Pundit to Pundit

U of L’s own political experts ask alumnus Howard Fineman about the presidential campaign

By Kevin Hyde

It was exactly six weeks before Election Day when I reached the extremely busy Howard Fineman via cell phone for a quick Q&A from the campaign trail. Fineman—the Washington, D.C.-based chief political correspondent for Newsweek, news analyst for NBC and 1980 graduate of U of L’s School of Law—was preparing to catch up with the Bush and Kerry campaigns in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Fineman began covering presidential politics for Newsweek in 1984 and has reported on every presidential contender since. He also has focused on such topics as the rise of the religious right, technology in politics, race in America and God in the courts. In recent years, he has become a fixture on NBC and MSNBC, commenting and expounding on the political news of the day.

He clearly holds deep affection for his days as a reporter for the Courier-Journal (he began his journalism career there in 1973), a time when he also began taking night classes at the law school.

“The first two presidents I covered were for the Courier-Journal—Gerald Ford in 1976 and Jimmy Carter in 1977,” Fineman says. “One of my prized possessions is a picture of me and Jimmy Carter at an LG&E power plant.

“I care a lot about U of L, about Kentucky and about Louisville,” he continues. “I love going back there.

Tell everybody I said, ‘Hello.’ “

No time for such pleasantries, I informed him. A gritty, some might say downright nasty, race for the presidency was hitting the home stretch, and I had questions for him—questions from U of L’s own political pundits including political scientists Jasmine Farrier, Phil Laemmle, Laurie Rhodebeck and Dewey Clayton as well as the director of the McConnell Center for Political Leadership, Gary Gregg.

I started with a question from Jasmine Farrier, who wanted to know about honesty in political advertising: Do the media (print, television, radio, etc.) have a responsibility to investigate the truthfulness of paid political advertisements before running them?

FINEMAN: Boy, they don’t ask easy questions at U of L.

I think a lot of broadcasters and cable outlets and newspapers don’t look too closely at the truthfulness of the advertising—both because they don’t have the wherewithal to do that on the business side and because they want to keep the business side and the editorial side separate. And there’s probably free speech concerns—people are allowed to use their money to say what they want. Unless it’s a blatant falsehood, people have wide latitude to say it.

But I think what’s happened in recent years, newspapers especially have begun examining the truthfulness of advertising claims fairly regularly in their news columns. For example, the Washington Post regularly runs an “adwatch” where they’ll look at them. That’s separate from the decision on the business side on whether they should take the ad. And I think even in the case of newspapers, if the editorial columns were to write a pretty harsh story about the truthfulness of a political ad, that may or may not lead to the ad being yanked. But there is a separation between what business does and what the First Amendment requires on the journalism side.

Farrier also wanted to know about the major networks’ plans on election night: Everybody is predicting an extremely close result on Nov. 2. Unlike 2000, do you think the networks have prepared for the possibility that this election might not have a clear winner on election night?

FINEMAN: Yes, I think they have prepared. I think they’re going to be very, very reluctant—they’re going to put aside what has traditionally been their competitive pressure—to make a quick call. If anything, they may error on the other side. They are also going to be very careful about the methodology of the polling being used and the exit polling. But no matter how much work they do, it won’t be enough to convince them that they should go quickly. I think they’re going to try to take their time this time.

The next question is from veteran U of L political science professor Phil Laemmle: With cable and the Internet, the media has become much more fragmented in recent years. How has this affected presidential campaigning, and what does it mean for the future of conducting campaigns?

FINEMAN: It means that the candidates don’t play to all of the media all the time. It used to be that both candidates would want to get as much coverage from and try to convince and woo all of the media and all of the reporters everywhere in the so-called national press corps. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Just as with the electorate now, they’re looking mostly to turn out the base and not worrying so much about the mythical independent swing voter.

Similarly, different candidates play to what they consider to be their home field—their home team in terms of media. In the case of George Bush, it’s pretty clear that they don’t waste a lot of time trying to convince Dan Rather and CBS to come over to the BC ’04 side of the equation. They would much rather spend their time giving extensive interviews to Fox News. On the Kerry side, they’re not going to spend a lot of time trying to make Kerry available to Fox News. Like when Kerry gives an interview—and he hasn’t been giving very many—he’s going to give it to the New York Times not the Weekly Standard.

So it’s really kind of a mirror of the electorate where you’re starting to develop two national press corps. There is sort of a red truth and blue truth now. I prefer to see the whole world as purple. Because I insist, based largely on my training at the Courier-Journal, on striving toward and believing in the possibility of reaching some sort of objectivity. You always have to strive for objectivity even though there is no perfect objective truth. It’s important.

When I was at the Courier-Journal in the mid-1970s, that newspaper still basically ran the state. The paper was an overwhelming power in Kentucky. They had a very feisty, very influential editorial page, but they ran the newsroom with an almost religious devotion to what they saw as objectivity and fairness. To the point that they would literally get out a big old pica ruler and measure the number of column inches being given to one candidate for county judge vs. the other. That might seem a little silly, but the symbolism of it was important. I don’t think those days have to be over.

We try very hard at Newsweek to be as objective and as fair as can be. We do have columnists. We have more columnists than Time, for example. And they’re allowed to swing away at the fences, and they don’t have to be fair because they’re not supposed to be fair. I’m not a columnist. I’m a reporter. I’ve never been anything else, and my view was shaped by my days at the Courier-Journal. But I don’t think that’s how most of the American people see the media today.

