Process is important, however, and too often it is used as a reason to dispose of the underlying issues relating to government operations and political activities. Politicians, pundits, and other political players now more than ever regularly dismiss process matters, like those associated with broken government, as irrelevant. Within the Washington news media community there has been a growing distaste for process, which may explain why political consultants, and in turn candidates, now reject process topics as valid campaign issues.2 David Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, explained the typical reaction in a column discussing Senate Democrats’ charging Senate Republicans with “unfairly rigging the game” on judicial nominations. Although Senate Republicans had regularly blocked nominees sent to the Senate by Democratic president Bill Clinton (often not even giving them a hearing), these same Senate Republicans attacked Democrats for blocking President Bush’s nominees. This process issue, which at the time threatened a near procedural meltdown of the U.S. Senate over the uses and abuses of the filibuster in response to judicial nominations, was, however, considered of little general interest. As Corn reported, the matter raised “what political consultants call a ‘process issue,’ and the conventional rule in politics is that ‘process issues’ rarely resonate with large blocs of voters beyond those base-voters already engaged in such things.”3 Another example of this attitude was expressed by Washington political analyst and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, Michael Barone, who, when commenting on the procedural battles between Senate Republicans and Democrats over judicial nominees, dismissed them as “process issues,” adding, “One of my rules of life is that all process arguments are insincere.”
Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein similarly slighted process, describing then ABC News anchor Ted Koppel’s questions during a 2004 New Hampshire debate among Democratic presidential contenders as “kind of silly” because “there were all these questions about process.”5 A few months later, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Klein observed, “I think that Howard Dean’s campaign started drifting down a little bit when he began to emphasize the kind of process issues.”6 In his book Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid (2006), Klein lamented news coverage relating to the “process of politics,” particularly when it involves “horse-race” coverage of matters like “the cross-tabs, the buys, the ground war, the weird fetish of numeric expectations (‘If Edwards can stay within ten points of Kerry, he will blah-blah-blah’) . . . , as opposed to the qualities of candidates.”
Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, the Washington- based neoconservative journal of opinion and a regular on Fox News, frequently discusses process, a topic he, too, usually slights. When Vice President Dick Cheney refused to provide what was then known as the General Accounting Office with information about his secret meetings with energy executives to formulate the nation’s energy policy, a number of pundits criticized Cheney’s intransigence “as the biggest political blunder of the year.” Barnes, however, minimized it as a process issue: “People don’t care about process issues. That’s why they never cared about the deficit, even during the Reagan years, when the deficits were actually very large.”8 When President Bush refused to permit his newly appointed assistant for Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, to testify before Congress because he was then on the White House staff, many in Washington thought it unwise politics. For Barnes, again, it was merely “a pure process issue that really excites people in Washington, but nowhere else.”9 Barnes likewise considered Howard Dean’s lack of experience in foreign affairs “a process issue,” and dismissed it; after being shown a clip of Howard Dean saying in 2000 that the Iowa presidential caucus system was “dominated by the special interests on both sides,” and then a clip of Dean claiming in early 2004, when running for president, that he had changed his mind about Iowa, Barnes characterized the flip-flop as merely “a process issue.”
Typically, though, contemporary political journalism’s aversion to reporting about process matters—which thankfully is not shared by all political journalists*—runs right to the top of the journalism establishment, where there is a great aversion to reporting inside baseball–type stories. (Safire’s Political Dictionary defines “inside baseball” coverage as relating to “specialized or private knowledge; the minute political details savored by those in-the-know, found boring by most others.”) A study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that most Americans were more interested in a presidential candidate’s character qualities than positions on issues.14 Based on this influential report (which did not examine whether Americans were interested in process versus policy), journalists were advised by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) to steer clear of “inside baseball” and “tactical” coverage of politics.15 What is ironic about the Beltway insiders’ avoidance of process reporting, and the advice of PEJ, is that it seems to have fallen on deaf ears. While politicians and pundits may try to steer clear of the subject, process remains; in fact, it is the mainstay of political reporting.
