In Campaigning, the Innocence Is Gone

People used to ask if it was fun. After the presidential campaign was over and I would come back home, people would always ask: “So how was it? Fun?”

And I would tell these small, true stories:

About sitting next to Jimmy Carter in 1976 on a tiny plane somewhere over Iowa. I hadn’t eaten all day--the feeding of the press was not yet an art form--and I had to sit there and watch him eat a cheeseburger. He looked up and saw my hungry eyes.

“You want half?” he asked.

You bet, I said. And so he tore his burger down the middle and gave me half. And so I voted for the guy.

Or about being at a George Wallace rally in Boston in Southie. Wallace was in his wheelchair behind his bullet-proof lectern, whipping the crowd into a frenzy of hatred against the media. And when the rally was over and we walked out, there were about a dozen moon-faced tough guys waiting for us, wanting to bash our heads in. And they probably would have except that Mary McGrory walked right up to them and asked them why they were so angry and interviewed them and treated them like human beings until they were again.

Or just watching Mo Udall shoot free throw after free throw in a small gymnasium in Wisconsin, wondering how he did it with one eye when I had trouble with two.

Or President Ford doing the twist with the San Diego chicken in a shopping center parking lot, with the crowd thinking what a regular guy he was and the reporters thinking how much he had been drinking.

Or Ted Kennedy speaking to a Latino crowd in San Antonio, the people waiting for hours in a baking sun, dressed in their Sunday best just to see him. And how they cheered and laughed and wept as he spoke and how a man held his small daughter above his head and said over and over: “Never forget you were here this day. Never forget you saw this man.”

And I remember being one of those who forced a hotel to open its dining room late at night for the traveling press and then seeing the giants of journalism engage in a celery-stalk-throwing food fight.

Yeah, I’d tell people, it was fun. You bet.

The 1988 presidential campaign is now over. And I am back. And not a single person has asked me if it was fun. “How horrible was it?” they ask instead. “Was it really as bad as it looked?”

Yeah, it was as bad as it looked. Not all of it. But enough of it. There was something different about this election and the American people know it.

You can pick the moments yourself. How about the first question of the second presidential debate?

“By agreement between the candidates, the first question goes to Gov. Dukakis. You have two minutes to respond. Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

How about putting that one down in the history books? Or, weeks later, when Dukakis explained that he had emotions just like anyone else and would feel anger toward his wife’s assailant, the questioner then asked: “Would you kill him?”

And I thought: Is this what it has come down to? That we choose a President based on whether he would hypothetically kill the imaginary rapist of his not-really-dead wife?

On the other hand, the campaign itself was beautiful. Picture-perfect. Visually awesome. One long photo op. And I’ll never forget that day in California when George Bush took the podium in front of a rainbow of balloons, surrounded by a bevy of pompon-waving cheerleaders, and how his handlers kept talking to the press down below him, explaining what Bush really meant. And how the handlers did not stop talking when Bush started talking. And how the press listened to the handlers and not to the candidate.

Was there any fun? Sure there was. It was like being at summer camp for 23 months, cared for, fed, moved around. All at enormous expense.

But you have to ask yourself: After 212 years of democracy, is Dukakis-Bentsen vs. Bush-Quayle the best we can produce? And if not, why not?

“But is it as fun as it once was?” I asked a colleague on the press bus one day.

“Oh, it’s still as fun as it once was,” he said. “We’re just not as innocent as we once were.”

And we’re not. Not the press, not the candidates, not the country.