POLITICS
The Competition
By Stump Connolly
Let us now praise the competition, and I’m not talking about the candidates.
I’m talking about the other guys. The camp followers. The Fifth Column. Or as they are often called, The Press.
People ask me what I read to keep up with the current presidential campaign. Here’s what I read:
1. Every morning, I wake up to two political websites:
ABC’s The Note [LINK] is the oldest and still best of the morning political tip sheets. The tone is less snarky than under its original editor Mark Halperin, but his successor Rick Klein writes a solid daily situationer and it still has a good eye for Must Reads in the other morning papers and a Sneak Peek at the candidates’ daily schedules.
After Halperin left The Note, he couldn’t keep his hands out of the race so he has re-emerged doing Time Magazine’s The Page [LINK]. There are fewer links to key campaign stories but Halperin himself does a daily “three things to watch for in today’s news cycle” on his own personal MeCam that is not to be missed.
You can sign-up for a daily email announcing when the reports are ready at either site. One caveat: On most days, you’ll get more than one, proving you can have too much of a good a thing.
2. I read The New York Times. My favorite political writers are:
Gail Collins: The funniest person ever allowed to run an editorial page has now been given the opportunity to let loose as a columnist without the onus of speaking for the institution. Every one is a hoot.
Michael Powell: A beat reporter whose profiles of candidates and campaign trail events make him the master of the moment. Why doesn’t he write more?
Frank Rich: Love him or hate him, Rich’s Sunday column is the most well-researched and well-written weekly campaign commentary out there. He’s rightfully earned his place as a voice worth listening to in the national conversation. When is this guy going to get a Pulitzer Prize?
Adam Nagourney: That rat bastard. The wily old coot lies in the weeds for months writing thumbsuckers that no one reads. Then just when I sink my teeth into a Week Behind story on Super Tuesday delegate hunting –– and think I’m running ahead of the pack –– he’s in the paper every day cutting my legs out from under me with the same analysis.
Okay, he probably got some help, but the chief political correspondent of The New York Times was the first major daily reporter to recognize how proportional voting set up a no-win Obama-Clinton race. So a tip of my hat to him! And a warning: you’re a dying breed.
3. The political columnists I like are:
Roger Simon: Chief political correspondent of Politico.com. If Mike Royko came back from the dead (and liked national politics), he’d be Roger Simon. Stylish, pithy and smart, Simon is quick to recognize the heart of a story and always gets right to it.
Joe Klein: One of the old veterans on the campaign trail, Klein has more sources than you or I have friends. They are stronger in the Clinton camp (he authored the Clinton parody novel "Primary Colors" in 1995) but his Time magazine columns put all the little details he collects into a context that illuminates the people, process and traditions of presidential races.
Ryan Lizza: First with The New Republic and now writing for The New Yorker, Lizza works hard to get the story and doesn’t leave much out. His conclusions are sometimes suspect, but there’s so much information in every story that you can’t ignore him.
Karl Rove: Whether he’s writing for Newsweek or The Wall Street Journal, reading Rove is essential to understanding the 2008 campaign. All the tactics and strategy of this campaign are measured against Rove’s own campaign to re-elect Bush in 2004, and there’s no better person to do it than Rove himself.
4. I also watch TV.
The three network news programs and cable channels CNN, MSNBC and Fox TV are the marketplace of political news. When you talk about news cycles, they define it. What they choose to broadcast is the story of the day (and what they don’t can be found on YouTube.)
One of the sad facts this year is that two of them – Fox and MSNBC – have allowed themselves to become polarized as the right and left wing channels of politics. Do you want Bill O’Reilly’s version of the news or Keith Olbermann’s? Hannity or Matthews? Why don’t they all just get themselves a blog?
When I want to watch people who cover this race with an intelligence I admire, here is who I watch:
John King: The national correspondent of CNN is, hands down, the most knowledgeable political analyst on television –– and not because he knows how to read an exit poll.
King gained his knowledge from the ground up, first as an Associated Press political correspondent in the early 90’s and later as a CNN campaign trail correspondent. His detailed knowledge of state voting patterns and extensive contacts inside the campaigns come out every time he stands up in front of that goofy telestrator board on CNN. And anything he says as part of “The Best Political Team on Television” makes the people around him look smarter.
Tom Brokaw: The former NBC news anchor is back on MSNBC for occasional guest shots on Election Nights. Without having to carry on his shoulders the burden of reporting election night results, Brokaw offers opinions on politics and the media, the culture behind the Obama phenomena and other insights into the American mood that prove, once again, he is simply the best.
Tim Russert: His passion for politics is evident in everything he does, but it can be both inspiring and maddening. His Sunday talk show Meet The Press is so integral to this campaign that candidates both covet and fear being on it.
Russert’s signature is research into what candidates said before that contradicts what they say now. “I just ask the tough questions,” he told me. “If they can’t answer the tough questions, they can’t make the tough decisions.” Fair enough.
What is not fair is how Russert uses his time on the air to give advice to candidates on how they should run their campaigns. With the latest polls at his fingertips (and displayed in TV graphics) he asks other guests –– usually reporters, but just as often political consultants –– to tell candidates what they should do next.
The most egregious example of this came in the
New Hampshire primary. While a sleep-deprived Sen. Hillary Clinton huddled
in her hotel room with her consultants trying to regroup after her Iowa loss,
Russert was asking other Democratic consultants on air to tell her how to
remake her image (and the irony is that his program was playing in her suite
at the time.)
Is it the role of the press to follow a campaign or lead it? Russert never
thinks about that.
George Will: Erudite and articulate, Will is a good counter-balance to George Stephanopoulos’s This Week on ABC. His solid command of historical trends and a few salient facts come together in opinions that leave you acknowledging, whether he is right or wrong, he might be onto something.
David Brooks and Mark Shields:
David Brooks is an acquired taste. Sometimes you feel like you should have
paid more attention to Ludwig Von Mises to understand what he is saying in
his New York Times column. But when the right-wing columnist is paired
with Democratic veteran Mark Shields on the PBS NewsHour, he lets
down his hair and their combined perspectives on how the race is unfolding
falls somewhere in the range of probably true.
5. What I don’t watch:
CBS: For the first time in my memory, CBS News is a virtual non-entity on the campaign trail. It has the smallest corps of reporters breaking the fewest important news stories on a network that seemingly couldn’t care less. It is a tragic end to a once great news organization.
6. And here is who I listen to:
The people around me . . . at the water cooler, on the subway, in conversations or in emails, videos and articles they forward to me over the Internet . . . because this election is as much about what you are thinking as what the pundits are saying.
Candidates ultimately win because they reflect what the majority of people in this country are thinking. And the only way to find that out is to listen.
Who do you read, watch, like or trust? Send your favorites to stump@theweekbehind.com and we’ll publish them in the Letters to The Editor.
