By John Pancake
orothy Sklaroff, a teacher at a Catholic school in Miami, was talking about her anger at being cut off from meaningful contact with government. “Even if my congressman does come home on the weekend,” she said, “he’s in his pool in his floaty chair with a cocktail.”
Dorothy’s feeling – the suspicion that most of us are somehow unplugged from the people we elect – is a subject many journalists are trying to address these days. In Florida, with the help of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism’s Citizens Election Project, six newspapers and 11 television stations produced a raft of stories designed to bridge the gap between what the voters’ concerns were and what candidates were saying.
I’m not sure we succeeded.
We just never imagined how reluctant some candidates would be to talk about the things voters care about. To be honest, I was surprised. I doubt Dorothy Sklaroff was.
The “Voices of Florida” is an idea that germinated one day in 1993 when Pete Weitzel, the tall, senior managing editor of the Miami Herald, was brainstorming with Paul Tash, a trim, terse native of South Bend, Indiana, and editor of the St. Petersburg Times. Although the voluble Weitzel and the taciturn Tash are as different as Los Angeles and New York, they both longed to add a few fathoms of depth to Florida political coverage. Eventually, their idea grew into a loose coalition of newspapers and television stations called “Voices of Florida.”
The first “Voices of Florida” stories appeared in 1994. That year, the coalition succeeded in focusing a good deal of the debate in the governor’s race on issues that voters said were important. Thanks at least in part to the project, incumbent Democrat Lawton Chiles and his Republican challenger, Jeb Bush (son of former President George Bush), addressed crime, drugs, immigration, schools and government waste.
But how could this media partnership have an impact on a far more diverse and deliberately vague presidential race? An idea came from Weitzel and Jeanne Grinstead, the St. Petersburg Times’ campaign editor. Why not find a single issue that was important to Florida voters and grill the candidates about it? After some discussion, our initial plan was to focus on the immigration issue.
With the help of a series of five CEP-financed focus groups conducted in Florida by The Harwood Group and with polling by the firm of Selzer-Body, we took a close look at voters’ questions and anxieties. What we found, first of all, was a deep, unfocused anger about government, politicians, corporations and, in fact, most other institutions. We responded to these findings with a number of news stories in the fall of 1995. (We needed to begin that early, because Florida had one of the first events of the presidential campaign – a mock presidential convention and straw poll called Presidency III that took place that November.)
Our initial research also revealed that, instead of a single key issue that moved Florida voters, there was an unstable mix of issues. What citizens singled out depended a lot on how one asked the question. Immigration, for example, no longer seemed to be in the front of voters’ minds (as it clearly had been earlier in 1995). Rather, it was an issue that, as our pollster, Ann Selzer, explained, was “hot if you touch it.” People didn’t mention it on their own, but if you brought it up, it quickly emerged from the shadows.
Thus, our partnership abandoned the plan to concentrate on immigration. Nor did any other single issue seem uppermost in the minds of the people we interviewed. Moreover, some issues voters cared deeply about – crime, for example – were largely beyond the scope of presidential authority, while others – the notion that the country’s values were shot and that children were growing up without a moral compass – were difficult for even the most earnest candidate to address meaningfully.
As a result of all this, we resolved to question candidates on a range of issues, with particular emphasis on health care, crime, family values, and immigration. We also looked at the broader problem of the public’s declining confidence in government and institutions, including the family – the thing I’ve come to think of as “Dorothy’s feeling.”
We began setting up in-depth, 90-minute interviews with the major candidates so that we could get beyond the kind of superficial responses that normally emerge from day-to-day campaign coverage. Such interviews had helped encourage some thoughtful discussion during the 1994 governor’s race. Getting time with the major presidential candidates prior to Presidency III was more difficult than we had expected, but we eventually worked out something with all the major candidates – all but one.
The job of lining up the major candidates fell to Mark Silva, the Miami Herald’s Capitol bureau chief and a person who does not give up easily. Each of the leading candidates at that time – Bob Dole, Phil Gramm, Lamar Alexander and Pat Buchanan – was invited a month in advance to meet individually with a group of reporters in a 90-minute session, which the partnership had arranged to have videotaped.
The candidates were advised that we would be asking them about issues that “Voices of Florida’s” polling had identified as most important to Florida’s voters, and that this would be an issues-oriented discussion free of political sniping in the “gotcha” mold. Our reporting and television broadcasts of these interviews were timed for the weekend before November’s straw poll in Orlando, an event important to all the campaigns.
