The book on the press.

Mary: Someone in the media has an original thought. One. Then the entire national press corps is done for the day, or week, or sometimes longer. Once the press line has been established, you can work for hours, days, even an entire campaign and not budge it. This is pretty infuriating when they're not seeing things your way. Which is pretty much all the time. The only thing to do is get out there when the story line is being created and demand they hear your side.

My reporter friends insist that they don't advocate or condemn a candidacy. What they say they do is follow the polls. If a candidate is on a downward slide, they pile on. If a candidacy is in an ascending trajectory, they pump it up. At least in the beginning, I suppose that's true; they generally don't pick a candidate and go out and support him. In the end, they like the fight.

Campaign operatives learn quickly there are rules for dealing with the press, and there are rules for them dealing with you. I got taught by one of the American originals, the syndicated columnist Jules Witcover, who has covered every presidential campaign since the fifties.

Witcover is especially fastidious about "the rules." When I first got into national politics and was learning the ropes, he told me, "Look, let me explain something to you. If you don't want your name attached to a story, you say 'I'm on background.' If you only want your thoughts used, and not your words or your name, say you're on 'deep background.' If you don't want me to use anything, you go 'off the record.' In all other cases, you're on the record, I'm going to print what you say. That's just how it works."

It sounded easy. But when you're first talking to the press, you feel like a jerk saying, "This is on background." Some time later, Jules and I were talking about the abortion issue. I was spouting off about how I thought the debate and dialogue had matured on both sides. To substantiate my point, I referenced the absence of screaming rhetoric with at unfortunate choice of words: "You don't see 'fetuses,' you don't see 'hangers' dominating the debate." It's an easy topic to get graphic about. He printed it.

My riff became the "Quote of the Day" in Hotline, the political junkie's bible. When I saw it I called Jules immediately.

"How could you do this to me?"

"You know the rules. You should have said, 'I'm on background.'"

It was a lesson I learned on the spot. He showed me not only how the system worked, but by cutting me no slack whatsoever, he taught me in practical terms that no one is going to give you anything. You can't call people back after something has come out of your mouth and say, "I meant that on background" and expect them to let you off the hook. It's a judgment call on their part. I have on more than one occasion really screwed up and had to go back and ask the reporter not to print something I'd said. I meant to say it on background or I didn't mean to say it at all. My usual line is "I'll give you my firstborn male child if you don't use it." If you're really in a lot of pain sometimes they'll let you slide. Of course, as the world works, that means next time you've got to give them some real juicy tidbits. You owe them.

You talk at your own peril. In the press it breaks out in the same way it does with all human beings: Some people have a strict code of honor which they adhere to under all circumstances, and some do not. You only learn who's honorable and who isn't through experience. There are blatant violations of the code, and spiritual violations. A blatant violation is obvious: A reporter quotes you after you've specified you're on background or off the record. You get really wary with that guy then; nothing is off the record, even when you specifically stipulate it's off the record.

Spiritual violations are trickier. Because of the way I talk, my rhetoric is identifiable. In the 1992 campaign if they used one of my "Maryspeak" lines unattributed (as in "a source close to the campaign"), they burned me. If a reporter quotes a background source in a way that's clearly identifiable, and they know it, that's a spiritual violation.

My gender also caused problems. Reporters could never say "she" when referring to their source because Torie [Clarke, the campaign press secretary] and I were basically the only "she"s on background from the campaign. So they had to resort to tortuous sentence construction, which pretty much gave us up anyway. They couldn't say "he said" because that would be a lie, but an ungendered quote implied they were covering up for a woman.

The relationship between operative and reporter is a precarious detente based on mutually assured destruction. Operatives use their power as the source of information to control the agenda; reporters use their power as disseminators of the operatives' information to expand the agenda. But a source's power is very tenuous because there's only one way to enforce it and that is to state your position and nothing else. However, since no reporter wants to be your shill, they'll always try to drag something, usually something stupid, out of you. If they get it, you've become a leak.

Negative leaks--information or perspective that works against your candidate's best interest--are obviously bad. But not all leaks are bad. If you want to get a behind-the-scenes story out about your guy that shows him clearly in command in a quasi-crisis, or moved to tears over some American tragedy--whatever--you can leak a reporter an exclusive peek at your guy's private moment, and chances are he'll print it just because no one else has it. Reporters aren't in the business of making your guy look good, but that's a good leak.

A problem with incumbents is they hate bad leaks so much that they start clamping down on all leaks, and you lose a very useful tool. Eliminating leaks is near to impossible, but John Sununu had a Gestapo method that infuriated everyone. First of all, we Bush loyalists never, ever leaked anything negative about the president. That stuff cme from detractors around town, all attributed to "a source close to the White House" or "a GOP activist." Well, that could be anyone in D.C. who wasn't a Democrat! But Sununu had his assistant come in every morning at four-thirty or five o'clock and yellow-highlight all the unnamed quotes; then they'd speculate as to the identity of the source, and with no other evidence than their suspicions, report "leakers" to President Bush.

For reasons I've never figured out, I was on Sununu's hit list early. It started getting back to me that Bush was unhappy with my "leaks" to Washington Post reporter Ann Devroy.

