This Media Life

Al Gore Rhythm

No matter how high we fly, fate (fate and media are similar arbiters, in this instance) will always bring us down. Even if we win, it will be costly.

Then there is the social-science aspect of our coverage, wherein the candidate becomes a sort of Rorschach test. The story we seek is about what voters really perceive, what angels or what demons they perceive, in this blot known as the candidate -- or what we in the media perceive voters to perceive. The subliminal rats frame in the Bush ads was uninspired but obviously intended. Perception has become the most powerful political force -- as patronage used to be.

Polling, of course, gives us the basis with which to measure these dawning perceptions. We comb the polls for such meaning, such deviations. Big news is the discovery of a new perception (let us not, at this time, get into the nuance that candidates are perceived on the basis of how we, the people who are reporting about the perception, present the candidates). Now, as it happens, there are few working reporters who actually understand anything about polling, or who have ever questioned the underlying methodology of a poll. Hence, the poll moves from quantitative information to anecdotal information -- we report it as an event, as though the election has occurred. Of course, the wide reporting of polls (such-and-such a poll by such-and-such an organization you've never heard of puts Gore eight points ahead!) as actual events turns around and helps fulfill the accuracy of the theoretical report.

Then, too, in the logic of reversals, there is our economic self-interest. Reversals are good for business. The rehabilitation of Al Gore means we have a playable story. A horse race. A presidential dead heat. What Andrew Sullivan recently called, with a skip in his voice, "this unexpectedly fascinating election."

I should note that I am not suggesting press bias. What's going on here is actually the opposite of bias. Contravening the age-old Republican fears of a liberally biased press is a knee-jerk objectivity at the root of the reversal. In other democratic countries, each media outlet states its bias and more or less delivers its dutiful message. In American journalism, fairness becomes the bias. At some point, after taking a beating, if you provide the least pretext, good things will be said about you; or, conversely, if you've been the beneficiary of positive stuff, that munificence comes back to bite you.

Who's in and who's out is just part of the natural flow of the campaign cycle.

Here, then, is how you, the candidate, should work this new reversal paradigm.

The immutable law of reversals holds that you can count on members of the press running in the same direction. The ultimate job of the campaign is therefore to try to control at what point the counter-stampede begins.

But the reversal itself of, say, 125 to 165 degrees (media always preserve a little wiggle room) is a certainty. Everything that rises must come down; when you hit the bottom, you can count on coming up. Because a campaign is finite, you win on your ability to control the velocity and incline of your trajectory, both up and down. Perception-wise, you can assume that at some point in the campaign, you will appear to be the opposite of what you are, so the crux of your job, or of your campaign operatives', is to see to it that your positive opposite strikes as close as possible to Election Day -- indeed, positive press at the wrong time can lose you the election.

This law of reversals is called, too, more bombastically, "the swing of the pendulum."

"The snickermongers now encouraging the bashing of Bush have to worry about another swing of the pendulum," writes William Safire, doubtless aware that the pendulum has quite a fixed arc and that, at this point, it is pretty unlikely that it could accomplish the double reversal needed to save Bush.

This law is also called peaking too early -- but that suggests you've given it your all and didn't have what it takes to persevere. Rather, it seems to me, the real problem is peaking too late. You want to go down with time to come up.

"Let's conserve the positives," I once heard a political consultant say -- I thought he was talking about how to stay up when you're up; now I understand he was talking about having to pay back on your positives (which, in a sense, are borrowed from the media) when you could least afford it. The Bush people are now making a balloon payment.

What was the Bush campaign thinking to let itself ride so high in June and July? That's dopiness for sure.

Still. With the new speed of information, you ought to be able to enhance the pace of reversals. If you can shrink the reversal cycle to two months, we could, just in time, see a charming and irascible George W. again.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com