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It's done. Jim Lehrer hosts a panel of NewsHour regulars and experts and takes a lingering look back at the convention that was. Did it succeed? Will American politics ever again see a true floor fight, or is the spontaneity gone for good? Our experts have their say.

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JIM LEHRER: Now some end of convention thoughts from four NewsHour regulars who have been here all week--David Gergen of U.S. News & World Report, Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss, Journalist/Author Haynes Johnson, and William Kristol, editor and publisher of the Weekly Standard. They are joined from far away New York by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kathleen, as a piece of communications, how does this convention rate?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON, Annenberg School for Communication: (New York) The Republicans accomplished their key objectives with this piece of communication. In particular, I think it's important to note that in the process they created what I think was a healthy tension between their message and the news media's message. It may be time in conventions like this to simply say let's give the parties four hours of direct prime time access, have them pay for it, and then put the news context around it, thereby solving the dilemma of putting 15,000 journalists on the ground not to cover much.

JIM LEHRER: There's an interesting dichotomy, I'm sure you picked up on, between the way television folks complain about it as television, but the newspapers, the “New York Times” continued to banner it as the lead story of the day, give thousands of words to it. How do you explain that difference?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: It is the lead story of the day, but it lacked the conflict and the drama that is native to the vocabulary for television. And in the absence of that and given a lot of attempt to stage manage with an unprecedentedly large number of pre-packaged visual pieces, the broadcasters were seen in a position of fighting the message, where the print reporters could simply say these are the speeches, here's what's there, and then write their side pieces, saying, by the way, there's a lot of crafting going on here.

JIM LEHRER: So the real story here may be the continuing divergence between print journalism and television journalism?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: I think there are two stories here. The first is that there was a lot of valuable information that was missed by those who watched broadcast networks. There's a reason we have party conventions. Learning about the party and the aspiring leaders in the party is important to voters, but the second message is I think is the message that you've identified, which is that from print there was a substantive story here because there's a great deal of substance in this convention, whereas, for broadcasters, the need to be driven by their own visuals, not somebody else's, and by drama and conflict, just simply suggested to them there wasn't news there.

JIM LEHRER: Now as a professional who studies communication, you say it was an effective piece of communication. Now you watched it obviously only on television.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Yes.

JIM LEHRER: And did you try to follow it both ways? In other words, did you try to follow the C-Span gavel to gavel and then go to the networks? How did you personally as a pro try to find out what was going on here?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: I watched C-Span as the base in order to see what was happening on the convention floor, pulled the materials off the Internet to be able to read what was presented because there were some--

JIM LEHRER: The Internet? Excuse me. I mean, you had the Internet there going to at the same time?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Yup. That's right. And then also taped all of the other channels so that the next day I could look to see what other people missed by not watching C-Span.

JIM LEHRER: So when you look ahead to the future, do you think that what's coming is the four hours paid time that will be on everybody's channel if they're willing to pay for it, and then the journalism will be around it, is that right?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Yes. And I think Ted Koppel made a serious mistake. I think he left one night too early because on Wednesday night the Republicans made an extremely strong case for a facet of Bob Dole's personality that we hadn't seen before. And what was missing that night was the half hour on “Nightline” that said what we do we know about the biography of Bob Dole now vetted through a news perspective, not through a highly crafted and very carefully sculptured set of remembrances from his close friends.

JIM LEHRER: So the television journalist has the same opportunity as the print journalist if he or she wishes to take it, and his or her network will give them the time to do it.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, also the network--the broadcast networks could have stayed on their air into their own local news time if they really wanted to provide commentary on the decisive moments each night. And those moments were crafted to be the last moments of the network news hour. But they didn't want to forego the local news revenue and, hence, I think decided that rather than put the news on the air from a national perspective, they would take the local revenues and cut to the local affiliates.

So I'm not that sympathetic to the broadcast networks when I can look at how we're being manipulated. We have to leave you right now, it's 11 o'clock, our local affiliates have to have their money.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Haynes, somebody who's spent his life in print, have we had--is this--have we come to a watershed time?

HAYNES JOHNSON, Author/Journalist: It's been growing there convention after convention, Jim. This is the first time I've been at a convention in thirty some years that I haven't been writing every day. In those days, you talk about the Internet, we'd hack out on typewriters, manual typewriters, not the computers and so forth, but the staging of conventions has always--they've always been staged. They want to put on the best impression. It is clearly a case now, though I doubt that you're going to see the four-day convention anymore in prime time television. That clearly is a thing of the past.