If I'd had a harpoon, I'd have speared Sununu. I never leaked to Devroy. Sununu couldn't control his own traitorous troops at the White House, so he told Bush the leaks were coming from the outside. Sununu was executing political enemies by falsely accusing them of committing Bush's worst peeve. The upshot was that the circle of Bush supporters outside the White House quit working the press out of fear that we'd get blamed for negative leaks. In the critical months leading up to the campaign, our press relations had degenerated significantly; no one could return political calls except Sununu, and he had the political acumen of a doorknob.

When we worked the media we stuck to our story. When it comes to policy issues, sticking to your story, while boring for the media, is good for America. The leadership of this country should be focused, should be able to tell the American people where we're going. A united voice from the administration gives the public a clear view of its direction; clarity gives the public confidence. That's why unified "talking points" are so important. Sure, they limit the scope of an issue, and sticking to them leaves you open to charges of media manipulation, but when you're working off talking points you have a better chance of projecting coordinated policy, which is what the public expects and deserves from the leadership of the nation. Sticking to your story on political issues is a lot tougher.

A perfect example of how the lack of talking points can kill you is the media hubbub around the 1988 nomination of Dan Quayle for vice president.

At the GOP convention in New Orleans, no one knew who the VP nominee would be. Every morning at seven, we had a logistical meeting detailing the events of the day. We'd receive our talking points and then spend the rest of the day disseminating them to the delegates and the press. Right before we would go on the convention floor we would regroup and be told, "Here's the theme for the night. Here's your talking points." Campaign media "bookers" spent their whole day scheduling GOP spokesmen, and from four in the afternoon until the convention's evening session was gaveled to order around seven-thirty that night, nonstop, we'd each do 60 or 70 stand up interviews with local and national radio and TV. You go from one microphone to another, perpetually disoriented and exhausted. You're just a piece of meat and you say the same thing over and over again.

Vice President Bush revealed his selection to no one until the last conceivable minute, the afternoon he arrived in New Orleans. Everyone was caught off-guard and unprepared. Surprises at conventions are the last thing you want; everything is scripted and planned for down to the minute. Once you're there, you're on autopilot. A surprise is like losing an engine in mid-flight. The lack of preparation for Quayle's selection was more like a midair collision.

The press was even crazier than we were. They hate secrets and live in mortal fear of getting scooped. They were hyperventilating by the time they got the word, and they pounced on Quayle.

We were clueless. We'd been given briefing books on every conceivable selection, from Kemp to Dole: their backgrounds, what we should say about them, why they were the perfect selection.... We'd gotten nothing on Quayle.

No one knew who Dan Quayle was. Obviously, we knew he was the junior senator from Indiana, but the surprise of the selection extended even to the research gurus. The big-cheese briefers slunk into the pre-convention organization room and handed us a single photocopied page from the Almanac of American Politics.

And that's all we got. Nothing about Dan Quayle's politics, his personality, his character. Worse, no written points detailing a political or philosophical explanation for his surprise selection. We went into battle unarmed. Amongst ourselves we bunched up and whispered, "Wasn't he involved in that Paula Parkinson thing?" We were given no political information whatsoever. Not even any background on "Who is this guy?" Nobody knew what he even looked like. Most deadly, we had no damage-control points on his heaviest political baggage, his service in the National Guard.

When the frenzy around Dan Quayle erupted, nobody could beat it back because nobody had any talking points. If we'd known his strengths we could have spotlighted them. We were unprepared and it cost him his public image. I will always contend that his unfortunate and undeserved reputation as a dim bulb can be laid directly at the feet of people who didn't give us any damn talking points. He took all these hits and we didn't know how to defend him....

James: The other side of that is when a reporter pulls you aside and says, "I want you to know, I'm voting for you guys."

I don't want to hear about it. "No, man, don't tell me that." That guy, he's going to go out of his way to screw you. It's almost like some affirmative-action program. Because they like you, they figure they've got to be really tough on you to be "fair" to the other side.

Mary: Campaign coverage swings like a pendulum. I think the grossly generous press treatment of Clinton in the general election, for example, was an overreaction to their overkill in the primaries. Their excuse for being so tough on Bush in '92 was that they felt they had gone easy on him in '88. They also conceded they were punishing us for not running as tight an operation this time as we did then. They gave us grudging respect for '88, they gave us no latitude for the looseness of the '92 operation.

James: No one understands the power of the media in this country. I went into this campaign believing they were powerful. I didn't know. The power they have is staggering. And they really do guard it. They like to think of themselves as learned and insightful and thoughtful and considered. They claim the mantle of truth. Hell, truth is they make instant snap judgments and after that all of their time, all of their energy, all of their creativity is spent on nothing but validating their original judgment. Something happens and three minutes after the event they all talk to each other and decide "this is the story," and the story must remain thus in perpetuity. They claim the moral high ground; their job is to report facts and tell people the truth. But information is secondary to them, self-justification is primary. Once the collective media mind is made up, it will not change.

