Walter Shapiro: “The dirty secret of campaign journalism for the next 11 days is that
there is no way for conscientious reporters to give readers what they
crave most of all–advance knowledge of who is going to win the election.
We have reached the point in the campaign when the polls are too close
and the dictates of spin too intense for anyone but a fool (or a TV
pundit) to offer anything more than tentative guesses about who is going
to be inaugurated on January 20.”
“When I was younger–and cockier about divining the future–I was convinced
that if you had the right sources within a campaign, you could figure
out the gist of their internal polling by their off-the-record mood and
body language. So I was privy to the buoyant mood at the upper levels of
the John Kerry campaign during the final heady week of the 2004
campaign. Sometimes in politics, though, the most potent spin comes from
the lies that campaign strategists tell themselves as they interpret
ambiguous information.”
Save to Favorites