JIM LEHRER: Unless they pay for it, as Kathleen said.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Sure. That's fine. But I think it is important that their--significance occurs at these events. Not enough significance to have 15,000 journalists in search of 4,000 delegates perhaps, but these matter. These tell you who are going to lead the country, what their ideas are, and it's our job, it seems to me, not only to take the crafted material that they're going to give you, they're all going to do that, but to try to find out what is actually being said, what's not being said if you see the stage that's up there, what else aren't you seeing on the podium, it seems to me that's what journalism is all about. Maybe that's old fashioned, Jim, but that's the way I view it.

JIM LEHRER: David, some--I heard a journalist say yesterday, in fact, at the convention, itself, what happens on the podium, should be viewed by us as a press release, and what we do with it before, afterward, around, and whatever is our business, that's all it is, is a press release.

DAVID GERGEN, U.S. News & World Report: I think that's fair. It's a video press release. That's what it's become. I do think it's been drained of much of the suspense, obviously, as a video press release and because this was a particularly highly scripted convention, the speeches themselves, it seemed to me, had an homogenized quality about them, although I agree with Kathleen that they were effective political indications, but I do think--

JIM LEHRER: Why do you think they were effective political communications?

DAVID GERGEN: Because they began to change the tone and direction of the Republican Party. After the ‘94 elections, there was sort of a rough edge to the Republican Party that I think was supported by a lot of conservatives but it seemed to me it drove many voters away. And it was also exploited by the Clinton administration. This was an attempt by the moderates to reassert their voice and their authority within the party, and I think they presented a more inviting, more moderate conservatism, which in my judgment is closer to where the heart of the country is.

JIM LEHRER: Would you agree with that, Bill Kristol, that whatever the media part of it is concerned if the Republicans wanted to change the image of the party in this four days, they did it?

WILLIAM KRISTOL, The Weekly Standard: I think they did that. They really had three goals, I think, Jim. One to soften the image of the party, to take care of the problem they felt that was created by the Gingrich Congress, and by the Buchanan candidacy as well; that, they succeeded terrifically in. The image got so soft that it was almost not Republican.

JIM LEHRER: You said that, Kristol.

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Secondly, they need to reintroduce Bob Dole to the country. Mrs. Dole did a terrific job of that Wednesday night, and I think the polling data showed that was quite effective. Whether Sen. Dole did as good a job Thursday night on that is, I think, we will see over the next few days. The third task in any convention, though, has to lay out issues for a candidate to campaign on in the fall.

And there I think the ascendancy of style over substance made it harder to really lay down markers for Dole and for the rest of the Republicans across the country to sort of take--to launch their campaigns from for the next three months.

JIM LEHRER: Michael, what do you think about this?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: I hate to be 19th century. If I were a convention planner--I apologize in advance--but if I were a convention planner, I would have done the week exactly as convention managers did here in San Diego this week. I think this was a week that will help the Republican Party. If I were not a convention manager, as I'm not, just an historian, I really think it's really rather atrocious for our system. You know we've talked a lot this week about past conventions.

What they traditionally did was they nominated a President and a Vice President, and they also debated their differences. Well, the President and Vice President were nominated months ago, and the differences were not debated in the open; they were debated in private. One of the best things for American democracy is if you have cleavages, have conflicts, let them take place in the open, not behind the scenes.

And I think, in retrospect, one of the most important things that we may feel has happened this week is that the nomination of Bob Dole on Wednesday night allowed him to get federal funding for his campaign. What he might want to do in the future is simply have a televised presentation of the $74 million check, and that's the thing that's significant.

JIM LEHRER: Haynes, do you agree with Michael that whatever else it is this, this is so different that--from what these things began--

HAYNES JOHNSON: Oh, yeah.

JIM LEHRER: --or the way they began, and, well, you've heard what he said.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Oh, sure, and we've talked all week--the absence of emotion or passion, there were real issues at this convention, there were real differences at this convention on abortion, on immigration, on the role of women, on the role of government, on all of these things, and it did come over fuzzy and gauzy as people have said, and you didn't get any of that.

The part that emerged from this convention was one of great uniformity of opinion, indifference from the delegations, themselves. I think we're better served and I think the party's better served, either party, by having real, honest, hard debates. And to me--

JIM LEHRER: Go ahead.

HAYNES JOHNSON: But that's what was absent from this process.