Laemmle followed up with a question on mudslinging: More and more it seems that if a campaign cannot engage on the issues, it inevitably will “go personal.” What role should the media play in balancing the coverage of a candidate’s personal attributes and foibles vs. coverage of the issues?

FINEMAN: In presidential politics, issues do not exist as a separate category. You can’t have the grin without the cat. And you can’t have the issues without the character of the presidential candidate speaking to those issues. So they should be related all the time.

You don’t want a dry recitation of the issues with a capital “I” nor do you want just the focus to be on whether a guy likes windsurfing or baseball. You should always try to tie the two together because that’s how the American people view it. If we don’t, we often lose sight of one or the other. Ideally you should always be talking about both.

And it’s interesting that John Kerry is known as something of a loner personally and yet he’s the one advocating getting everyone together. He always says, “I’m going to bring everybody to the table.” And George Bush is Mr. Social, yet he’s sort of going it alone in the world. That just goes to show you that character traits don’t necessarily predict what somebody’s political stands and actions on the issues will be.

Gary Gregg, director of the McConnell Center for Political Leadership, asked Fineman about the Electoral College: After the 2000 election, there was a brief flurry of interest in reforming or abolishing the Electoral College. Our own McConnell Center got national recognition for its study on the subject. Why do you think that effort died so quickly and there seems very little interest left in such efforts?

FINEMAN: I’m convinced that 99.9 percent of American people never think about the mechanics of politics. It’s one of those things that they debate in various debating societies, but most people don’t pay attention.

People in a lot of America—more so than people in Washington, D.C., or New York or L.A.—tie their identity to the state they live in. I learned that by living in Kentucky for almost five years. I remember I was driving back from Wytheville, Tenn., and as I crossed the border back into Kentucky there was a big sign put up by the local RC Cola Bottling Co. It was a huge, blue and white sign, and I’ll never forget it. It said, “We’re proud to be Kentuckians.” That vestige—orientating yourself toward America through your state—remains. In a lot of the country, if you abolish the Electoral College you might as well abolish the states.

If it were not for the Electoral College, nobody would be going to New Hampshire and West Virginia this year. Mostly, the whole campaign would be in California. There are 37 million people in California. The land of the flyover people would never see a presidential candidate. You can argue that this is just as bad because none of the candidates are going to California, except to raise money. But on balance I think the American people, if they thought about it, would probably like to keep it the way it is.

Gregg also had a question about the influence of money in politics: Reform supporters claimed that campaign finance reform would take the influence of big money out of politics. Now we see more money than ever is being spent on our presidential campaigns. What do you see as the major changes campaign finance reform has meant for American politics?

FINEMAN: Well, it’s meant more big money from more rich people than ever. Go figure. It’s made George Soros more important. It’s made the Bush Rangers more important. They keep inventing new categories of rich guys.

I remember my friend James Carville saying, “Not only is money the mother’s milk of politics, it’s the condensed milk and the evaporated milk and the whole milk and the skim milk and everything else.”

That was true in Louisiana when he was growing up and it’s true everywhere. That’s the way we run things here. And it’s going to be damn hard to change it.

Political science professor Laurie Rhodebeck asked Fineman about the tenor of the presidential campaign and in political discourse in general: The rhetoric seems to be divisive and shrill. What are some of the factors that have led to this?

FINEMAN: You have to have a sense of perspective. It’s one of the shriller periods, but I wouldn’t call it the shrillest. If you go back 200 years, the Jeffersonians and the Federalists were literally and openly accusing each other of treason every minute. And there were all kinds of scurrilous, personal rumormongering going on. It was unbelievably vicious.

During the time of Abraham Lincoln, it was the same. More recently, during the time of the Red Scare—both in the 1920s and ’50s—people were accusing each other of being traitors. That was the basis of all politics—you were either for us or for the dreaded enemy. The same was true during Vietnam. In the 1960s, you had incredible cultural divides opening up—big chasms opening up over abortion and women’s rights and civil rights. It makes a lot of this stuff look like a tea party.

So yeah, it is nasty. I do think the difference now is that it’s more personal. It’s less about somebody’s philosophy than it is about some flaw in somebody’s character. It’s sort of like character has replaced philosophy. I think television is one reason because television is based on what people see when they look at somebody, not when they listen to somebody. And there’s the fragmentation of the media that we spoke of before where you have one side attacking all the time.

If you would want to, you can turn on the radio and inhabit a completely right-wing Republican world from 9 in the morning until 9 at night. You’re listening to Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. You can go from morning to night hearing nothing but attacks on Democrats.

That didn’t used to be legal, but with the fragmentation of the media and the diversification of the media, the Federal Communications Commission threw out all of the old rules about what you could and could not say. And now pretty much either side can say what they want. And the other side is coming back with people like Al Franken, who is doing a pretty good job on the liberal side. His show has been a surprising success. That all points to the personal, and that makes it feel nasty.

As time was running out on the interview, I was able to sneak in one last question from political science professor Dewey Clayton: After every presidential election, as the media reviews the job it did covering the campaign season, it seems to determine that it focused too closely on the mudslinging and not enough on the issues. Yet it inevitably repeats this in the next campaign. Why?

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