Forecast for the Political Crystal Ball: Cloudy   

The pitfalls of political predictions prove problematic

T HE END OF 1994 WAS a tough time for President Clinton. On his watch, Republicans had just regained control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Once the "Republican revolution" was officially underway, Clinton even went so far as to insist upon his own relevancy at a press conference aimed at boosting his sagging approval ratings--but only one of the big three networks bothered to broadcast it.

But that was then and this is now. Ever since Clinton reaffirmed his presidential dignity with his handling of the Oklahoma City bombing, his poll numbers have been steadily inching upward. The Clinton presidency now seems back on track, and for months the president has enjoyed a healthy lead over GOP rival Bob Dole in the polls.

Through all the political ups and downs of Clinton's presidency, perhaps the only thing that has remained constant is the itchy desire of political reporters to pronounce each day's events a landmark victory or monumental failure. But any political reporter who would have dared to predict Clinton's current most-favored-candidate status back in his "presidential funk" would have been laughed out of the newsroom. At the time, pundits everywhere seemed to have no reservations about declaring Clinton a lame-duck president and consigning him to the dreary lot of one-term presidents. To them, "The Man from Hope" no longer had any.

There is "a growing feeling that this country is presidentially bereft," wrote the New York Times' William Safire. "The Oval Office seems somehow vacant; the job is open."

"The negative mindset that many voters have toward [Clinton] after two years is likely to cling and could make him a one-term president," wrote Jack W. Germond of Baltimore's Sun.

"The rule of thumb," wrote Mary Anne Sharkey of Cleveland's Plain Dealer, "is that any politician with a disapproval rating in the 40 percent range is in deep George Bush doo-doo."

"New taxes are harmful to economic growth, and the massive tax increase that Clinton really does seem to want...is likely to stall the economic recovery, ensuring that he is a one-term president," wrote the American Spectator's Tom Bethell.

Such ominous predictions from the press corps may have had the ring of truth at the time, but judging from today's poll numbers, all were premature in burying Clinton. Is such cloudy crystal ball-gazing just par for the course of political reporting? All of the reporters surveyed by AJR who declared Clinton a one-term president say it definitely is. Is going out on the proverbial limb an unavoidable occupational hazard of punditry? Of course.

Not that that makes the pain of hindsight any easier to swallow. No matter how political reporters try to hedge their predictions by tossing around phrases like "if early indicators are reliable," and "so far it seems," and "if polls are correct," sooner or later their inability to predict human behavior becomes apparent.

"If you make predictions, you're going to make a fool of yourself," says the Washington Post's David Broder, who devotes a retrospective column each year to berating his own wayward political predictions. "There are some judgments that I think you're called upon to make as a political reporter, unless you want to be a namby-pamby, but, generally, predictions aren't useful to readers or in the interest of good journalism."

S O EXACTLY WHY ARE so many political reporters in the business of making hapless predictions about the fates of our civil servants? Is there some kind of pundit instinct pushing journalists toward sweeping pronouncements that have no logical basis? Or is it that the allure of political speculation is just too much to resist for those who make a living by observing political peccadilloes and putting them into perspective?

"In a lot of respects, predictions are harmless because no one takes them seriously," says Broder, whose name didn't come up in AJR's Nexis search of political reporters who described Clinton as a one-term president. "But sometimes they can be a fun conversation piece, and everyone has a laugh when they turn out wrong."

Jack Germond had the last laugh when he predicted in the now-defunct Washington Star that Gerald Ford would win the North Carolina Republican primary in 1976. Ronald Reagan prevailed and Germond used his next column to own up to his error and explain precisely how he had arrived at the wrong conclusion. To his surprise, he received a deluge of positive feedback from his readers who were refreshed by his honesty and humility.

But Arnold Beichman of the Washington Times--who wrote in 1995 that it was time "for all good men and women to start thinking seriously about Newt Gingrich as the Republican candidate for president in 1996, a candidate sure to walk over the one-term-president-to-be Bill Clinton"--isn't ready to back off yet.

"I don't see how you can even write this piece with five months left 'til the election," Beichman says. "In politics, five months is an eternity. Who knows? Maybe Paula Jones will be the swing vote!

"Prophecy in politics," Beichman adds, "is like predicting the course of a marriage, and no one could have predicted that Charles and Di's marriage made in heaven would end up the most tawdry romance since Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.... The sun will rise and the sun will set, and that's about all you can predict for sure."

Doubtless that won't stop political reporters from trying to prognosticate the outcome of every political event that earns ink in their papers, even though such "reporting" might be better left to the horoscope section. But perhaps there is some comfort to be found in the fact that political reporters, like economists and meteorologists, make mistakes like the rest of us. Germond points out, "If I was right all the time, they couldn't afford to pay my salary."

If the odds of political predictions hold true, if Whitewater at last emerges as an issue people care about, if news of the White House's request for FBI background reports on prominent Republicans causes the seesaw of Clinton's presidency to settle on the downside, it is entirely possible that the 1996 elections will make a mockery of this article and of this reporter. By mid-June it did appear that the race was tightening. Perhaps Beichman was right to call this reporter on a premature attempt to poke fun at those who predicted that Clinton would never see another term.

But if early indicators are reliable, I predict not.