The Authenticity Beat   

To the news media, the way presidential candidates interact with them has become an important tool for assessing character.

I T WILL GO down as one of the supremely goofy moments of the campaign.
Asked about Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, John McCain told a debate crowd he'd not only reappoint him, but "if Mr. Greenspan should happen to die, God forbid, I would do like [they] did in the movie 'Weekend at Bernie's.' I'd prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him and keep him as long as we could."
For 200 coffeed-up reporters in the filing center, the mental image was just too loony. We lost it at our laptops. But the most telling thing about that moment wasn't the wisecrack itself. It was the reflexive reaction of many journalists afterward.
When the giggling died down, we wondered: What was it we had just experienced? Was it actual, honest-to-God wit, direct from the madcap mind of the mordant McCain? Or was it-- sigh --scripted, like so much else in presidential politics?
Wary reporters asked the McCain camp about it afterwards. That "Weekend at Bernie's" line--where did that come from? Aides insisted they had never heard it before. McCain vouched for its spontaneity.
So there you had it: an impromptu, off-the-cuff, genuine, authentic moment. They still happen.
As the 2000 presidential race unfolds, the search for "authenticity"--the inner candidate, the telling detail, the revealing comment--becomes one of its enduring features. Most analysts agree there are no consuming issues. In their absence, and in the wake of the Clinton sex scandal, style, character and integrity leap to the fore.
Small-town New Hampshire, storied haven of "retail" campaigning, provided the perfect locus for this trend. Its voters seemed more interested in the candidates' personal qualities than their policies. This fit in nicely with the state's self-assigned electoral specialty: to get close enough to the contenders--as one local put it--to "smell their fear."
That is also a role the press has assumed. And as character analysis has gained currency in campaign reporting, the relationship between journalists and candidates has taken on more and more significance.
To reporters, the way politicians behave toward us has become its own key character test. How comfortable are they with the media? How genuine? How nimble? How scripted?
Nowhere was this more evident than in New Hampshire, the nation's chief presidential battleground in the months leading up to the state's February 1 primary. The major party candidates displayed strikingly different media strategies, from McCain's high-wire all-access act to Bill Bradley's prickly sphere of privacy to George W. Bush's controlled jocularity to Alan Keyes' volcanic contempt. Journalists treated these differences as both performance art and clues to the candidates' core being.
The media's side of the relationship was also worth noting. This was a campaign where reporters were seen as too nice (the McCain honeymoon) and too rude (snotty debate questions). The media helped erect caricatures of the contenders (the programmed Al Gore, the angry McCain, the featherweight Bush, the aloof Bradley), then helped knock them down. There were times when the debates seemed as much about the panelists as the politicians.

