FEW WOULD ARGUE that the 2004 presidential campaign promises to be one of the more lively, contentious, and interesting campaigns in recent U.S. history. In February,
several Kennedy School faculty sat down for the Bulletin to debate some of the issues surrounding the 2004 presidential race. Panelists included Linda Bilmes, a political consultant and financial analyst; David Gergen, a political consultant and presidential advisor to four presidents who directs the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership; Alex Keyssar, an historian and social policy analyst; and Tom Patterson, a political scientist who has been studying campaigns for more than 30 years. Alex Jones, a journalist and commentator on the press, who directs the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, moderated the discussion.

Alex Jones • Let’s begin by talking about what the difference is in what people say they want in election coverage and what they seem to actually want or what they seem to pay attention to at election time?
Tom Patterson • I think that in election coverage, it is more a question of timing. The public kicks into this process kind of late. A lot of newspapers did in-depth profiles of the Democratic candidates, and as the race started to get connected to what was happening in Iraq, they did a decent job of making that connection. The difficulty, in terms of thinking about the public, is most people don’t tune into the race that early. There was a study that came out recently that looked at the period from January 1 to the Iowa caucuses, and only 4 percent of the coverage in the national press was about issues of public policy. In some ways, when you tap the public, you tap an interest in the horse race. They are interested in the competition. In terms of their ability to sort out candidates, the press at that moment was playing more of a traditional media story, and that was, Who is more likely to win this thing?

Alex Jones • There are three fundamental kinds of campaign coverage, and two have sort of gotten conflated into bad campaign coverage, and one is supposed to be good. The bad are the horse race coverage and the in-depth profiles that are essentially unearthing secrets. Then you have the good campaign coverage on issues of policy and great national concern. Is this really the way it breaks down? Does the weight of each change in each election?
Alex Keyssar • I think that the horse race coverage has increased in proportion in part because there is a technology to play with in covering the horse race. You can talk about polls; you can run your polls every day or every week. Certainly the digging up and spreading dirt on your opponents is a venerable tradition and occupied the press a lot, for example, in the 19th century. The focus on personalities has also probably gotten stronger as the office of president has gotten more outsized. And as the president is being seen less as a representative of a party and more as an individual, that is something that has grown in the last 50 to 60 years.

Alex Jones • We are months away from the Democratic Convention, we are even further away from the real campaign season that starts in September. How do you see these types of coverage breaking down, and how do you imagine it breaking down in terms of proportion?
Alex Keyssar • I would agree with Tom completely. There were some attempts that were made fairly early to provide coverage that was more penetrating. Then it became a horse race. Looking ahead, there is not going to be another horse race for awhile. We will have another one in the fall, but the press coverage is going to have to do something else. My guess is that a lot on personalities and individual quirks will get attention. To take the third strand, the good strand, the policy coverage right now has been very thin. Candidates don’t talk very explicitly about what their policies are. They talk in terms of general themes and the press reports on them, but policies are hard to report on. The policies of deficits and taxes seem to be overwhelmingly important issues, but, in my mind, they are being under reported.

Alex Jones • What is the policy debate going to be about, such as it is? Is it going to be, for instance, on the deficit?
Linda Bilmes • The way I look at it, at least 80 percent of the population has already made up its mind about how it is going to vote. Forty percent are going to vote for any Democrat and 40 percent are going to vote for the president. The undecided vote is a maximum of 20 percent, and that is only 15 percent or 20 percent in 15 or so states. The undecided voter in Massachusetts, for instance, doesn’t count. So, really, what you are looking at is, what are going to be the policy issues important to that 15 to 20 percent in the 15 states who tend to be, as Tom was saying, people who engage late in the process? And what are the issues that are really important to them that are going to emerge? I think the number one issue that is going to emerge is the economy — the issue of jobs — because those people are extremely focused on jobs, whether it is manufacturing jobs, technological jobs, or whatever. The second issue is a number of social issues, such as gay marriage, which for the undecided voter in those states are proxy for what direction we want the country to go in.

David Gergen • I think the election is far more important than just what it says to the 15 or 20 percent who are undecided. An election is about whether the candidates take the opportunity to explain their initiatives for the future and to build public support for those initiatives, so that they have a wind at their back when they take office. The mandate is as important as the victor in terms of governing. It is that mandate that allows you to govern successfully or unsuccessfully? Yes, you want to reach out to the undecided, and of course you want to swing those over. But it is equally important that you build a base of support.

Alex Jones • Well, that may be desirable, but do you think in this situation we are in, do you think it is possible for this election to be something more than just a mandate on George Bush?
David Gergen • I think it will be, first and foremost, a referendum on the Bush administration, how well his team has performed in Iraq and other places. But it is not just about him personally; it is a referendum on how the country is doing and on how he is doing. And how the country is doing goes to the question of his team or his administration. It is about [John] Ashcroft, [Dick] Cheney, and a lot of other things. It is not just about George Bush personally. That is why I think it is a referendum on more than the individual.

Alex Jones • How has the new Campaign Finance Law affected the campaign? Will it affect the campaign in a significant way as it goes forward?
David Gergen • My sense, and it is not well informed, is that it has not affected it very much so far. Both Howard Dean and John Kerry were able for different reasons to meet their financial needs. Howard Dean didn’t lose because of lack of money, and I don’t think John Kerry won because of his money. Any of the other candidates, at the end of the day, had they won early, would have had the money to compete. Wes Clark, John Edwards, and others did not drop out because of that. How much it is going to affect it in the future, I don’t know. We haven’t seen the Bush people start spending their large load of money yet, and we don’t know how that is going to affect it. The possibility is that they’re going to put a large hole in the Kerry boat before this is done.

