Dole vs. the <I>Times</I>
For several weeks now,
pundits have debated how Bob Dole would exit the stage. Would he depart on a
negative note about his opponent or a positive one about himself? Would he
leave with anger or with humor? In the past several days, the issue has been
settled. Dole, it appears, will end his political career raging against the
New York Times .
Dole's spat with the gray
lady went public on Thursday, Oct. 24. In New Orleans, Dole charged the paper
with ignoring a story about a Miami drug dealer who got invited to the White
House. "This is a disgrace," Dole insisted. "I doubt if you even read it in the
New York Times . They probably put it in the want ads. They don't put any
anti-Clinton stories in the New York Times . Only anti-Dole stories in
the New York Times ." Dole repeated his attack for the next five days.
"We are not going to let the media steal this election," he told a crowd in
Dallas on Friday. "This country belongs to the people, not the New York
Times ." On Saturday, in Visalia, Calif., he added, "I know that with a
crowd this size, the New York Times will write not many people showed
up, but the other papers will get it right."
On Sunday
(the day the Times endorsed Clinton), Dole called the paper "the
apologist for President Clinton for the last four years and an arm of the
Democratic National Committee." In a CNN interview broadcast Monday, Dole said
the Times "might as well be part of the Democratic Party. ... They
hammer us on a daily basis. We make a major speech, they bury it back on
section D. They put a front-page story that, well, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp
didn't get along together 12 years ago." On Tuesday, Dole was still at it,
referring to the 28 words of the 10th Amendment, and quipping, "That's about
what I got in the New York Times today."
The Times has reacted to this assault by
highhandedly quoting everything and explaining none of it, leaving its readers
baffled as to why the Republican nominee is so upset at the paper. In fact,
Dole's fury at the Times is hardly news to those who work at the paper.
According to Katharine Seelye, who has covered Dole since the beginning of his
campaign, the complaints date from December 1995, when Dole staff members first
protested that she had misunderstood the candidate's position on abortion. The
real bitterness, however, began in May, when the paper played what Dole aides
billed as a major address about welfare on Page 19 of the business section.
Since then, campaign honchos have peppered the paper's reporters and editors
with constant phone calls and letters complaining about unfair treatment.
Reporters traveling with Dole
caught a glimpse of the enmity Oct. 9, when Nelson Warfield, Dole's press
secretary, staged a public confrontation with Seelye. The candidate, Warfield
told reporters waiting to board the campaign plane, had just come from an
appearance on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show. Why, Seelye asked, weren't
reporters told about the appearance in advance? According to reporters present,
Warfield snapped that it wouldn't make any difference because the Times
would get the story wrong anyway. Then, on the plane, Warfield walked back to
the press section and grandly served Seelye with a copy of a letter from
Communications Director John Buckley to her boss, Times Washington
Editor Andrew Rosenthal.
That
letter, which has fallen into the hands of Slate, protests Seelye's coverage of
a speech the previous day. Dole, in New Jersey, had talked about Clinton being
AWOL in the drug war. "Where has he been for four years? How many hundreds of
thousands of young people started drugs?" Dole said. "Three million have
started smoking while he was playing around with smoking and all this stuff
finally in an election year." Seelye's front-page story reported that "Mr. Dole
accused the President of 'playing around' while the drug war raged out of
control." Buckley complains that the story "could lead the reader to believe
that Dole was talking about a very different kind of 'playing
around'--something he did not say, and something he would not say." The letter
continues: "Since May, I have been pointing out to you a problem we see with
the accuracy and understanding of context revealed in Kit's reporting," going
on to assert that "Seelye has misquoted Dole on numerous occasions and done so
in a manner that distorted the accuracy of her assertions and your
coverage."
No Dole staff would be quoted by name for this
story, but speaking on background, a senior campaign official elaborated upon
the complaint. "They've just done a miserable job throughout this campaign,"
the official said. "The coverage of Dole has been excessively bitchy from day
one, in addition to having a number of extraordinary factual problems." With
Seelye, the official says, the problem is "not being able to transcribe a tape
accurately." With Adam Nagourney, the Times ' other reporter covering
Dole full time since the summer, "the problem is an incredible focus on the
little picture as opposed to the big picture." As an example, the official
cites a September story in which Nagourney lumped together Dole's fall from a
platform in Chico, Calif., and his mistaken reference to the "Brooklyn" Dodgers
as "a rough stretch of politicking." Other than those two episodes, the
official says, Dole actually had a great week. The campaign's complaint extends
to unequal treatment--a nine-part series on Clinton's record, which the
official describes as "the softest portrait since they invented black
velvet"--and the Times perpetually underestimating the size of Dole
crowds. "Clinton even gets better photographs," the official contends.