There are few empirical studies of news media that analyze process versus policy coverage of government and politics, but one recent investigation examined such coverage of Congress. Political scientists Jonathan Morris and Rosalee Clawson surveyed over twenty-six hundred congressional news stories from the New York Times and CBS Evening News for the period 1990 through 1998. They found that 95 percent of the New York Times stories, and 87 percent of the Evening News stories, “mentioned one or more aspects of the legislative process.” In particular, this journalism, while often arising in relation to policy matters, focused on legislative maneuvering, conflicts between the Republicans and Democrats, and conflicts between Congress and the president, as well as on compromises made and accommodations reached. Stories of “scandal and personality [were] comparatively infrequent.”16 Based on my own crude content analysis (the study of news coverage of politics based on over a hundred LexisNexis transcripts for the week following the November 4, 2006, elections, and then for the first week that the 110th Congress was convened in January 2007), it appears that newspapers like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post (which supply most of the grist for the political blogs) provide a steady stream of process-related stories with enough internal tactical information to clog the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s content-coding system perpetually. The ratings of network television news, however, have been steadily decreasing, and those shows reach a larger audience than the lead newspapers. Cable news, however—when not infatuated with a missing white female child, Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, or a gruesome crime of the moment—will address process issues. Bloggers, too, love process.
Given that there is no shortage of attention to process in the media, why have candidates for national office, particularly Democrats, avoided this issue in recent campaigns?
Candidate Rejection of Process Issues
When writing about the excessive secrecy of the Bush administration in Worse Than Watergate, I believed I was discussing a subject that would prove to be a serious issue in the upcoming 2004 presidential campaign.
I was confident that President Bush’s Democratic opponent would seek to hold him accountable for his baseless and troubling behavior. Admittedly, I had not taken into consideration the increasing distaste for process in the Washington press crops, but rather based my thinking on the fact that process had been an important topic in past presidential races, and had been spelled out in great detail in both Democratic and Republican party platforms.
Inexplicably, in 2004, the Democratic Party at the national level chose to totally ignore process matters. For the first time ever it did not mention a single process matter in its platform, which is quite remarkable given the fact the Bush/Cheney administration had provided them a long list of activities that should have been called to the attention of voters.* Like his party, or because he so instructed them, Senator John Kerry was silent on process as well; its absence was stunning and conspicuous. The day before the nation went to the polls, a member of the New York Times editorial board expressed her personal dismay that Kerry had given Bush a pass on his secrecy. In her bylined editorial, “Psst. President Bush Is Hard at Work Expanding Government Secrecy,” Dorothy Samuels confessed “to feeling disappointed over Senator John Kerry’s failure to home in hard on one of the more worrisome domestic policy developments of the past four years—namely the Bush administration’s drastic expansion of needless government secrecy.”
When writing a post election chapter for the paperback edition of Worse Than Watergate, I specifically asked a number of Democrats, as well as individuals who headed Kerry’s presidential campaign, about their silence on this matter. I received the same answer from everyone:
Secrecy is “a process issue,” which they were convinced interests no voters. A year later, when researching Conservatives Without Conscience, I discovered that the editor of The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner, had been told by Democrats that they were reluctant to criticize the Republicans’ stunningly antidemocratic behavior in operating the House of Representatives. “Democrats are ambivalent about taking this issue to the country or to the press because many are convinced that nobody cares about ‘process’ issues,” Kuttner reported.
Both Democrats and Republicans once held process matters significant enough to consistently make them major planks in their respective party presidential platforms. Comparing the process language found in their respective platforms from 1960 to 2004 (see word counts in the footnote), we see that Democrats devoted a rough total of 15,104 words in their platform planks to process issues; over the same period Republicans devoted almost double that amount; or, 24,056 words.* These planks dealt with every conceivable aspect of government operations.
Although the degree of attention to this area fluctuated, never before 2004 had one party given, without explanation, the other a complete pass on process related matters. If this was inadvertent, which is doubtful, it can be corrected; if someone has specifically advised the Democratic Party to avoid process issues, as the quotes above indicate, this was bad guidance.
Thankfully, not all Democratic candidates ignore process. For example, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who represents Evanston, Illinois, publicly criticized the GOP for running an undemocratic House, addressing the subject early in the 2004 campaign. “The process,” she told a reporter, “particularly in the House, has been one of systematically shutting out debate and democratic procedures” and, by extension, shutting out the voices of millions of Americans.
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