Campaigns Don’t Count

FROM THE INTRODUCTION In 1973, White House lawyer John Dean told the Senate Watergate Committee that earlier that year he had told President Richard Nixon that a "cancer" was growing on his presidency. The next day, Professor Milton Rakove, a specialist in urban affairs, said this to his graduate class at the University of Illinois in Chicago: "He's got to resign." At first I didn't know whom the professor was talking about. But he obligingly explained to the blank faces in front of him: "Nixon. He's got to resign. That's how this ends: Nixon resigns." I was dumbstruck. Presidents don't resign. And Nixon had just been re-elected the previous fall in a 49-state landslide. And, though Watergate was, indeed, giving him all manner of trouble, few observers had raised the question of resignation publicly. I knew this. I was obsessed with Watergate. But Dr. Rakove didn't simply raise the question. And he didn't simply make a prediction. He was making an announcement…. For months after that, I searched the expressed thoughts of people in journalism, academe, politics and elsewhere for any thoughts of a resignation, and I found almost none. As for certitude that Nixon would resign, absolutely none. When Nixon resigned… I thought of Rakove. Specifically, I thought that's the kind of understanding of politics I want. That's the kind I respect. Not the kind that explains events after the fact. Not the kind that analyzes things. Not the kind that tells you what "factors" are at play. (I was getting to the point where even I could do that.) I wanted the kind that predicts things. Flatly, boldly. Correctly. Prediction is what cuts through the crap. Journalists and most other political people—including academics—generally treat prediction in politics as a game, a sideshow. Occasionally journalists venture into boldness when contemplating the future, but most often with tongue in cheek…. If you make a prediction—whether it's right or wrong—you get credit for being a good sport, and that seems to be the only characteristic that gets measured. But physicists can make predictions within their realm. They can say flatly what will happen when two objects collide, or something. They really know their subject. Of course, we can simply take the attitude that politics isn't physics—that nobody ever said politics is an exact science—and leave it at that. But we aren't required to leave it at that. Before deciding whether to leave it at that, we should face this fact: when the alleged political experts treat prediction as a laughing matter, they serve their own interests. They free themselves of a form of oversight, of one way their listeners might judge whether the "experts" really understand things, or whether they just sound good. The "experts" in politics are generally accorded the "expert" label as the result of some professional achievement…. They are respected in their professions. And if you—the reader—are satisfied listening to the people the professionals listen to, fine. But what if the professionals are confused as a class? FROM CHAPTER 7 Fred Barnes wrote the May 4, 1992 cover story in The New Republic, a magazine for political sophisticates: "Loser: Why Clinton Can't Win." It needs to be paused over here, not because it is one more mistake, or because there's any point in picking on Barnes. The special value in his piece is that he presented it not merely as his view, but as the view of the insiders, the people in the know. It is a remarkably well researched piece, if you consider talking to political insiders to be research, which, of course, by the standard rules, it is. The list of people he quoted and paraphrased as agreeing with him is impressive. The piece begins, "Vin Weber, the Republican representative from Minnesota, remembers the exact moment he concluded Bill Clinton will never become president." (It was Feb. 6, the day the Wall Street Journal printed new evidence that Clinton had dodged the draft, this coming a couple of weeks after a flare-up in the Gennifer Flowers adultery scandal.) Another passage: "Tubby Harrison, the pollster for Paul Tsongas this year and Michael Dukakis in 1988, has called Clinton 'a dead stone loser' in the fall." In this passage, Barnes notes that loser Dukakis jumped ahead of Vice President George Bush in the polls when he reached the point in the primaries where he clinched the nomination. Clinton didn't. Another passage on Harrison: "Every party figure he's talked to, the consultant says, 'thinks it's going to be a disaster.' Why? Because Clinton has problems in four separate areas: the character issue, voter turnout, the South, and foreign policy. These problems are all the more troublesome because there's no clear way to overcome them." (On character, Barnes cited four polls making his point that the public had doubts that were not going away. He called the poll numbers "staggering.") Barnes quotes respected Republican pollster Richard Wirthlin saying, "A candidate can't get on the playing field unless he pays the ticket of honesty and integrity." And an unidentified "Democratic strategist:" "Once Clinton's negatives are established and allowed to grow deeper and deeper, they're almost impossible to blow away." Barnes unearths a Clinton problem beyond the usual list: low turnout in the Democratic primaries. He quotes former Sen. Paul Tsongas (a candidate in the early primaries) and then Georgia Secretary of State Max Cleland (later a Democratic U.S. senator), not to mention Bush's Southern coordinator, plus academic turnout expert Curtis Gans on the difficulty that low-turnout poses for Clinton. Barnes notes that blacks turned out in smaller numbers in the 1992 primaries than in 1988 (when the Rev. Jesse Jackson was in the race), and says, "I can't imagine how Clinton will lure them in the fall when he couldn't in the spring." Barnes concludes, "Absent a (Bush) scandal or economic collapse, Clinton's a goner." There was no scandal, and the economy improved.