The Ordeal of the Same Speech

By Thomas Griffith

Now that campaigning has advanced from the primaries to maneuvering for delegates and power blocs, it is time to assess how the press and the candidates did out in the open. Insofar as they were at loggerheads, it was the candidates who won. They found a way to outwit all those reporters who seek novelty and call it news. Candidates discovered that the press hates nothing more than to be compelled to repeat what has been said before.

So for the candidates, the "ordeal" of the primaries may have required airplane hops, and dawn appearances at factory gates, and facial muscles tightened into frozen smiles, but the long march did not really involve much intellectual strain. The shrewdest among them had their act well in place and The Speech well learned. They solved the problem of television, with its terrible rate of consuming new material, by going back to the era of vaudeville acts, when Burns and Allen or Weber and Fields could play the same skit week after week from coast to coast, testing new lines, honing the delivery, refining the timing. Reporters were reduced to making a commotion out of minor variations the candidate might try in The Speech.

Since newsmen did not keep reporting the familiar speech, and since it was never really heard at full length on television (where time cost too much and was hard to arrange), each fresh audience would hear it as largely new, and could smile or sneer in resignation at the snippets it already knew -Carter's longing for a Government as good as the American people, Reagan's chant that the canal is ours, Ford's conviction that a Government big enough to run things is a Government big enough to threaten us. These became applause lines just as carefully prepared and as essentially empty as Joe Penner's "Wanna buy a duck?" once was. Only occasionally did a reporter's sharp question throw a candidate off balance. (Reporters live in the conviction, which is not universally valid, that anyone's unguarded remarks more truly reflect his views than responses he has time to think out.)

Carter and Reagan, those presumably inexperienced outsiders, proved to be the most adept at the new campaigning. They did not discuss "issues" as journalists understand issues; they presented themselves. Both spoke softly and smiled often, giving a bland appearance to positions that were not in fact always so bland. Secure in their formulations, unfazable in their reiterations of them, they felt little need to provide new headlines that might get them into trouble. Since the candidates spoke their unchanging lines like actors, reporters found themselves analyzing their performances in box office terms. In fact, "electability" has become the final political argument. (Worried at one point because TV news was concentrating on little except his comments on his electoral chances, Carter ordered up more commercials to proclaim his basic themes.)

The conventional wisdom of 1976 is that the public is disillusioned by politicians who overpromise, and is more concerned with character, judgment and ability. And here, oddly enough, it is two survivors, Carter and Reagan, so different in their outlook and temperament, who share a common trait. In part because of their professional, almost impersonal skill at merchandising their personalities, they create an aura of reserve about themselves -one that reporters rarely penetrate. Against their cool responses, interrogative reporting of the Mike Wallace-Dan Rather school seems out of season, overheated and hectoring. Reporters, themselves often on camera, vie with the candidates in not wishing to appear rash, partisan or unfair. This "good guy" attitude further tranquilized primaries that were emotionally tepid and intellectually thin.

Now that introductions are out of the way and everyone knows the three finalists, some new scripts -and new ideas -are in order. There is, after all, quite a lot to talk about.

Perhaps the Republican Convention at Kansas City will change everything and turn Panama and Rhodesia into the Quemoy and Matsu of 1976. If not, you can shortly expect a loss of benignity from editorial writers, analysts and columnists, who, unlike the television cameras, need issues and not images on which to feed and ruminate. Tired of forever analyzing each candidate's appeal or parsing his pat answers, these critics will be talking instead about the campaign's lack of content.

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