Alex Jones • What is the significance of the part of the Campaign Finance Law that requires candidates to verbally authorize the campaign ads that go out with their names attached? Some say that this has made the campaign advertising less aggressive, less nasty, it will give a tone that is different.
David Gergen • I think that is likely to be true that the campaign ads that are coming from the campaign itself are likely to be more positive. It is impossible to think of Lyndon Johnson appearing on the Daisy ad in 1964. Similarly, it is impossible to imagine George W. Bush appearing in a Willie Horton ad. So I would think we won’t see ads like that coming from a campaign.

Alex Jones • One of the things that the media and the campaign both seem to cooperate in doing is creating a “metanarrative.” For example, in the last election, Gore was the “liar,” George Bush was “dumb.” This time around, now that Kerry clearly is the nominee, the metanarrative that seems to be emerging is that Kerry is the “liberal,” and that George Bush, this time around, gets to be the “liar.” Do you agree, and how does a campaign coverage editor resist that if you are doing a responsible job?
Alex Keyssar • I am not sure I know the answer to the second question about how to resist it. I think that certainly Kerry will be painted as the “Massachusetts liberal.” Those words seem to be inseparable right now. Whether Bush will be portrayed as the “liar” or the “destroyer,” I’m not sure. I think that there is another ingredient in this; I disagree slightly with Linda and David. The emphasis, which I think will affect the coverage, is that I don’t think this is going to be your father’s Oldsmobile kind of election. I think there is an extraordinary amount of passion on both sides. The passion and rage on both sides feels very different than 2000 felt. Even though one of the candidates is the same, and the difference between Gore and Kerry is not that great, there is an intensity of sentiment, I suspect, on both sides. I am not sure it is going to be decided by 15 or 20 percent; I don’t know what this electorate is going to look like and who is going to get galvanized. I think that is something the press is going to have to stay very alert to, and I am not exactly sure as to how they do that. Certainly I think it would be good if political editors could avoid getting into the kind of simple metanarrative too early.

Linda Bilmes • I don’t agree with you, because even if you do have a very, very intense 40 percent on each side, that 40 percent still basically gets one vote each.

Alex Keyssar • But 50 percent of the population doesn’t vote, and we don’t know who is going to tap into any percentage of that.

Linda Bilmes • But we do know that the group that is undecided is unlikely to be substantially bigger, and in the places where the intensity is the biggest, they tend to be in the states, I would argue, the least “swinging” states. So there is passionate intensity in Massachusetts, but even if the voter turn out is three times what it was last time in Massachusetts, it is still the same amount of electoral votes. So I agree with you that there is this intensity, but despite that, the group in the middle is basically going to vote the way they always vote, which is, “politicians are sort of bad, and we don’t necessarily like this whole process, but we’re going to vote because we need to.”

Alex Jones • Something that’s new in this election is that even though we had the Internet in the last presidential campaign, what we have this time around is a more mature blogging environment in which bloggers are going to be increasingly part of the news cycle. In light of the fact that some of the networks say they aren’t going to come to the conventions, does this development suggest this is going to be a campaign covered differently by the media?
Tom Patterson • Like a lot of observers, I am still trying to get a fix on things like blogging and Internet organizations and the like. It’s obviously changing. For me, the blogging hasn’t risen to that point where it is a large force in American politics. I think that the major impact in the Democratic nominating race was, by far, the major media, not the new media. When Howard Dean’s coverage turned very sour in late December and through Iowa (one study found it went about 2 to 1 negative), I think he self-destructed, but he had a little bit of help along the way. So I think the major media is still the big player, and these other players are still evolving. We are primarily in the old politics and on the threshold of something different.

David Gergen • I was stunned by the story that came out a couple of days ago about the “I have a Scream” speech, which emphasizes your point that the old media is still having more impact, especially cable. The proliferation of cable 24/7, the quality of news coverage is so far having more impact than the Internet. In the four days after Dean gave that speech, it was shown on television 633 times, just on broadcast. That was just stunning.

Alex Jones • What should John Kerry do about the issue of gay marriage? This has emerged as an issue that he is not going to be able to ignore.
David Gergen • He should ensure, first and foremost, that he has control of the platform because the Democratic platform may commit the party to a position that is untenable for him, and so he needs to make sure that his people are riding the platform. I think he would personally be well served by courage on the issue and by not coming up with a compromise that seems to have it both ways.

Linda Bilmes • I think that the issue has not been put fully in perspective. For example, virtually every country in Europe has legalized gay marriage already, and there have been actually very few gay marriages. I totally agree with David to come out forcefully and say, “This is the right thing to do and I’m for it. We’re going to do it and that’s it.” That would show an enormous amount of leadership on his part. But secondly, I think the issue should be put in perspective, not necessarily by him, but by surrogates who say, “Look, we’ve got 40 million people in the country who don’t have health insurance, we have 20 million people who can’t pay their drug bills. Let’s put this in perspective.”

Tom Patterson • If I were his handler, I would make sure he’s got his 30-second-sound bite down pat. “Yes, I’m supportive (or whatever his position is),” and then turn to what Linda is talking about, that this issue is not a primary issue of presidential politics. I think the community that is harder to think about is the Hispanic community because there is a broader social conservatism there and that makes the issue somewhat more unpredictable than in other communities.

Linda Bilmes • Speaking as the Hispanic here, I think that the Hispanic community is very concerned about the class issue. The real issue for Hispanics in Arizona and New Mexico and Southern California is, is the American Dream still possible? We are working our bones off now, but are our kids going to have access to the American dream, or are we going to be a permanent underclass? So I really think it comes down to a necessity for Kerry to marginalize the gay marriage issue, because that is just not the core, critical voting issue for the Hispanic community. And if he thinks it is, he is missing the boat for where the community is at.