Obsessed by the Future

By Thomas Griffith

Those dread words New Hampshire are surfacing in the political columns again. Already. In the hot sun, long before the winter snows, Columnist Robert Novak of the team of Evans and Novak has been following George Bush around the state, busy making less ("It is doubtful he was seen by more than 100 registered Republican voters") sound like more (". . . could set the foundation for an upset transforming Republican politics in 1980").

A tone of heavy journalistic irony usually suffuses such coverage, as if the reporter, by suggesting that Bush's dozen trips to New Hampshire so far this year may be a little excessive, hopes to avoid drawing attention to the fact that the reporter's own early presence on the scene is also much ado about nothing. Paradoxically, the presidential politicking season lengthens while voter interest declines. Much of the old gusto for hitting the campaign trail--which candidates sometimes had to feign and political junkies in the press corps sometimes had to suppress--has disappeared. It's now a long grind.

David S. Broder, the Washington Post's veteran political writer, won't be drawn into it until after Labor Day, convinced that "the process has got out of hand in length and cost." He thinks the press itself may have "aided and abetted" this overemphasis, because "it's easier to cover politics than to write about government." Theodore H. White, who first trooped around New Hampshire with Estes Kefauver back in 1956, vows to make 1980 his last book-length inquiry into President making. "Why, New Hampshire's only 26,000 votes!" Teddy White says. ''It's like analyzing the Harvard graduating class! It's only terribly important because of what TV does to it."

Before next February, millions of words will be devoted to how each candidate is thought to be faring in New Hampshire; after the election, more thousands of words will explain the results. It will be pointed out that New Hampshire is singular for having no urban crises, no big racial minorities, only the granitic resolve to be counted first. Even such analysis (always project ahead!) will center on how New Hampshire's vote may affect the next states to ballot.

Journalistic previewing constantly diminishes an event, boring the reader before it happens, making an election either an unsurprising confirmation of what was foretold or else an exercise in judging whether a candidate has done as well "as expected." This can be unfair, as it was to Senator Edmund Muskie in New Hampshire in 1972. Long before the primaries, a Boston Globe poll prematurely "gave" Muskie 65% of the vote; on election day, though Muskie beat George McGovern, 46% to 37%, the press proclaimed McGovern the real winner.

A surprising portion of any publication is devoted not so much to what happened as to what presumably is about to. And not just in politics. Us magazine, a celebrity-watching fortnightly from the owners of the New York Times, promises "stories and pictures of what's going to be happening during the next two weeks."

The itch to know what's going to happen next seems ingrained in modern man, and can be valuable, at least to those Wall Street insiders who buy on the rumor and sell on the fact. But journalism's constant anticipation of the news can be like a runner dashing for third without having touched second base. Magazine writers, or the authors of books about current affairs, often find themselves gratefully surprised by how much remains unexplored and untold about major events that the daily press and television once swarmed all over, then abandoned. An English historian, when asked how valuable newspapers are to his own work, didn't express the usual misgivings about their accuracy. Newspapers would be more useful to historians, he said, if they devoted more space to the immediate past and less to the immediate future. More useful to readers too.

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