It took weeks of prodding before any of the campaigns agreed, but, slowly, most of them did. Gramm was interviewed first, in Jacksonville. Alexander was interviewed soon after, in Tallahassee. Buchanan’s travel schedule was so tight – indeed he was spending a lot of time in Alaska at that point – that “Voices of Florida” agreed to meet him in Washington. Buchanan was interviewed the week before the partnership’s news stories were to run.
Only Dole refused to commit to an interview. During more than 50 conversations with members of his campaign, his Senate staff and his leading supporters in Florida, Dole’s campaign never agreed to meet. There is no question that Dole was busy. During the final week, he and other top leaders in Washington were on the verge of shutting down the government. He still had time to campaign, however.
The stories were to run on Saturday night and Sunday. During the final week before the stories appeared, Silva worked the halls of the Capitol attempting to convince Dole to talk. Congressmen and senators supporting him were enlisted in the appeal. The candidate was approached personally.
His campaign never said yes and never said no. Silva waited near Dole’s office in the Capitol for an entire day before Dole’s campaign staff finally agreed to put their man, who was campaigning in Pennsylvania, on the telephone that Friday. In the course of all these discussions and negotiations, it became clear that one of Dole’s concerns was the television camera that “Voices of Florida” was using in all such interviews.
That Thursday night, Silva advised Dole’s staff that it was almost too late to arrange for a freelance videographer to tape the interview. Dole’s staff appeared relieved to see that they were gaining greater control over the situation. They said they would put Dole on the phone with one reporter, instead of exposing him to the same team of reporters and a TV camera that the other candidates had faced.
On Friday, one time after another was scheduled for Dole’s call by his staff. When nothing happened, the staff assured us that the next designated time would surely result in a call from the candidate. The phone never rang. On Saturday afternoon, the Herald’s early Sunday edition was on the street. It included the first in the “Voices” series of articles on the candidates’ stands on the issues. It also included a story explaining that, of all the candidates, Dole alone had declined to participate. Television reported that Dole was ducking the issues. Said the Herald story in part:
Approached by a reporter outside his Senate office in the Capitol late last week, Dole waved an arm and said, “Not now.”
. . . [Said Pat] Buchanan: “Why would Bob Dole would be reluctant to do this? I can’t think of a single reason. For me, it’s a terrific opportunity to speak to the press of Florida and to get my message out to the people of Florida, and that is what a campaign is about, communicating your ideas.”
At 6:30 on Saturday night, Dole called Tom Fiedler, the Herald’s political editor, and offered a condensed interview. Although the other candidates had spoken for an hour and a half on the issues, he was on the phone for little more than half an hour. The final Sunday editions and a subsequent series on the issues included complete stories with all the candidates and did not make a point of Dole’s lack of cooperation.
By the spring of 1996, all nine of the Republican candidates on Florida’s March 12 presidential primary ballot were invited to attend an hour-long candidates’ forum in Miami. None of the leading ones agreed to take part. Only Alan Keyes and Morry Taylor committed to attend the March 10 forum in Miami, which was to be broadcast live statewide. Repeated faxes and phone calls to the Dole, Steve Forbes and Buchanan campaigns went unanswered. Alexander’s scheduler said he was working on it. A low-ranking Buchanan aide finally called to say there was no news. In the final week before the scheduled forum, Alexander and Richard Lugar dropped out of the race. (Gramm had dropped out earlier. ) This left Dole, Buchanan and Forbes as the leading candidates, and their campaigns were still balking.
“We don’t schedule that far out,” said a spokeswoman for Dole, four days before the scheduled forum.
Behind the scenes, the Dole campaign called Tom Slade, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, to ask if he thought Dole should participate.
“I told them, `No. You’re the front-runner, start acting like it,’ ” Slade said.
Because Dole would not cooperate, the other leading candidates also refused to do so. The forum was cancelled. Florida’s media and the citizens of the state were ready to talk about the issues, but the candidates weren’t.
Those of us in the “Voices of Florida” project did the best we could to present the candidates’ positions anyway. In a coordinated effort (but with each news outlet free to report and analyze as it saw fit), the partners researched the key issues and presented grids and analyses of where the candidates stood. We also continued to research and report on the immigration issue because of our belief that the next president’s decisions on that issue will help shape Florida in the next century.
Where our major undertaking was concerned, however, we were foiled by Dole and the other candidates.
As the Herald’s Fiedler, one of the more respected political writers operating outside the Beltway, put it: “The quality of the media’s coverage is in many ways dependent on the quality of the campaigns presented to us. If Dole [and the others] move deliberately to thwart our efforts to present an issue-based campaign, it is difficult for us to elevate the process. This was the antithesis of the media focusing on the horse race to the exclusion of the issues. The leading candidate excluded the issues, virtually forcing us to deal disproportionately with the horse race.”
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