Backstage passes: what it takes to run for president in the age of media intimacy.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul

AMERICA'S REAL-TIME political explainers are a game bunch. There's nothing that happens in the course of a campaign, a speech, a candidate's TV appearance, or any event inside or outside the Beltway that they can't quickly filter, analyze, and judge. People such as CNN's Jeff Greenfield, Fox's Brit Hume, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, PBS' team of Mark Shields and David Brooks, and an overflowing green room of others like them are, in fact, pretty good at high-pressure instant analysis. They know the players, they've heard all the stump speeches, and there's not much that happens that they haven't seen before. That's what makes them experts.

So it was novel to see them all dumbfounded. This year's Democratic primaries presented them with a spectacle that no one could remember witnessing before: the Genteel Debate.

Once the field of Democratic contenders was past Iowa and New Hampshire, most of the candidates ceased having much to say about each other, even in high-profile TV "debates" in delegate-rich states such as Michigan. True, vanity candidates Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton kept up a rhetorical drumbeat, and once in a while even the major contenders spoke an impolite word, especially when approaching the March 2 "Super Tuesday" contests. But only the early candidate forums featured any really sharp exchanges, with various hopefuls going after early front-runner Howard Dean. Understandably, Dean didn't much like being a punching bag, and he reportedly asked Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe to intervene. But since one purpose of the primary season is, supposedly, to test the contenders without actually destroying them, the friction seemed not only normal but also desirable.

Then it all but stopped. No sooner had the candidates assembled in South Carolina than they became more gracious than a porch full of Old Charleston belles. John Kerry, the new pack leader coming out of New Hampshire, was pronounced the "winner" of that state's late-January debate if only because--and this was the phrase news junkies heard from every real-time analyst--"no one laid a glove on him." That was true as far as it went. The more intriguing realization was that no one had tried.

"I don't know if these guys were all auditioning for vice president or what was going on," a perplexed Mark Shields told a PBS audience the next day. "But campaigns are about differences. There are differences in value, differences in experience, differences in vision, differences in character, personality, and temperament. And boy, you wouldn't have known it last night." Shields' debating partner, New York Times columnist David Brooks, agreed. "I thought at the debate they were going to endorse [John Kerry] at the end," he said. "It was so gentle." Brooks found the debate "a waste of time."

All Politics Is Personal

Was it? Shields, Brooks, and other high-profile refs of pro politics assumed the real value of such a debate is to draw attention to "difference" through rhetorical exchange. That obviously makes sense, and it is certainly true that such figures as Joe Lieberman and Wesley Clark allowed their candidacies to expire without really exploiting any of the televised debates and making a determined last-ditch rhetorical stand.

On the other hand, debate isn't what it used to be. It's not all-day exchanges between the likes of Lincoln and Douglas; it's not even the soundbites about, say, "missile gaps" that marked the Kennedy-Nixon contest a century later. During the last decade, rhetorical exchange has been playing second fiddle to a different phenomenon entirely: the display of identities.

In the course of the 2000 presidential race, I argued that, due partly to the growth of ever more invasive and intimate media and partly to the decline of a foreign military threat, presidential candidates were under continuing pressure to change their whole concept of campaigning. Since then the military dimension of the presidency obviously has reasserted itself, but the role of invasive media--which capture the once-private "backstage" activities of politicians and turn them into yet another public, front-stage forum--has only grown.

In "The New Presidential Identity" (November 2000), I wrote that geopolitical and...