"A Revolution Is Under Way"

By Hugh Sidey

The network television cameras panned and probed across the United States last week, searching for high political drama. They found it along Chicago's State Street on St. Patrick's Day. Mayor Jane Byrne, in a Day-Glo green vinyl cap and swathed in the luxurious fur of numerous martens, towed an uncomfortable Senator Kennedy through what used to be Mayor Richard Daley's scruffy but functional precincts. The lung power of the combined brass bands of the great city was unable to drown out the boos. Daley surely turned a bit in Holy Sepulcher cemetery.

There followed over the next hours, as the state that nurtured Abraham Lincoln prepared to vote, electronic vignettes of all the contenders. John Anderson, billed as the candidate of ideas, was seen soaring and swooping, eyes nearly closed in his passion, resembling no one so much as the late Billy Sunday. George Bush, the cool Ivy Leaguer, appeared with his neck veins protruding, finger wagging, voice in upper fortissimo. Jimmy Carter was there too, via the tube, talking calmly from the White House as the world he helped to create seemed to be collapsing around him.

And then there was the old man of the boards, Ronald Reagan, a show business artifact whose time has come round again through video tape and the minicam. Reagan kept his eyes on the lens and himself under control, and he appeared on the screen as just about the only public figure of the moment who could both understand and tame the crazy world.

There is now some serious scholarship to support the theory that we have entered a new age of the presidency. The first words encountered in the new book by Duke's Professor James David Barber are stunning: "A revolution in presidential politics is under way. No longer do the Democratic and Republican parties control the choice of standard-bearers. In their place a new set of kingmakers has arisen: the journalists. For it is in the newspapers, the magazines and on television screens that the presidential candidacies are created and destroyed." Barber has made political history before. In 1969, in a paper on Richard Nixon, he forecast tragedy later in that Administration. His 1972 book The Presidential Character established new standards of political assessment. The new volume due out in April is called The Pulse of Politics: Electing Presidents in the Media Age.

"What is new is not mass communication as one of the major forces in politics," writes Barber, "but rather its emergence to fill virtually the whole gap in the electoral process left by the default of other independent elites who used to help manage the choice ... The primary task a presidential candidate faces today is not building a coalition of organized interests or developing alliances with other candidates or politicians in his party, or even winning over the voters whose hands he shakes. If he has his modern priorities straight, he is first and foremost a seeker after favorable notice from the journalists who can make or break his progress."

Last week a group of concerned Americans clustered around a television set in Chicago for an updating on their own state primary. Their focus was not on a local luminary but on Walter Cronkite, who had come to the provinces and set up his majestic broadcast booth. His noble gray head appeared at the bottom of the screen, a gigantic red, white and blue map of the U.S. spread out behind him. Not since George C. Scott opened the movie Patton had such a dramatic entrance been filmed. There were quiet gasps among the appreciative Chicagoans.

Cronkite for that second or two consumed everybody who watched. He was everything the real world was not. Cronkite was truth, stability and reality. "My God," one of the viewers muttered, "why don't we get it over with and elect Cronkite President?"

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