O F ALL THE contestants, McCain gave journalists their best material. His bus-and-town-hall road show was the biggest scribe-magnet of the New Hampshire campaign. And with good reason. Reporters on presidential campaigns hear the same canned rhetoric day and night.
The fact that McCain let reporters ride with him--and appeared to enjoy it--earned him numerous grateful, glowing stories. This drew fire inside and outside the industry, but there was nothing mysterious about it. McCain's good press had less to do with his reformist politics than his gaudy bio, his openness, his lack of handling and his disarming self-criticism.
It was almost impossible to leave the McCain bus without good copy. One day in December his questioners included the Scholastic News (sixth-graders), Dan Rather and a correspondent from Comedy Central's nightly news parody, "The Daily Show."
The Daily Show: "Senator, how do reconcile the fact that you are one of the most vocal critics of pork-barrel politics, and yet while you were chairman of the Commerce Committee, that committee set a record for unauthorized appropriations?"
McCain: (too flummoxed to speak)
The Daily Show: "I was just kidding! I don't even know what that means!"
The chief lure of the bus was its sense of unscripted possibility. Having ascertained McCain's favorite book ("For Whom the Bell Tolls") and favorite movie ("Viva Zapata"), the comedy channel asked him to recite something from one of his favorite poets (Robert Service).
McCain responded with the first 12 lines of "The Cremation of Sam McGee." When he was done, he added: "I memorized that poem in prison. A guy tapped it through the walls to me."
Such moments were not to be had on the other guys' buses. Bradley boycotted "favorite poet" questions. CNN's Judy Woodruff pressed him on this January 26 in the last New Hampshire debate.
"Well, Judy, if you want me to share a little bit with you, I will," said Bradley, with a trace of sarcasm. He told her he liked Joseph Conrad's "Victory." He quoted a passage. "Now what does that tell you about me running for president of the United States?" Bradley asked. "It tells you that I read the book."
Gore's interaction with the national media offered few surprises; the relationship was already well established. Seen as stagy and calculated, he was viewed by reporters with more cynicism than anyone else in the race. During that last debate, Gore lamented Bradley's "unfortunate decision to kind of get a little nasty in the campaign." When the vice president added this stoic note--"I have not complained, and I will not complain"--the filing center, packed with 500 journalists, erupted in derisive laughter.
Bush's relationship with the media was outwardly chummy with undercurrents of tension. At a Rochester press conference, he interrupted reporters at least five times to correct their questions: "No, no, stop, stop, stop. Make sure you get the facts correct.... Ma'am, would you like me to finish the question?... Let's just make sure we get the facts straight.... I don't like a 40-minute question.... No, no, I am not saying that."
McCain ribbed reporters with an affectionate, over-the-top abusiveness, calling them "lowlifes," introducing a New Hampshire crowd to Rather so he could answer "any question you might have about the liberal, socialist, Communist bias of CBS."
With Bush, there was sometimes an edge; he once chided CNBC's Chris Matthews for "horning in" on the question-and-answer session reserved for employees at a Salem investment house. "Sometimes, the big stars start surfacing as the campaign gets closer," he told the crowd.
Bradley simply kept more distance from the press corps. For a good stretch of the campaign, the two candidates who enjoyed the best press had dramatically different approaches toward the media. McCain offered the most access among the contenders, Bradley the least. McCain palled around with reporters; Bradley stood apart.
Few public figures have enjoyed the kind of adulatory press Bradley received in his basketball career. But few politicians have so candidly put down on paper their grievances with journalists. His 1996 memoir, "Time Present, Time Past," features this plaintive account of a media feeding frenzy, from the perspective of the hunted:
When the red-hot media burn is in progress, it seems that nothing escapes its flames. The reporters are waiting at each stop on your campaign schedule. Just to see them, let alone to hear them, shortens your breath, dries up your voice, turns your face hot, tightens your chest, and makes you feel like an average guy about to be hit by the heavyweight champion.
Bradley lacked McCain's spontaneity; much of his stump speech came verbatim from his book. But like McCain, he scored early points with reporters for "authenticity." He wasn't handled. He even made a virtue of his starchiness, refusing to bare his soul or exploit his family or faith for votes.
But after a honeymoon, both Bradley and McCain experienced tougher treatment in the media. Bradley's sphere of privacy--questions about his intellectual influences, favorite books, even policy advisers were off-limits--began to seem overly large.
With both Bradley and McCain, there was a faint build-'em-up-knock-'em-down rhythm to the coverage. McCain's first rough patch in the press involved questions about whether he pressured a federal agency on behalf of campaign contributors. After a brief frenzy, the controversy withered when most journalists decided it had been overblown. At a January 6 debate at the University of New Hampshire, a media panelist asked McCain if he had shown poor judgment in the case.
No, he replied, and explained the reasons why "I would do the same thing again."
This time it was the reporter who seemed scripted. "For a man who rides the 'Straight Talk Express,' " she noted tartly, "that wasn't the most forthcoming of answers."
McCain, who had actually answered the question, seemed puzzled: "Well, what was not forthcoming about it?"
That wasn't the media's only snippy moment. When Democratic debate moderator Peter Jennings asked the candidates for a one-word answer, Gore's response ran on a bit. Replied Jennings, "Interesting one-word answer, sir."

D EBATE REPORTING took one step forward in 2000 with the demise of the spin room. Campaign surrogates still populate the filing centers. Reporters still record their thoughts. Yet they pretty much have stopped putting them in their stories--less as a matter of policy, it seems, than a heightened sense of the hollowness of the ritual.
But the debates also highlighted the frequent disconnect between what interests journalists and what interests the public. Steve Forbes, Orrin Hatch and Gary Bauer had to endure gratuitous why-are-you-still-running questions at a time when the first vote in the 2000 race had yet to be cast. It's a question few voters seemed to find worth asking.
And it's part of what the Baltimore Sun's Jack Germond was alluding to when he said, "We are covering the spectacle we create." At one debate, media panelists asked five questions about McCain's temperament. Naturally, the subject was a major theme of the next day's stories. But many of those stories failed to point out the media had raised the issue--not the voters, or even the candidates.
More than any other candidate, Keyes challenged the media's role. After a debate December 2, he strode into the Hanover filing center. Rows of reporters were still hunched over their Toshibas battling deadline when the candidate's angry voice rang out, damning them for ignoring him, recapping long-standing grievances, and indicting the press corps as racist. He left as abruptly as he came, a passing squall.
Keyes became the media's chief scourge, repeatedly challenging the premise or propriety of reporters' questions. He gave veteran New York City newsman Gabe Pressman the what-a-stupid-question treatment when Pressman asked him, "Can you legislate morality?"
"Meaning no offense, sir, almost all morality is legislated, and almost all legislation is about morality," Keyes intoned. "How foolish can we be, asking silly questions like, 'Can you legislate morality?' "
When Republicans briefly interrupted their New Hampshire campaigns to meet in South Carolina January 7, the debate was held in front of a large and partisan audience. NBC affiliate reporter Stephanie Trotter rather transparently invited the candidates to air their dirty laundry.
"Gentlemen, I am curious. As an adult, what is the biggest mistake that you have made? And what lesson did you learn from it?" she asked.
Much booing ensued. Repeating the question so the candidates could hear, she deftly shed ownership of the query: "I am curious" became "Our viewers would like to know."
Unimpressed, Keyes said his "biggest mistake" would be to answer the question.