--youthful, cerebral, skeptically liberal--but the press battered him with questions about everything from his name change to his handwriting three years before Donna Rice and the good ship Monkey Business sunk his presidential hopes.   So if it's not a leftist plot, why have we anointed ourselves "the character cops"?   First, we were told it was part of our jobs. As Vietnam and Watergate were teaching Americans to distrust their leaders, some very smart thinkers were arguing that the press had failed in its task of delineating the character of our leaders to the public. We needed to do more than analyze position papers and voting records; we needed to explain who these people were, what drove them, what were their strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, as Watergate turned into the biggest political story of the century, the pursuit of character seemed like a good career plan as well.   Second, the whole American culture was conflating the private and public spheres. Once upon a time (roughly until the end of the 1960s), the political press had a bright line to guide it--what a public figure did on his own time was not the public's business. Even private vices displayed in public might go unreported--a fact I learned in 1967 as a young aide to Robert Kennedy, when I walked on the Senate floor for the first time and saw an obviously blottoed Sen. Russell Long.   But when Ted Kennedy drove off that Chappaquidick bridge, and when Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House tax-writing committee, drove into Washington's Tidal Basin with a stripper at his side, it was impossible to keep such matters private. More significant, the emerging women's movement was making a powerful case that the personal is political. You cannot, they argued, judge a powerful man simply by his public posturing; you must look to the kind of husband and father he is, how he treats the women in his life. Thus, when Kennedy ran for president 11 years after Chappaquidick, his alleged womanizing became a matter of public debate. That same spirit fueled the ugly controversy over the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, with his foes arguing that we had to listen to Anita Hill's story in order to judge the judge properly. (Yes, many of these same feminists and liberals brushed aside the later behavior of President Clinton, which just proves that politics makes strange bedfellows).   Moreover, the whole American culture has become "unbuttoned" since the early 1960s; from the women' s magazines to the late-night comedians, matters are discussed in public that were once only whispered about in private--and with language that would have gotten the speaker thrown in jail. Oral sex was, a few decades ago, a criminal offense in most states, even between a husband and wife. Now it's a subject of advice columns and jokes on government-regulated broadcast television. That has given journalists a much wider field to play in.   Third, neither we, nor the public, has a set of clear rules on what is and is not out of bounds. When Gary Hart's woman troubles blew up his political life in 1987, the press constantly wrote that the issue was not adultery, but his judgment. A viewer called me and said, "Why do you guys keep saying that? For me, if a man lied to his wife in the presence of God, he's not fit to be President." Millions of Americans agree with him; more millions (if Clinton's survival is any proof) do not. Is it my job, is it the press' job, to decide what information the public cannot have in deciding who shall be their President? And if so, are you really that confident that my colleagues and I will make the right choice?   I once had a public disagreement with a prominent Democrat who argued that past adultery is nobody's business. But, she argued, she would want to know if a candidate told ethnic or sexist jokes; that, she said, would be a disqualifying trait. Others might feel that ethnic jokes are harmless, even a benign way of laughing away our differences. The question is: Is it my job to decide what you, the public, get to weigh?   Finally, we in the press have a lot less power than we, or our critics, think we have. Again and again, voters have brushed aside the clamor and the controversy; they've sent divorced men, adulterers, pot smokers, recovering alcohol abusers, to high office because they've made the judgment that these public figures can do the job. Even as the press was watching for the moving vans, the public has said, in effect, "Enough, already. We hear what you've told us, and we really don't care." That should be some consolation the next time the dogs begin to bay, and the hunt begins again.   Jeff Greenfield is CNN's senior analyst, and co-anchor of "CNN and Time". He will also co-anchor CNN's coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign.