New Medias Influence On Politics

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The G.O.P. consultant added that Rove has delivered his Wright tirade in several venues. That’s the reason, he said, that it sounds as well-documented and rhetorically precise as, in fact, it was. Rove’s .50-caliber political mind, on full automatic, is formidable. “He’s very rehearsed on it because he’s auditioning for the role. He’d like to run the 527s to disassemble this guy Obama.”

The speaker of these words was Roger Stone, the dapper political trickster who tipped the F.B.I. to Eliot Spitzer’s trysts. Stone is routinely described in news stories as disreputable, cruel payback for the fact that he’s been a major source for the Washington press corps for close to 30 years. I first met Stone in 1980, when he was running the general-election campaign in New York State for Ronald Reagan. Because Reagan’s chief political valet, Mike Deaver, disliked both of us, Stone wound up giving me some valuable news tips. Since both Deaver and Reagan are dead, I guess the off-the-record status of Stone’s leaks doesn’t matter anymore. Deaver was a master of the same trade and would have been surprised if Stone hadn’t tried to knife him. That’s part of the point here. Stone, who has been condemned editorially more times than Vlad the Impaler, is emblematic of a political age in which the press secretly admires and enables attack politics as long as it’s marketed as brutally unidealistic.

Perhaps because he’s a renegade, Stone is unusually candid about the fact that managing low-road campaigns is a bipartisan enterprise organized by both parties’ top political consultants, who this year have surpassed all their earning records. That’s because to gain early credibility, candidates hand out multimillion-dollar signing bonuses to star advisers. Then, those advisers’ firms get 9 to 15 percent of every dollar the candidates spend on radio and television advertising. Less well-known, they also collect the “vigorish” from multimillion-dollar polling, direct-mail ads, and robocalls. “A letter in a direct-mail campaign costs 55 cents,” says Stone. “The consultants charge the campaigns 75 cents a letter. The extra 20 cents is the vigorish.”

Reporters of my generation have a hard time being honest about the role of our major news institutions in creating “the game”—as Washingtonians, with a wink, call the capital’s permanent industry. Witness the tolerance of rascality in my descriptions of Rove and Stone as mercenary warriors. Consider the undertone of admiration in news stories about the Clintons’ willingness to “do whatever it takes to win.” In modern times, this journalistic celebration of ruthlessness dates back to Robert Kennedy, who seduced and co-opted many of the top broadcasters and reporters of his time. More recently, my gang of boys on the bus elevated Lee Atwater for the politics-as-war tao of his television ads that hung Willie Horton around the neck of Mike Dukakis. Mainstream journalists like to believe that their admiration for bullies is a professional secret, but the American people have been onto us for too long. That’s why the handmade journalism on the blogs has so much authority, despite the fact that it’s a hydrophobic parody of my generation’s political journalism.

So what does this have to do with the 2008 campaign and the Rove jeremiad against Wright or, more pointedly, Clinton’s kitchen-sink victory in the Pennsylvania primary? Both remind us that we’re astride a demographic fault line. Sure, the ruling Democrats of the state’s hackocracy—Governor Ed Rendell, the mayors of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—got Clinton the numbers she needed. Yet six of 10 newly registered Democrats and the same proportion of voters under 30 voted for Obama. They responded to Obama’s commercials saying he didn’t want to play “the game” of old politics, but end it.

McCain has already bridled at party-financed ads attacking Obama. Suppose that in the general election, independent 527 ads depicting Obama as Wright’s hand puppet fail to work in each and every red state. Or suppose that, as suggested by a G.O.P. consultant with roots in the party’s bare-knuckle Southern wing, “McCain denounces 527 attacks, as he has done in the past. Then it will be much more difficult for any Republican-based 527s to attack Obama.” That would mean the coming electorate—young, multiracial, linked, equally indifferent to Wright and nutty Texas evangelists, dubious of McCain’s neo-Rumsfeldian military strategy, convinced that “smart” is better than “faith-based”—has already grown beyond the political commercials and reporting that have been a sport and pastime for me and my peers and, it seems, for today’s bloggers. It would mean that a new American majority had experienced what Martin Luther King Jr. said Rosa Parks experienced on that bus seat in Montgomery in 1955. She had been hunted down by the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Will we? Could we be? Even the reporters?

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