October 13, 2003

Why News-Press panel didn't go for Arnold

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER / Jerry Roberts

The day after Arnold Schwarzenegger's triumph last week, Managing Editor Linda Strean fielded a call from a loyal reader with an intriguing inquiry about our recall campaign coverage.

Noting that we lavished attention during the race upon the views of a special News-Press Voter Panel, Dennis Iden wanted to know how we could portray the group as a "cross section" of county voters -- when not a single member supported the winner of the election.

A tough question -- and one we asked ourselves in the final days of the campaign, as polls forecast a big win for the Terminator.

The answer, I believe, begins in what political consultants call "the criteria of choice."

Simply put, it means that every campaign is a battle to define what the election fundamentally is about; in any race, the candidate who succeeds in selling his definition to the most voters wins.

In the recall, for example, Gray Davis urged voters to use Ideology as their criteria of choice, arguing the recall was a partisan attempt to undo a legal election. Tom McClintock defined the race as being about Big Government and set forth a conservative economic plan to reduce the deficit. The porn star Mary Carey said it was about . . . well, you get the idea.

Schwarzenegger effectively defined the election as being about Insurgency. Portraying himself as a true outsider, he campaigned hard, not only against Davis, but also against the entire Sacramento establishment, with its poll- and cash-driven special interest politics.

By contrast, our 11-member panel (a 12th dropped out) largely saw the campaign as being about Specific Solutions to the deficit and other key issues. They were hungry for meaty policy proposals, so Schwarzenegger's movie line slogans and broad strokes rhetoric simply did not resonate as they did with others around the county and the state.

Why the disconnect?

As soon as the recall qualified last summer, we knew we wanted a different way to cover what was clearly a very different kind of campaign.

Most important, we wanted real people to be a central part of our grassroots coverage. But we wanted to move beyond opinion polls and the Mood of the Man in the Street, two staples of newspaper political reporting, and drill down more deeply on voter attitudes and issues.

We first put a little notice on the front page, seeking volunteers who were interested in politics but undecided about the recall.

We got more than 50 responses, and political writer Nora Wallace spent several days interviewing the applicants. Then she, Linda, Metro Editor Jane Hulse and I went through the list to cull it down to 12 people.

We sought a true cross-section of Santa Barbara.

Understanding that a small group could not statistically reflect the county, we tried as much as possible to reflect its diversity, in terms of party affiliation, gender, age, ethnicity and geography. Its members ranged from a 19-year-old Libertarian to a 77-year-old "decline to state," with many stripes of partisans and independents in between.

The one common denominator is that every member of our group was undecided on either the merits of the recall or the replacement candidates for governor.

Over the next seven weeks, our panelists collectively spent hundreds of hours reading, researching, debating, discussing and answering endless questions from us about the recall process and candidates.

Their sustained effort, interest and connection to the political process was one of the more fascinating things I've seen in more than 25 years practicing political journalism in California.

Their deliberations were not only a source of good stories for us, but also a tribute to Santa Barbara's public spiritedness: Civil, good-natured, open-minded, and tireless, our panelists produced a vigorous and intellectually honest debate about the most important public issue of the day. Their decency, caring and commitment made it an honor to chronicle it in our pages.

In the end, their rejection of Schwarzenegger came down to three issues, which they clearly articulated immediately after watching the only debate in which the governor-elect participated.

* Process. Many panelists began and ended the campaign deeply ambivalent about the wisdom of the recall process itself, fearing it was a shortcut way to short-circuit the election cycle.

* Sound bites. Many panelists expressed concern that Schwarzenegger was a packaged candidate marketed for a mass media audience, an actor mouthing rehearsed sound bites in playing the role of a political leader.

* Specifics. Our panelists viewed policy and budget issues with nuance and complexity and sought a candidate who would address them at a level of specificity. It is instructive that they overwhelmingly voted McClintock the winner of the big debate, after he offered the most detailed and dispassionate analysis of the deficit during that event.

As Schwarzenegger prepares to govern, we plan to reconvene our panel in six months, to find out what they think about how he's doing.

Maybe by then it will be clear whether the election was about Insurgency, or about Specific Solutions.

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