Romney wrapping it up
New endorsements and vanishing coverage clear signals in race
WASHINGTON— It was supposed to be a week about anything but the race for the Republican crown.
But somehow, the supposed respite of a whole 10 days without primaries — and the distraction of blockbuster Supreme Court hearings with Obamacare in the dock — appears to have sealed the deal for Mitt Romney.
It wasn’t just the drip-drip-drip of key endorsements, with Tea Party favourites Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan and two of the three Bushes (former Florida governor Jeb and his dad, George H.W.) all rising in Romney’s corner in the past few days.
Nor was it just the unlikely utterance of Newt Gingrich, who on Friday choked down 12 weeks of his own bombast, admitting to a Milwaukee radio station that Romney is not only “clearly the front-runner” but also “will probably” get the 1,144 convention delegates he needs to win the nomination.
For those who speak Gingrich, those words scream “Uncle.” The former House Speaker may not be out of the race, officially. But his de facto ceasefire, after months of excoriating personal attacks, means essentially the same thing.
Arguably the more interesting dimension driving the Republican nomination race to a ho-hum, whocares finish is the vanishing American political coverage.
Two weeks ago, the last two “embeds” — campaign reporters detailed to full-time coverage — pulled away from Ron Paul. A week ago, it was Gingrich who lost the last of his embeds.
And though Romney’s last serious rival, Rick Santorum, still has reporters in his midst — readying for Tuesday’s triple-header primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia — Santorum has openly taunted them, saying: “They’re all trying to go home, get off the road and stop writing about this thing. They’re all tired.”
Indeed, exhaustion may be a factor — but perhaps it’s the audience, not the reporters, who feel it most. And as viewers tune out, it becomes all the more difficult for TV news anchors to intone the words “crucial” and “drama” in a race that, with each passing primary, seems to involve neither.
“I can testify that campaign reporters yearn to stay out on the trail as long as there is a hint of drama to the story,” veteran political correspondent Walter Shapiro wrote this week on the Columbia Journalism Review’s Swing State Project blog. “The problem is when the campaign becomes like the movie Groundhog Day, when each day seems like the last and disconsolate reporters sense that no one is reading (or watching) their stories.”
Last week a minor furor erupted when NBC’S Chuck Todd chided coverage of the 2012 race as “tidbit journalism” — a succession of small, buzzy, viral-friendly political stories that favour the gaffe du jour over traditional reportage. Maybe there’s something to that. A month ago, we managed to catch out Romney on one such gaffe when he regaled a Michigan Tea Party rally with childhood memories of the day Detroit painted the streets gold to celebrate the birthplace of the automobile. When the Toronto Star doublechecked and reported that the epic Detroit festivities actually took place nine months before Romney was born, stateside web traffic surged to thestar.com. For a day. Until the next gaffe took a large part of the political audience elsewhere. But perhaps the flip side to “tidbit journalism” is that in the real world of instant news, nothing takes the air out of a story like sheer repetition. And repetition — Romney leading, the other three remaining, rinse, repeat — has been the story since January. Shapiro, noting “how often in politics the smug conventional wisdom can be grotesquely wrong,” cautioned his impatient peers that the media would do well to resist the “Mitt-is-it rush” and let democracy unfold at its own pace. “Have we reached the point when a presidential campaign only feels real if the candidates are caught up in the reality-show drama of TV debates with smack-downs and oops moments?” wrote Shapiro. “Do a lack of debates plus a lack of charismatic candidates add up to a late March news blackout?” Earlier this week, Barack Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, added his voice to the legion of gleeful Democrats who characterize their opponents with big red noses, calling the Republican primary “more of a circus show, a clown show.” Perhaps he could afford a laugh on the heels of new polls showing Obama expanding his national lead over all four infighting GOP rivals. But with the media, pundits and a withering assortment of senior Republicans now pulling down the Big Top peg by peg, the April Fool’s joke may turn out to be that Obama’s rivals are ready to forgive and forget sooner than anyone thought — and realign behind Romney in the spirit of Anybody But Obama. It’s the one message that transcends and animates the fragmented Republican ranks. And the one message Democrats aren’t laughing about.