Rosenthal, who has direct responsibility for campaign coverage at the
Times , professes bewilderment at these complaints. "We don't make
editorial judgments based on disposition to be tough on Bob Dole or nice to Bob
Dole," he says. On the specifics, Rosenthal says that the Times ran an
editor's note acknowledging that it shouldn't have truncated the "playing
around" quote. He points out that the Times ran its story on the Miami
drug dealer who visited the White House the same day Dole accused the paper of
not covering it. As for the nine-part series on Clinton, Rosenthal says it is
the long-standing practice of the paper to do a lengthy series on the
incumbent's record. "If Dole wins and runs again in 2000, he will get nine-part
series too," he says.
"Ithink we have been tough on him," Seelye
says. This stems, however, not from any bias, she says, but from the campaign's
own internal problems. Dole's campaign has been especially "porous," with aides
emulating the proverbial seafaring rats. This is true enough--in recent days
ex-strategist Don Sipple has trashed the campaign on the record. But there's
another point, too. Contrary to Buckley's charge that she misquotes Dole,
Seelye routinely makes Dole look ridiculous by quoting him all too accurately,
depicting him in what one colleague calls a "cinema verité " style.
Famous for going over and over her tape recordings on the campaign plane,
Seelye manages to get every Dole mumble, repetition, and verbal miscue down.
For instance, in her Oct. 26 story reporting Dole's attack on the Times ,
Seelye writes:
"In Phoenix on Friday night,
he had a delightful time drawing out his vowels as he described financial
contributions to the Clinton campaign. "From Indoneeesia," he said. "Yeah. From
INdiaaaaah. Some fellow named Gandhi out there. He owes $10,000 in back taxes,
but he found $300,000 to give to the Clinton campaign. And now Gandhi is
gaaaawn. Gaaaaandhi, gone gone gone. They can't find him."
Two days later, she quoted
Dole in another story: "They've turned the White House into something else, I
don't know what it is. It's the animal house! It's the animal house!" Most
reporters would write, Bob Dole yesterday compared the White House to an
"animal house," sparing the exclamation points, and making him sound at least
compos mentis.
But though
unflattering, Seelye's Mametizing of Bob Dole can hardly be called unfair. It
is not as if the Times cleans up Clinton's quotes; the president simply
observes the rules of syntax most of the time. Something similar may be
happening with the pictures. After four years, Clinton has learned how to avoid
looking unpresidential. He no longer allows himself to be photographed wearing
too-short running shorts, and he avoids pulling faces in public. Dole, who is
simply less photogenic, is an easier victim for picture editors--who, like
their editorial counterparts, have a strong bias against dullness. Take, for
instance, the two pictures shown above. The front-page picture the Times
ran the day after the second presidential debate does make Dole look like a
decomposing monster. But unlike the picture in the Washington Post the
same day, it captures the spirit of the event, with Dole grimly taking the
offensive and Clinton watching warily but standing aside from the attacks.
Dole sounds absurd when he alleges that the
paper that broke Whitewater and the story of the first lady's commodities
trades has not been aggressive in pursuing Clinton scandals. All sorts of
potential Dole scandals have been soft-pedaled by the media, including the
Times , because he is so far behind. It's true that coverage of Clinton
on the campaign trail has been somewhat softer than the coverage of Dole, as
even other Times reporters acknowledge. But the explanation is
institutional, not ideological. The press, as many have complained,
overemphasizes the "horse race" aspect of politics. As a side effect of that
disease, reporters have excessive respect for a well-run campaign. (In 1988,
Republican George Bush benefited from this phenomenon.) A cruder reality is
that reporters need to have a relationship with Clinton after Tuesday.
None of these factors,
though, is unique to the Times . So why is Dole singling it out? Dole's
attacks on the Times have the appearance of being an exercise in
populist demagogy. In one of his great cue-card reading remarks, Dole tried to
explain his recent attacks on CNN the other night by saying, "I like the media.
They don't like them in the South." But this pat explanation doesn't entirely
make sense. Red meat for right-wing crowds doesn't help Dole with the centrist
voters he would need to turn around in order to make the miraculous happen. And
in fact, according to a senior Dole aide, the attacks are heartfelt on the
candidate's part. Dole has been going after the Times over the
objections of advisers who have been telling him there's no percentage in
picking fights with the press.
But if Dole is attacking the
Times because he is truly furious and not because he thinks it will help
him get elected, what is he so angry about? The answer, I think, is that there
has always been a Nixonian streak in Bob Dole, by which I mean a part of him
which feels shut out of the closed circle of the Eastern establishment. At the
Republican convention, Dole blasted the Clinton administration as a "corps of
the elite who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never
suffered, and never learned." That phrase recalled an attack he made on the
press long ago, in the days of Watergate, when he accused the Washington
Post of being in bed with George McGovern. "There is a cultural and social
affinity between the McGovernites and the Post executives and editors,"
Dole said then. "They belong to the same elite: They can be found living
cheek-by-jowl in the same exclusive chic neighborhoods, and hob-nobbing at the
same Georgetown parties." The deeper story here isn't whether Dole was wrongly
shunted onto D19 when he ought to have been on A1. It's his feelings, as he
says goodbye to politics, about the people who get to decide.
