Variety of Factors Can Garble the Candidates’ Messages : Media: New Hampshire voters get varying, sometimes contradictory images of the contenders. The situation keeps primary pundits guessing.
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MANCHESTER, N.H. — At a newsstand, there is Patrick J. Buchanan, frozen on the front page, reading a white supremacist newspaper that, to his embarrassment, had published something he wrote.
Atop a counter in a diner, another front page shows Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., bearded and living in Tokyo. The caption with the photo reads: “Brown grew a beard and studied Zen in Japan.”
Live on Manchester’s WMUR-TV, New Hampshire’s influential lone network-affiliate station, there is Tom Harkin saying: “I am the only real Democrat running.” Isn’t that the same thing he says in those TV commercials?
To understand what the campaign for President looks like to voters, forget what smart political reporters say or write about who is winning or losing next week’s crucial New Hampshire primary. Ignore the consultants with their tough-guy realism.
And ignore the polls. History has proved them far off the mark--including in 1984 and 1988.
To regular citizens, the people who actually vote, the presidential campaign looks a bit like a gadget they must buy--some assembly required, instructions missing, and the parts dumped out on the living room floor.
In real life, politics comes to people in pieces--a snippet on the radio driving to work, a disturbing picture in the newspaper, a colleague at the office who watched the candidate speak the night before, bites of sound off television, ads, and then more ads, coming in batches until they become a wall of noise. WMUR alone airs more than 150 presidential campaign ads a day.
The images that people in New Hampshire have seen are often contradictory and frequently different than people see in the national press. This confusion may be more meaningful to the ultimate outcome of the primary than the incessant polling and analogies to a horse race.
“People don’t decide here till the last week,” veteran political columnist Jack Germond warned. “This thing is not yet focused.”
Many reporters, for instance, think that Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey is falling apart. But Germond said last week: “He’s no worse off at this time than Gary Hart was in 1984.” Hart defeated former Vice President Walter F. Mondale in the state.
What are the conflicting images for New Hampshire voters, and what do they suggest?
Television advertising is the hardest to escape. Some times of day as many as eight or nine ads run every half an hour, creating what consultants call clutter that can render some of them meaningless.
Buchanan’s crudely produced ads attacking President Bush seem to stand out. When a reporter recently questioned a group of New Hampshire voters about which advertisements had stuck in their minds, several simultaneously mentioned Buchanan’s spot denouncing Bush for breaking his “Read My Lips” anti-tax pledge.
“My kids are walking around the house reciting it,” said Don Carrignan, father of two young girls.
One reason could be that Buchanan is campaigning in the state more than any other candidate in either party, reinforcing the same message on local news.
Is Buchanan doing well in this race? That depends on what newspaper you read and what television station you watch.
WMUR and the Manchester Union Leader produced a poll last week showing Bush with “a commanding lead” of 60%. “Buchanan insists his campaign isn’t over yet,” WMUR reporter Nannette Hanson intoned in a TV story that cast Buchanan as a candidate losing momentum.
But in a poll by the Boston Herald and Boston TV station WCVB the same day, Buchanan was “gaining momentum.” The Herald’s banner headline shouted: “Buchanan on the move!” And a searching piece in the Boston Globe last week suggested that Buchanan was emerging as “a major threat.”
As for Bush, the images voters see in New Hampshire are not so much the President as his surrogates, such as Vice President Dan Quayle or Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). New Hampshire Gov. Judd Gregg was used to counter Buchanan last week. Gregg held a press conference and charged that supporting Buchanan only helped the dreaded Democrats.
“You might as well cast a vote for Ted Kennedy as Pat Buchanan,” he said.
Among Democrats, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton tends to have an easier time dominating the news even when he is not in the state. When his wife, Hillary, delivered a speech last week at Wellesley College, her alma mater located outside Boston, it was the lead story on Boston TV stations and got heavy coverage in newspapers in New Hampshire and on WMUR.
The only other candidates’ spouses who can make news are First Lady Barbara Bush and Quayle’s wife, Marilyn.
The message former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas tries to deliver tends only to exist when Tsongas himself is in the state campaigning because his ads do not air at anywhere near the same frequency as other Democrats.
And Iowa Sen. Harkin appears on television and in print with perhaps the simplest and most consistent theme: “I am the only real Democrat.”
Among the group of voters questioned about the political ads, the only other advertisement people readily recalled was a Kerrey spot that shows him standing on a hockey rink in street clothes, discussing trade. But that’s not good news for Kerrey. Asked why he remembered the spot, one voter in the group, Dan Harkinson, said: “I keep waiting for him to slip on the ice.” Several others nodded.
How these images are created is something few voters in New Hampshire get to see. But it offers a lesson in how media perceptions tend to feed off each other, amplifying poll movements that journalists privately admit they sometimes doubt.
Last week, for instance, Kerrey held a press conference at a Manchester high school after addressing students there. The first few questions, from a local television station in Boston that was conducting a poll of the race, asked him to respond to the polls.
“Do you think you’re dead in the water?” the reporter from WCVB asked.
“No,” Kerrey answered.
“Would you elaborate?”
He wouldn’t.
“Is your support eroding?” another reporter asked.
“I like where we are,” Kerrey said. Whether his listeners believed him was open to doubt. Earlier in the week, Kerrey was quoted in Newsweek magazine as admitting that some of his ads had been a mistake. One reporter from a major newspaper, playing off the Newsweek story, even asked sarcastically: “Are there any ads of yours you do like, senator?”
“I like them all,” Kerrey answered.
“If you don’t do well, is there anywhere else you can go?” another reporter asked.
It was a textbook example of a candidate’s failing to get his message out because the perception of his flagging fortunes had obscured it.
Dan Balz, a reporter from the Washington Post, then asked Kerrey the first policy question: How long did Kerrey estimate it would take to accomplish his plan of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy?
By this time, local television stations had taken down their equipment. It was 11:30 a.m., and they each had news programs at noon. Cable News Network was getting cut-away shots of the press, not pictures of Kerrey.
What is less certain is whether, amid the clutter, the voters would notice the Kerrey stories that day, and if so, whether they cared.
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