Billl Katz writes:

When I worked on The Tonight Show, years ago, I got to interview Roger Kahn, the great sportswriter. He'd just written The Boys of Summer, about the old Brooklyn Dodgers. For those of you too young to know, or kept from the truth by unbelieving professors, the Dodgers were a baseball team made up of Old Testament prophets who could lead their followers anywhere. If given a choice between taking the train to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers play, and going to Heaven, many in the flock would have picked Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Duke Snider over the Lord himself. After all, the Lord couldn't steal third base. Commandment problem.

Ebbets was the smallest park in the majors, and that played a role in its charm. You got up close to the players. As Kahn put it in our talk, "You got to know what they were like." I knew that Kahn was correct. I'd gone to Ebbets Field many times as a kid. I got to know what they were like, and often, during batting practice, some of the guys would come over and talk to the kids. I remember leaving Ebbets after a game, and seeing Reese's wife leaning against her Pontiac, waiting for her husband to come out. A real guy married to a real wife, with keys to a real American car, and not a sports agent or lawyer in sight. Remarkable.

I thought of that interview, and those times, while watching a TV report on the election campaign. We're about to start voting in primaries, and yet one of the most common gripes you hear is that people don't feel they know the candidates. They don’t know what they're like.

It seems impossible. We have more media than ever. We have the internet. Candidates pay gurus obscene fees to "connect" with the public. Those who run introduce themselves over and over in TV ads. And yet, we were surprised to find that Huckabee was an amateur at foreign policy, we still aren't sure what Hillary actually believes, and we have to wonder what, beyond inspiration, Obama really offers. How many months, or years, have they been at this?

But why do they seem so distant? I think there are three reasons. First, the TV myth. Television, we're told, brings us closer to events. No, it doesn't. It brings us closer to the coverage of events, and the staging of events. But the very staging of something for TV separates us from the candidate. That, of course, is the purpose – to create illusion, not reality. The great example, of course, was the first presidential TV debate – matching, in 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. Surveys showed that most who watched on TV thought Kennedy had won. Most listening on radio thought Nixon had won. Television didn't bring us closer. It just gave us a different image. We've come to depend too much on the tube in the hope that it lets us in. But we're not watching truth on TV. We're watching what someone wants us to watch, what a camera lens can take in, and what a news organization on a budget is willing to deliver. And, given the cash flow of many news organizations, that is less and less.

The second reason for the distance between public and candidate is a routine demeaning of the American voter. Voters, we're told, are impatient, they won't listen, they're not interested, so let's reduce everything to sound bites. Strange, but Lincoln and Douglas debated for hours, and people listened, often in blazing Illinois heat. I'd guess that most of them had no more than a grade-school education, if that. Franklin Roosevelt had Americans glued to their radios for his fireside chats. Doris Goodwin wrote that you could stroll down an American street during one of them, and hear the entire thing while continuing to walk because every radio was on. But today the so-called "debates" give us statements so short that we can barely follow what the candidate is thinking. And, unless you watch CSPAN, you'll rarely see anything longer.

Yet, every time something happens in a campaign, the polls instantly change. People are interested, they do follow, they do react. The press should respond by presenting a more detailed picture of each candidate, not the CliffsNotes version we see today. It's striking that, as the educational level of the country has gone up, the depth of campaign coverage has gone down. The inevitable result is a sense among voters that they don't know the candidates, that something is missing. I've written about this before, but the influx into journalism of a generation of college graduates may well be at work here. Many journalists look down on voters, thinking them some inferior mass lacking proper diplomas. They shortchange the voter because they think the voter wants it that way, and they are wrong.

The third reason for the distance, and the most important, in my view, is that the concept of "knowing" the candidates has changed, in part because the selection process has changed. Recalling 1960 again, I was a campaign intern that year for Senator Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, a liberal at a time when it meant something quite different from what it means today, a staunch anti-Communist, and, by the way, the oldest man ever to go through Marine Corps training. He was 50, in World War II, when he made it through Parris Island. One afternoon we were having lunch in the Polish section of Chicago, and talk turned to the candidates for the Democratic nomination for president. Mr. Douglas reviewed all of them because he knew all of them, and gave me his assessments. (His view of John F. Kennedy: "Brilliant, but cold.")

How incredible, I thought, that I was with a man who actually knew these potential presidents, who worked with them, and saw them in their off-camera moments. But, in fact, there were many who knew the candidates, and many do today. The difference is that, in the 1960 era, these insiders played a far greater role in the nominating process. The parties were more powerful than now. Conventions meant something, and were covered gavel-to-gavel on TV.

There were, if I may I use the term, professional politicians standing between the people and the candidates, and one role they played was to screen out the hopeless cases. Yes, I know, I know, the process wasn't all that democratic. And yes, there were so-called "bosses" involved, and they controlled blocks of delegates. Richard Daley in Chicago and Carmine De Sapio in New York were not Jeffersonian. But they were, despite their sins, men who had a kind of professional pride. They would not go to a national convention and nominate a jerk.

This is gut instinct – I cannot prove it – but I think many Americans would like a bit of that old system to return, a kind of pre-screening of candidates by the parties, a political safety valve. We don't think we know the candidates, in part because the "knowing" bar has been raised. We feel we must know far more about them than in earlier days when others did some screening for us. Today, candidates are thrust out there, encircled by managers, and we're supposed to figure them out by watching 30-second bites on a TV screen, or commercials every bit as slick as the ones for hair cream. I think people would value the weight of more party regulars, those who know the office seekers, who are ready to give them what the actress Joan Crawford once called "the big okay." Today, a distant public gives the big okay, often choosing among six or seven candidates. And, in too many cases, we really don't know who they are.

Even the guys playing at Ebbets Field had to be looked over by a bunch of pros before they were allowed to wear those numbers. Come on, any kid who paid a buck twenty-five for a grandstand seat knew that. What's wrong with these grown-ups?

Posted by Scott at 7:45 AM  |    |