Until you understand that, you can never understand the media. The original take is the one that's going to last. Knowing this, as a political strategist, it is imperative to get out there right away and make sure your side of the story is the one they see and hear and write and say. That is why you have to be in the first news cycle, not the followup; that is why we try to get our story out first and best. It's why we went down first in New Hampshire and claimed victory. History gets created in about three minutes. Don't miss it. If you get there a moment too late, you're dead.

Once they've got their story, they stick to it. At some point they stop thinking about an issue and just pursue it. There's no one who has dealt with the national media who has not gotten any number of phone calls saying, "I'm writing a story and I want to say this. Can you say it for me?" Reporters try to get you to say what they want you to say, not what you've got to say. If you say what you want to say, they keep coming back to try and get you to say what they want you to say. I tell them, "Look, we're going to be on this phone an awful long time. Now, do you want me to tell you what I think? Because I'm not going to tell you what you want me to think."

They made up this phrase, "spin doctors." The word "spin," I think, means what political strategists do when we go out and put our candidates in the most favorable light. That's what spin is. Well, la-di-da, guess what? They're right. What do you want me to say? Of course. That's my job. Why don't the media just admit the truth about themselves, that they're way more into self-justification than information? Then we could go on from there.

Take, for example, Bill Clinton. Here was a guy who was my age, who grew up in the South who cut his teeth on his passion for civil rights and his opposition to the war in Vietnam. And a bunch of Yankee yuppie reporters decided that he was Slick Willie. It's an article of faith among the national media that Bill Clinton was an ambitious politician who tailored his positions to get elected since the doctor slapped him on his butt when he was born.

I kept saying "What are you guys talking about? Do you really think that a guy who was an utterly, totally ambitious political animal would have as his two defining moments entering politics his opposition to the Vietnam war and his passion for civil rights? Look, I'm the same age as him. Do you think that a political consultant, if he was conniving to get his guy governor of Arkansas, would have said, 'What you've got to do is go to Texas and be George McGovern's campaign manager. And you have to take a really strong civil rights stand'? Are you guys nuts?"

They would listen to me but they would never accept any evidence to the contrary. They couldn't say, "This is a complex man who has beliefs, and who, like a lot of politicians, is ambitious." If an undeniable fact runs counter to the story they want to write, they will ignore the fact.

They try to be honest people. A lot of them I like. But they're so into self-justification that they have turned journalism into the one institution in America with the least capacity for self-examination and self-criticism. These people think the First Amendment belongs to them. It doesn't; it belongs to the American people. The ultimate arrogance is that they view any criticism as some sort of censorship or media-bashing. Democrats have Republicans to criticize us; Republicans have Democrats to criticize them. Ford's got G.M., G.M.'s got Ford. But the media, they never criticize each other. Thou shalt speak no evil of another reporter.

There is a natural conflict between reporters and campaign strategists. Reporters, from the day they walk into journalism school, news is defined to them as "something different." Every day the media get up, they're looking for something new and different to report. What campaign strategists are about is focus, repetition, consistency. Every day we get up, we're trying to get them to report the same thing over and over.

So how do we get them to do it?

If you want schoolchildren to eat spinach, you cannot serve them hamburger. If you give them a choice, they ain't going to eat spinach. Now, you can trick them a little bit. You can put some Parmesan cheese on the spinach, you can put some olive oil, some garlic, you can saute it, you can add some mushrooms, some hot bacon drippings. But you've got to have spinach. Kids don't like spinach every day. They want cheeseburgers and ice cream, so it's an ongoing struggle.

The media's dietary habits are not particularly healthful. They kind of like their high-fat foods, like cheese fries and patty melts: Gennifer Flowers, Hillary's hairdo. They're not too big on the garden vegetables of the campaign, like job creation and health care costs. And usually, the further down the food chain you go, the worse the dietary habits get. New York tabloids, they really like greasy cheeseburgers, like whether you inhale or not.

I can show you poll after poll that says people don't vote based solely on the abortion issue. But I guarantee you that for every story out of Washington on education funding there are 20 on abortion funding. Why? Everybody's for education; there's no inherent conflict there. On abortion you've got interest groups on each side, you've got fire, you've got rhetoric. It's a point of conflict. It's cheeseburgers.

One of the shabbiest journalistic techniques that I know of is the man-on-the-street interview. Reporters go out and interview ten people. Do they report back that nine out of ten were for Clinton or for health care or pro-choice? No. They put one person on the air saying one thing and one saying the exact opposite, so they can give equal weight to the positions. In the guise of equal time they have badly skewed what people really think. We call it "equivalency journalism" and it's a very bad trait.

There seems to be more tolerance for sloppiness now than there has been before. If a reporter gets a fact wrong, more often than not he's not even upset. A journalist ought to be out-raged by a factural error; it calls into question the profession's entire credibility. At the very least they should say, "I can't believe I did that. I feel terrible." But I've never seen a reporter kick a trash can over the fact that he made an error. Mostly it's "Oh, well, okay, what do you want me to do about it? I'm on deadline. You gonna call my editor and get me in trouble?" I'm not likely to do that, I've got to work with these people. Maybe you get a retraction. But an original error in a page one story isn't properly corrected by a retraction on page A20. Other reporters pick up the incorrect story and it just keeps getting spread over and over again.