8/23/00 10:50 a.m.
Summer's Fun, Punditocracy's Fall?
A watershed moment.

Robert A. George is an editorial page writer
for the New York Post------------------------------------RAGGEDmail@aol.com

oward Kurtz had an interesting story in Friday's Washington Post. It chronicled the hesitancy of many pundits the night before to grade Al Gore's speech. "It may be that [they] are worried about appearing too opinionated, but it's equally likely that they're worried about being wrong. It's easier to hang back and wait for the polls, but political analysts are, after all, paid to analyze."

This was a watershed moment. After years of criticizing politicians for being slaves to the polls, it appears that the punditocracy has itself abdicated — it wants to wait for the polls to come in before judging a political event. This suggests that, if there had been any doubt beforehand, there can't be now: We live completely in a Clintonized political culture. Bill Clinton polls everything and then tailors his policies and speeches to suit. Dick Morris explained a few years ago that the First Family doesn't even vacation without checking the polls (as far as we know, there's no evidence that Chelsea selected Stanford because of the importance of California to the Democrats' fortunes — but it certainly can't be discounted).

Not too surprisingly, congressional Republicans followed suit. Unfortunately, either their pollsters were not as good or the GOP has difficulty interpreting polls as well as Democrats. Regardless, polls are more and more used as a guide to making a specific decision rather than merely being used as information with which to help process a decision.

And so, now pundits have decided to wait upon polls to determine whether Gore's speech — and, by extension, the Democratic convention — is a success. Now, it is the case that many conservatives didn't bother to wait for the polls. Neither NRO's own Jonah Goldberg nor the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan had any problem instantly calling Gore a "loser." Noonan's opinion, of course, carries a lot of weight considering she wrote George H. W. Bush's acceptance speech in 1988, which was widely praised as helping Bush overtake Dukakis.

No, Noonan was not just upset that Gore chose to write his own speech. She decried it not because it lacked rhetoric (which it certainly did), "but because it lacked thought... its sound shaped not by the simple speech of the honest man but by a reflexive politico-bureaucratese..." But, is it possible that Al Gore, frighteningly, more clever than we thought. Is it possible that the lesson of the last eight years is that Al Gore is more of an un-Clinton than anyone could have thought? If Clinton connects by glamour and empathy, Gore is earnestly down-to-earth — or at least puts on a reasonable appearance as such. That was the image presented in Tipper's home-video presentation. If Clinton is the free-wheeling lothario, Gore is the dull family man, who still loves his wife. That was certainly one lesson of "The Kiss." (That also might explain why Gore seemed to speed through is speech; he had a hot date afterwards.)

But few liberal pundits wished to speculate last Thursday. Instead, the "non-ideological," (i.e. liberal) "experts" waited until the insta-polls came in over the weekend. They then ventured out to try to make sense of it all. It's becoming increasingly evident that the punditocracy, at long last, has to admit that they have no idea who "the American people" are.

Beyond that, the truth remains that, since 1994, the pundits have been increasingly wrong about things political. Hardly anyone predicted the GOP landslide that year. No one predicted that the Democrats would gain seats in 1998 (especially in light of Clinton's troubles). In fact, each election year, going back to 1992 has tended to upset accepted "wisdom," from Clinton-Gore's breaking of the Republican presidential 12-year presidential "lock" through Clinton's being the first Democrat reelected since FDR ('96 was also the first year that a Democrat president and Republican Congress were reelected simultaneously). And so it went.

The punditocracy is forced to face — it must understand what it doesn't understand: The current electorate. It began losing control of them (as did the conservative movement) during the impeachment saga. Bill Clinton, through either superior political instincts or basic force of will managed to connect with this group — the "silent plurality," perhaps. They remained his basic bedrock of support. To the consternation of various critics. Thus, the pundit class remains (somewhat) silent for fear they will be proven wrong once again.

Perhaps they fear that their days are numbered after this year's election — will there be three 24-hour newschannel's next time around?

Basic instincts having collapsed, who should be surprised that the pundits finally surrender to the last device they have dismissed the most — polling? Well, for the time being, we should not care too much. It's just that, now — in order to keep their jobs — they will simply say that which people already know. It's a little easier that way.