Candy Crowley
Political Journalismwords by > Norman Sklarewitz
POLITICAL PRESS
* Veteran CNN political reporter Candy Crowley reveals the business behind reporting the elections.
By tradition, serious campaigning for an off -year election, such as the one coming up in November, begins right aft er Labor Day. Don’t tell that to Candy Crowley. As senior political correspondent for CNN and a familiar voice on XM Satellite Radio, Crowley figures that she began working on the coming campaign since just about the time the last one ended two years ago. Th at’s the way it is for this self-described “political junkie.”
In the popular view, a television political reporter is most oft en seen in a clutch of press people shoving their microphones in the face of a politician as he or she leaves a congressional hearing room. Don’t look for Crowley in that situation, at least not very oft en. Instead, CNN viewers and people listening to XM Radio expect her to off er political insight, the background to breaking news and, when appropriate, carefully reasoned analysis.
But even for someone so keenly interested in politics, the prospect of analyzing, let alone reporting, on all aspects of the coming mid-term elections would seem to be impossible. All 435 members of the House of Representatives are up for reelection. Th ere are 33 contested seats in the Senate. And 36 governors are up for reelection.
Within those raw numbers are critical dynamics. To get control of the Senate, the Democrats need a net gain of six seats, if the Independents vote with them. If not, they need seven. Going into the election, the GOP has 231 seats in the House; the Democrats 201; two seats are vacant. In the Senate, there are four retiring senators—two Democrats, one Republican, one Independent. Of the 33 seats contested, 17 are Democratic, 15 Republican.
The Republicans need to hold onto only 50 seats to have a majority, since the Vice President, who serves as President of the Senate, breaks all ties.
So how does this veteran political wonk cover all the races? Simple—she doesn’t. “Th at doesn’t keep me up nights,” laughs Crowley. “CNN has people all over the country who are quite capable of going out and covering local, individual races.” Besides, she adds, “Daunting as that sounds from the numbers, the important races are far fewer than that.” She figures there are probably no more than two or three dozen House races and maybe 10 Senate seats that are competitive, and perhaps the same number for the gubernatorial races. “If I look at a race and the polls show that candidate X has 75 percent of the vote and candidate Y has 25 percent, I don’t go there,” she says. “Such a race isn’t competitive, it isn’t interesting, it isn’t news.”
Reduced to its lowest common denominator, Crowley insists that every mid-term election is a referendum of the party in power. “Th ey always are,” she says, looking back on a reporting career with CNN that dates to 1987, and before that jobs at NBC’s Washington Bureau and as White House correspondent for the Associated Press.
Her challenge now is to identify local races that may provide clues to the broad national picture and the 2008 presidential election.
This spring, for example, she was in Texas looking at a race in which a Republican was running in a district currently held by a Democrat. Th e candidate in question was also an Iraq War veteran. Th at gave her an idea: “How many Iraq War veterans are candidates this fall?” Th at would be a story.
She also was looking for trends in terms of women candidates. “What’s happening in the suburbs that traditionally would be considered Republican territory?
Is that changing as more urbanites who might be inclined to vote Democratic move out?”
Th ere are other stories that are more hard news in nature. “How much damage may have been done to Republicans by the Abramoff scandal?” she muses. For clues, she’s watching one race with a Republican candidate who had ties to the convicted lobbyist. He’s running in what is ordinarily a “safe” GOP state, but he may be in for a fight. Any such “endangered” seat lures Crowley out of Washington and into where the action will be. “A reporter needs to get as close as he can to the source, and the source in any election is the people who are going to vote.”
Crowley says, “Th ere have been elections when you couldn’t really figure the central theme; you didn’t know what was driving people to the polls. But those are few and far between.” And she’s rather confident that the election coming up won’t be one, either.
While gubernatorial races are important, Crowley generally considers those races to be almost wholly driven by state issues and state politics. Having said that, she cautions, “Some gubernatorial races can tell you something about the way the nation is going.” As an example, she is looking at one race in which the incumbent Democratic governor in a large state is facing strong opposition. Should his Republican opponent win in November, that would have significance for the 2008 presidential campaign, she points out.
And there’s one overall theme that is certain to dominate media coverage of the coming election: “Are the Democrats going to take over Congress?” she asks. “Anything that fits under the umbrella could be a very interesting story. Th e Democrats say it’s time for a change; the Republicans say ‘stay the course.’ ” As for issues that will figure high in coming races, Crowley doesn’t hesitate: Iraq, immigration reform, high gas prices and bird fl u. However, she believes only one will truly dominate. “To me, Iraq has become a patina that colors how everybody feels about everything.”
Reporting for such major CNN programs as Wolf Blitzer’s “Th e Situation Room,” “American Morning,” “Anderson Cooper 360” and “Paula Zahn Now” increasingly takes Crowley out of the network’s Washington bureau. Field reporting finds Crowley traveling with her producer and, at a minimum, one cameraman. If her report has a breaking news element that precludes going back to a local studio for the network “feed,” a satellite transmission truck may be required. CNN has 10 of these units around the US, in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, the Gulf Coast, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, San Francisco and Washington, DC.
For all the technology involved in her work, Crowley considers the greatest invention in her life to be the roll-on luggage. “I travel like a sherpa,” she laughs, describing racing through airports to catch her plane carrying her laptop, files of research, cell phone, pager and Blackberry, plus personal belongings.
Starting this month right through election night, Crowley expects to be reporting out of Washington, DC, at least three or four days a week. Compared to a presidential campaign, that’s actually modest. For the 2000 election, when she covered the Bush campaign, she was in Texas for seven consecutive weeks. You won’t ever hear her complaining, though.
“I’m totally obsessed,” she admits. “I really love politics. And the closer you get to the voters, the more you see what the founders of this country had in mind. Th ere is nothing more pure to me than the people who show up on voting day.
They’re the ones who run this country.”