Election Tea Leaves

Journalists love endorsements. Voters don't care.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

President Bush's decision to make a last-minute stop in Virginia for Republican gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore prompted all kinds of media analysis. Would the president get credit if Kilgore won? Would he be blamed if Kilgore lost? Would he be blamed if Kilgore lost anyway, meaning there was no extra risk in doing the drop-by, especially if it enabled Bush to claim credit in case of victory?

Now that Democrat Tim Kaine has won, the press has set the table for all the what-does-it-say-about-Bush pieces.

What journalists often fail to appreciate is that state and local races turn on state and local issues and personalities. There may be voters who would back Jerry Kilgore because Bush visited the state, but I doubt there are many of them. I had the same feeling when I saw Democrat Jon Corzine repeatedly running ads in the New Jersey governor's race with Bill Clinton singing his praises.

The Jersey race was more likely to turn on the appalling mud-slinging in which the press carried allegations that both Corzine and Republican Doug Forrester had extramarital affairs, and Forrester ran an ad quoting Corzine's ex-wife as saying he had abandoned his family and would probably be a lousy governor. I guess voters decided to ignore the former Mrs. Corzine, because the senator won easily. His reward: Moving to Trenton.

Endorsements are a cheap and easy story for political reporters. Remember what a huge deal the media made over Al Gore's backing of Howard Dean? Lotta good that did him.

The only exception I can think of is when Rudy Giuliani endorsed Mike Bloomberg weeks after 9/11, although the former Wall Streeter's spending of $75 million that year didn't hurt. (The Republican mayor's victory yesterday followed an avalanche of TV ads versus nothing for Freddy Ferrer until the final days. If it were a prizefight, it would have been stopped weeks ago.)

There's a simple reason why journalists love big-name endorsements in local contests: because they're dying to imbue them with national significance. Otherwise, they're just local races about schools, taxes, traffic, potholes and health care. What the media want are trend stories that have national significance and can be read as a harbinger of the next national elections.

The Note even noted that "national political analysts have gone on TV to say, in effect, 'Stop us, before we over-analyze again.' "

Fat chance.

Every four years, the press grabs onto the flotsam of the Jersey and Virginia races and the New York mayoral contest--boosted this year by Arnold's special election in California--and tries to interpret, infer and extrapolate what it all means . And it may not mean squat beyond the borders of those states. But political reporters are smart enough to make it interesting reading anyway.