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Howards Begin: Howard Dean and Newsweek journalist Howard Fineman were part of a panel discussing media, politics and political heroes in honor of the late Charlie Ross. (Photo: Bill DiLillo)
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4.27.06 SECOND ANNUAL CHARLIE ROSS SYMPOSIUM
Heroes and the Media
What happens to political heroes in an age of Swift boats, Dean screams and vice-presidential shotguns? Does the trivial inevitably triumph? Is broad Kennedy- or King-style public heroism still possible in an era when 24-hour-cable and thousands of blogs compete to expose personal foibles?
The topic for the second annual Charlie Ross memorial symposium held April 25 in Ira Allen Chapel was political heroes and the media’s role in making and breaking them. The expansive panel discussion, which concluded a day that also included a classroom visit and luncheon with students, was a tribute to the Vermont public servant and former faculty member organized by two former students, Bill Wachtel and Scott Baldwin, who deeply admired him.
The panel comprised Howard Dean, former presidential candidate and Vermont governor; Howard Fineman, a Newsweek and MSNBC political commentator; Dotty Lynch, former senior political editor of CBS News and current Harvard fellow; Howard Wolfson, Hilary Clinton’s former communications director; and Ron Kaufman, former national political director for the Republican National Committee. The moderator was Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
The topic seemed to invite nostalgia — and at times did — but the group wasn't inclined to linger there for long.
“We had a sitting vice president shoot and kill a secretary of the treasury… when they called each other bastards back then, they really meant it,” Kaufman said, using history to challenge the idea that today’s tone is uniquely nasty. “The difference now is the medium rather than the media. Back in Washington’s day, if you said something on a Monday in Boston, you didn’t hear about it in Washington for a month. Now… if someone is overheard on a bus somewhere saying something off-color in the capital, within 12 minutes four bloggers have it.”
The Internet giveth...
Dean has not spent a great deal of time publicly discussing the end of his presidential campaign. Dean’s presidential run wasn’t the panel’s set topic, but the media and Internet’s role in his campaign’s quick rise to prominence and even faster fall from grace made it an irresistible topic for the group, and Dean was frank in offering his take on what went on.
“We were inexperienced. I was inexperienced as a national candidate, and it turned out that our operation in Iowa was not what we thought it was,” Dean said. “Had I been much more experienced, we would have withstood the barrage. We simply weren’t prepared to run a national campaign. We came up so fast we weren’t able to make an adjustment.
“And there was a tactical decision that we made in September that was a mistake. We should have — I should have — Bill Clinton said in order to get votes for a president, people have to see you as president. I never was able to successfully shift gears from the willingness to challenge establishment that got us there in the first place to a mode where people can see you as president of the United States. And you have to do that, or you aren’t going to be president of the United States.”
As for the oft-emailed audio of Dean vigorously rallying his supporters after the Iowa caucus? Dean said none of the 75-odd members of the national press following his campaign initially wrote anything about it. Enthusiastic speeches were nothing new; the real problem was being defeated soundly in Iowa after being the front-runner there.
“You could make the argument I destroyed my candidacy, and I know other people have made it, but the truth was nothing would have been different, except I wouldn’t have made as much money (later) giving speeches,” Dean said.
Fineman and Lynch, who were both actively covering the campaign, elaborated on Dean’s assessment. Lynch described how the clip was “repeated and repeated into something it wasn’t” (a mike issue made Dean’s volume in a loud room appear over-the-top) so much so that it completely “engulfed” even rival and second-place-Iowa-finisher John Edwards’ New Hampshire coverage. Fineman put the clip into the context of the larger forces at play in Dean’s run.
“That clip which I saw on the monitor, which I commented on to excess, was nothing compared to virally the way that clip went around the country on the Internet… the Internet giveth, the Internet take away,” Fineman said.
Swift boats and better days?
The campaign talk segued to the activities of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a widely publicized advocacy group who used a Website, book and television advertisement to challenge John Kerry’s war record, damaging his popularity and prospects. For media consultant Wolfson, the episode signaled the end of the big media “gatekeepers.”
“There are too many points of entry for a story like the swift boats for any campaign to assume that people of good will… will be able to keep it out of the public consciousness,” Wolfson said. “I think that any campaign in the future has to assume that the opponents will attempt to generate whatever the 2008 equivalent of swift boats is. And they are going to need to respond as if people are going to hear it and it’s a serious story, even if the nightly news isn’t covering it officially.”
In absence of gatekeepers — and in the presence of more and more cynical observers with ability to disseminate information worldwide almost instantly — are heroes extinct?
Wolfson said heroism could transcend individual flaws, pointing to the imperfections of one of his inspirations, assassinated Israel prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Dean said a return to the fairness doctrine and regulating ownership of media outlets could help. But in terms of presidential campaigns, he said he thought the grueling process wasn’t a bad thing: Aspirants to lead the free world need to withstand some knocks.
And Fineman said the media itself must become more used to scrutiny as well. Walter Cronkite’s authority was venerated, but it might not have been as substantial as it sounded. “When Walter Cronkite closed his broadcasts with a baritone, ‘And that’s the way it is’ — was it really?” Fineman said.
The questions soon concluded, and the second Ross symposium closed.
And that’s the way it was.
Mostly. Sort of.
Charlie Ross, a lawyer and Middlebury native, was appointed to positions of public trust under presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. He served as chair of the Vermont Public Service Board and as a commissioner on the Federal Power Commission and the International Joint Commission. Ross, an environmentalist and Morgan horse fancier, taught public policy at UVM for two years in the early 1970s.
Written by Kevin Foley for The View, April 26, 2006.