2008 Race, 20 Months Away, Dominating TV: Unusual Amount of 2008 Presidential Campaign Coverage for an Election 20 Months Away

By DAVID BAUDER AP Television Writer

NEW YORK Mar 4, 2007 (AP)— Two months before the 1992 presidential election, an NBC reporter cornered a man to ask whether he preferred Bill Clinton or President Bush.

The man said he didn't care. He just wanted them off his TV screen.

Imagine how he'd feel today?

The 2008 campaign is already playing out so intensely that it dominates airtime at a point where only political junkies usually pay attention. Remember: it's 20 months before voters will make the ultimate decision.

This is uncharted territory for people in both politics and television, who wonder when campaign fatigue will set in. Many Americans may be sick of seeing their next president before he or she even takes the oath of office.

In one measure of news interest, campaign stories have consumed 95 minutes of attention this year through Feb. 27 on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts. That's more time than in the comparable periods for the previous four presidential election cycles combined, according to the Tyndall Report.

Presidential politics was so far off the radar in January and February 1991 that the three newscasts together spent less than a minute on the upcoming campaign.

The study doesn't even take into account time chewed up by the cable TV networks, with their gaping 24-hour news holes. CNN was around in 1991, but Fox News Channel and MSNBC didn't exist. Neither did "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart.

"It used to be that campaigning was the interval between governing," said Bob Schieffer, host of CBS' "Face the Nation." "Now governing is the interval between campaigning."

Behind Iraq, the 2008 campaign is the top news story of 2007. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which compiles a weekly news index taking broadcast and cable TV, newspapers and the Internet into account, said the campaign was the top story the week of Feb. 18-23. The biggest development then was Hollywood mogul David Geffen taking shots at Hillary Clinton, and the campaigns of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama sniping at each other in response. The story is likely to be forgotten in two months, let alone 20.

Television is responding to the unusual early activity in this campaign and, to a certain degree, the public, said George Stephanopoulos, ABC's "This Week" host. Nearly two-thirds of people responding to an ABC-Washington Post poll this week said they were following the campaign closely.

"That is simply astonishing," Stephanopoulos said. "Those are the kind of numbers you see at convention time, not 20 months before the elections."

Many factors are at play: The Iraq war has deeply divided the public and, polls say, many Americans have already checked out on the Bush presidency; the 2008 election will be the first in 82 years with no involvement by an incumbent president or vice president; the biggest political stars of the day are involved, including John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Clinton and Obama.

Knowing the importance of raising money and preparing for a condensed primary season where nominations could be sewn up in a month, the candidates are already running hard.

A campaign where voters have nothing to say for another year exaggerates the media's importance.

Neat narratives and conventional wisdom are already developing. Few Americans could pick Mitt Romney out of a lineup, but know him as the flip-flopper trying to appear more conservative than he is. Giuliani is America's mayor who may be undone by his liberalism. McCain's moment has passed and he's weighed down by his support for the war. Obama's the rookie repository for American dreams. Joseph Biden's campaign was born and died on the same day when he made remarks perceived as racially insensitive. Clinton? Everybody knows Clinton and has made up their minds about her.

Each story line may have a ring of truth now. Time might decide otherwise. So might voters.

"One of the risks of a protracted campaign that doesn't involve voters is you get a kind of creative reality," said Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter for the Los Angeles Times and now director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Consider some conventional wisdom of the past: Howard Dean was on the way to the Democratic nomination and John Kerry's campaign was cooked, at least in late 2003. The George Bush who ran in 2000 was a compassionate conservative and non-idealogue who worked well with Democrats.

Candidates left out of the narrative may never have a chance. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack abandoned his bid for the presidency almost a year before voters in his state meet for their closely watched caucuses.

An aide to Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd called NBC's Chris Matthews to ask him to please not forget his boss' name when talking about the second tier of candidates, Matthews said.

"The hardest thing when I make my quadrennial resolutions is `don't pay attention to early polls,'" Matthews said. "But it is so hard not to."

On the flip side, Schieffer is convinced that Giuliani's surge in the polls may partly be due to McCain's overfamiliarity. McCain is on the news all the time while Giuliani has kept an air of mystery about him, he said.

The veteran Schieffer worries about the impact of a long campaign. The topic has been bandied about in several newsrooms.

"I find myself getting tired of it," he said. "I really do. I love politics, I'm a political reporter. But when they go on and on and on, they just wear you out."

Logic tells Stephanopoulos that there will be lulls in the campaign. But this one may be different. In that, news organizations won't be the drivers, the newsmen say. They'll be driven.

"As long as there is news with the campaigns themselves, we're going to cover it," he said.