Soft on Issues, Sharp on Scores

By Thomas Griffith

When uneven football games get out of hand, sacking the quarterback becomes an exercise that any number can play. That's the way it has been for Jimmy Carter since early in this political season. If Brezhnev, Castro, Schmidt, Begin and Lopez Portillo could do it, who's to stop William Safire?

Since his increasing respectability as a Washington columnist, people have proclaimed the existence of a new Safire, but the old Nixonian Safire keeps popping up: there he was, calling Carter "the best U.S. President the Soviet Union ever had."

Columnists' condescension toward Carter is widespread in Washington. Witness Clayton Fritchey: "President Carter says he doesn't 'panic in a crisis.' But that's not the problem. The problem is that he panics without a crisis." The sagacious George F. Will has reasoned that "the national interest" dictates that Carter should be eliminated from the 1980 presidential race, and as quickly as possible. If George Will had been old enough to pundit in 1948, would he have summoned the national interest against Harry Truman too?

Carter's low popular standing has brought on one of those self-conscious self-examinations that the press constantly undergoes: Seeing Carter's troubles, has the press deliberately built up Ted Kennedy? To such an accusation from a Washington Post reader, the paper's ombudsman, Charles B. Seib, pleads not guilty.

The Washington press corps as a group does not have the visceral dislike of Carter it had of Nixon, Seib wrote, it is not "unfriendly toward Carter or sold on the idea that Kennedy would make a great President." Seib conceded, however, that "we of the media like conflict, tension, the suspense of contest. We like these things because they make good copy. Our banner might well carry the motto 'Let's You and Him Fight'... We desperately need a contest." That answer doesn't satisfy New York's Lieutenant Governor Mario M. Cuomo, a Carter Seib of the Post supporter. He accuses the press of being "in love with Ted Kennedy" and adds: "Jimmy Carter is a bore, and I think the media cannot tolerate a bore. That's not the way to pick a President."

But surely a weakened President and a Kennedy in the wings were a combustible situation that didn't need the press to ignite.

A more serious charge against the press than favoritism is that it constantly covers political primaries as horse races instead of contests of men and issues, and devotes most of its time to handicapping them. That is the valid complaint of political scientists about the 1976 campaign coverage. Why not talk more about the issues? The fact is that the candidates quickly develop, and tirelessly repeat, a pat little passage of reverberatory obfuscation on any controversial issue.

True, there is currently some fascination, and some suspense, in watching Candidate Howard Baker, the Senate minority leader, calibrate the exact degree of his opposition to the SALT treaty. And it was exhilarating to see John Connally playing catchup, firing that long bomb of his about the Middle East--with results that have persuaded no other candidate of the usefulness of candor. But what happens when candidates no longer define issues as they used to be defined in terms of priorities in spending, or in terms of problems and solutions?

Both Kennedy and Connally declare the election issue in 1980 to be something as nebulous as "leadership." If, instead, the issue were to be defined just as intangibly as "character" in the candidate, would either Kennedy or Connally be so eager to make a campaign issue of it? (On many a newspaper, such a question would itself be regarded as loaded and would be edited out; the usual rule is: let an opponent raise the question, then quote him.) In the present murky confusion, the press finds it safer and easier just to keep score--to concentrate on who's ahead in the polls or at the polls. That's not particularly elevating, but neither is politics itself these days.

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