Not even experts know how race will turn out

By SARA FRITZ

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 11, 2000

WASHINGTON -- What sets Washington pundits apart from normal people is they think they know more than everyone else about politics and government. There is nothing they haven't seen happen before, they tell themselves.

I was overcome by those smug feelings just last week when the new Chinese pandas arrived in Washington. As a young reporter back in 1973, I covered the arrival of the first pair of pandas, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling.

This just proves, I said to myself with a satisfied smile, the value of my experience as a Washington journalist.

Ha! I am sure you already see where I am heading with this.

The events of the past five weeks have clearly demonstrated that nobody -- not even those of us in Washington who make our living doing this -- have sufficient experience to predict how the 2000 president election is going to turn out.

Uncharted waters -- that's the phrase you hear repeated most often these days. Washington pundits, you see, have also mastered the right cliches.

The post-election recount started out so sensibly that while it was unusual, it was certainly not beyond our imagining.

Who knew that a recount could pose so many new issues that we political experts had never even considered before? Who knew the difference between a Votomatic and a Vegamatic?

Standard wisdom, which is ladled out in embarrassingly large helpings each week by newspaper columnists and talking heads on television, said that it would only be a matter of days until the winner was declared. Not to worry.

Even when it became apparent that the courts would likely decide the outcome, we were not particularly flustered. After all, we political reporters are not entirely unschooled in Marbury vs. Madison.

But last Friday night, after the Florida Supreme Court acted against every last shred of available standard wisdom, many of us realized we were way over our heads on this one.

Even MSNBC's Chris Matthews might have been momentarily speechless.

Here in the Times' Washington bureau, we sought the advice of constitutional scholars. We asked: If Florida chooses two slates of electors, how will the dispute be resolved? While they agreed on many points, there were questions that had no answers.

If constitutional scholars are befuddled, who can blame the pundits for being clueless. The truth is the news media has no idea how this is going to turn out, and if you hear or read anything to the contrary, beware.

In the past few weeks, I have heard more so-called experts spouting misinformation than in any time I can remember. Frequently, it is partisanship masquerading as expertise.

There has been a big controversy in the journalism community in recent years about news commentators, such as George Stephanopolous, who have moved from politics to journalism. There are those who would police our profession under the guise of eliminating partisans.

Personally, I do not adhere to that view. Who is to judge the difference between an honest journalist and a partisan? That is a slippery slope -- if I don't mind my showing off my own mastery of cliches.

My advice, dear reader, is to be skeptical of everything you read and hear these days -- and especially skeptical of the information you agree with.

Remarkably, the post-election battle over the presidency is something we see so rarely in our times -- pure, unscripted news -- that we may have forgotten how to appreciate it. Even the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton were never as genuinely suspenseful as this.

Not only is this a case of history running out of our control, it is downright important. This is not a question of whether O.J. Simpson will be found guilty -- not a soap opera disguised as news.

The question to be answered in the next few weeks is not just who will be the 43rd president but whether our 200 year-old republic is still nimble enough to handle one of the most perplexing challenges of the modern era.

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