. . . the weird get blogging, and the past few days have kept me tied up in all kinds of “deep” stuff that prevented me from keeping up with the flow of events on the blogosphere. First there was that weirdness about the Planned Parenthood bombing in Wisconsin and the MSNBC “Republican War on Women” meme. Then I spent yesterday immersing the entirety of my cerebral cortex in campaign-finance reports and the details of the Florida primary campaign in order to locate the precise moment when Newt Gingrich’s campaign became an irretrievable disaster.
So I’m trying to get back in the flow now, which isn’t helped when Bill Quick — The Guy Who Named the Blogosphere — whacks me for my post about Gingrich. Look, Bill: This stuff is important, OK?
The big media are going to tell their own version of the 2012 campaign, shaped by their various prejudices in favor of the Conventional Wisdom, and so there is real value in publicly re-examining the facts of the campaign, thus to provide at least the raw materials for crafting a counter-narrative. It might be nice if there were a think tank, a philanthropic foundation or a book publisher offering to cut me a fat check, so I could afford to hire an assistant do all the research — e.g., what’s the daily charter rate for a 16-seat Gulfstream IV? — but as it is, there’s just me and I’m actually kind of enjoying it.
Remember my wild ride to McCarran International Airport with the Best Cab Driver in Vegas? I’d forgotten all about that until I started digging back through the archives. If the GOP primary campaign is now effectively over (an assertion that Rick Santorum certainly does not accept), then the question of How We Got Here becomes a matter of historical interest, because those who don’t know history are doomed.
Then again, maybe we’re all doomed.
Maybe history is now repeating itself for the very last time. But the ancient Mayans could not be reached for comment.
At any rate, Bill Quick’s contempt for Rick Santorum isn’t what this story is about, except insofar as it serves as an example of how the perception of candidates affects the reality of campaigns. If you’ll check page 404 of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, you’ll find Hunter S. Thompson talking about how “perception” was the key word to understanding what went wrong with George McGovern’s campaign.
Of course, looking back over the distance of four decades, it is possible to perceive that McGovern was doomed beyond all hope of redemption from Day One, that Nixon’s Campaign to Re-Elect the President was destined to crush whoever got the Democratic Party nomination that year, and that any perception to the contrary was never more than a mirage.
Let’s not ponder whether that shoe is now on the other foot, eh?
Leaving aside such premonitions, I remain fascinated by the gap between perception and reality in politics, and what happened to the Gingrich campaign is a textbook example: On that Monday before the Florida primary, Newt was still the national front-runner, barely a week had passed since he’d beaten Mitt Romney in South Carolina and — if all you knew was what you saw on Fox News — it was going to be Newt-vs.-Mitt all the way to the end.
But there was something drastically wrong with that perception. I sensed the disconnect, but couldn’t quite identify or adequately describe what it was that bugged me. It wasn’t until I took the time to start going through the details of the FEC reports (which of course weren’t available at the time) that I located the relevant facts, demonstrating that while Newt had already passed his fundraising peak on Jan. 22, his campaign was still spending as if those days of six-figure contributions would stretch forward infinitely.
This was, I say, a Neutral Objective Fact — but a fact that was not known at the time, and its shrewd concealment permitted the Gingrich campaign (which was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy throughout February) to maintain an illusion of viability for several more weeks. The revelation of how such a perception-reality gap developed may not disturb Bill Quick, given his animus toward Santorum’s social conservatism. Yet it might disturb those conservatives whose idea was to find the strongest “Not Romney” candidate in order to prevent the GOP Establishment from once again imposing a non-conservative nominee on the unwilling grassroots.
Surely there must have been many millions of Republican voters, and thousands of campaign contributors, whose primary motive in backing Newt was their belief that he was the Only Candidate Who Could Stop Romney. By the end of January, however, that belief was already being falsified by the Gingrich campaign’s overspending, tactical errors, and strategic miscalculations. Yet they were able to keep up the pretense of viability all through February and on into March.
Maybe that doesn’t bother you any more than it bothers Bill Quick, but don’t you think it’s an important reality that deserves to be understood? Just look at today’s headlines:
President Obama raises nearly
$1.5 million in 3 hours
— The Hill
Effort would change Texas primary
to winner take all, benefit Santorum
— Austin American-Statesman
Rob Portman tops veepstakes
— Politico
What is the reality-perception gap today? What unknown facts contradict our superficial perception of political events, a perception based on news coverage that can never include all the facts? How much different would our perception be, if we were privy to all the relevant facts, rather than just those facts we glean from media accounts that are always incomplete, even when they are not actually biased?
Maybe that’s too “meta.” Never mind. I try not to take this stuff too personally. Go hit Bill Quick’s tip jar, just to let him know it’s OK.