JIM LEHRER: But to play devil's advocate, as I'm sure Bill Kristol and David Gergen would, that if that, in fact, had happened here, we would all be talking about the Republicans don't have their act together, they don't agree, it's just a terrible blood letting, they're acting like Democrats.

DAVID GERGEN: That's right. Journalists would have loved it, and Republicans would have hated it.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah.

DAVID GERGEN: But I think to come back to something Kathleen said and following up on Mike--Jim, I think there's something sad about this convention. It does seem to me that this is probably the last time we're going to see a convention like this on prime time television. We're into a downward spiral, and that is when the audiences go down, the networks, the broadcast networks begin to flee, and we're down from one hundred hours of prime time broadcast network time in 1980 to sixteen this time.

When the number of hours go down, the convention planners begin to over package and over plan, because they've just got this tight, little window to communicate their message. When that happens, the networks begin to say, this is all manipulative, it's boring, and the audience goes down some more. Last night--the overnight suggests that last night the audience for Bob Dole's acceptance speech was down 1/3--

JIM LEHRER: Overnight ratings.

DAVID GERGEN: Overnight ratings. It was down 1/3 from the audience that George Bush enjoyed four years ago in Houston. That's a huge drop in audience.

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Yeah. And the irony is that this most made-for-TV convention ever was viewed less on TV than any of the previous conventions in the TV era.

JIM LEHRER: Kathleen, do you have an explanation for that? Here was the most TV thing, yet, nobody watched it--not nobody--not as many watched it.

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Yeah. I think part of the problem is that there was a dominant theme in the broadcast news coverage which said this is a boring convention, we're being manipulated, the implication was there isn't much here of substance. And what's unfortunate is that that, I think, contributed to decreasing. To diminishing the audience for one of the three most important moments in the Republican candidates' campaign. An acceptance speech is an extraordinarily important document. It forecasts the campaign. It forecasts the presidency. And I'm sorry that so many people missed that because they weren't given a chance to get to know some important things about Bob Dole.

JIM LEHRER: Michael, I know you're a historian, but let me ask you to go forward on this. Let's assume that nothing changes in the process, that we continue to have a primary system, that the candidates--the nominees are going to be known months before there is a convention. How do you make a convention like this work in that kind of environment?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: You can't. You can't do something with a national meeting that really has no function unless it's going to have a serious role in nominating a candidate, and unless it's going to have a serious role in resolving big differences that afflict a party. Then you basically got sort of an “up with people” type ceremony which is rather devoid of very much interest, and no one is going to look at it, and the result is it's not going to be a big moment in the life of the campaign.

I would very much love to see presidential primaries decline in importance, and have a system that gives a national convention a little bit more power. So there is the possibility that by the time a convention meets, you don't know who the candidate is going to be, and you'll see some conflict on the floor. I think that tends to involve people in the system. If you have something this sterile, people check out of the system.

JIM LEHRER: But, David Gergen, what--what can be done about this, or what even should be done about it?

DAVID GERGEN: Well, I happen to believe that the delegates you mentioned ought to have a lot more strength and power and take some of the power away from the primaries. I think there's been a mistake by the parties to put all of the votes into the primaries essentially and have it predecided so well in advance. I think some of the party pros ought to have a voice, having said that.

So I think that Michael's correction is right. Jim, I think they need to cut the amount of time in this conventions down. If they could go to say two to three nights and work with the networks, I would be happy as a citizen to see them trade off one or two nights of the convention in August to have at least one night in October when people are really checked in, when the parties ought to have a chance to really address the country.

JIM LEHRER: Haynes, if you were the political god of America, what would ordain?

HAYNES JOHNSON: You can't do these conventions this way anymore. People won't listen. And they're also very cynical about what they see. I think that from the party's own standpoint, it's a mistake for them to try to package this thing so much because I think people are very cynical. We know toothpaste doesn't make us sexy. Children growing up knowing that; they understand that. They know that commercials don't always--it isn't perfect. So I think you've got to be less time--reform the primary process, have a series of debates around the country on issues, and I think then if the public wants to tune in, they will tune in.

JIM LEHRER: So the idea, the fact that the Republican Party at this convention put out a lot of moderate speakers on the podium doesn't necessarily mean that the public now believes the Republican Party is a moderate party.

HAYNES JOHNSON: I believe that. I can't document that but I believe that to be true.

JIM LEHRER: We'll find out.

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Well, no, but I think there is some evidence that, in fact, they change perceptions, at least temporarily. The question is there was so much style and so little substance, whether the bump in the polls the Republicans get, the gains they seem to have made among moderate independent voters sort of fritter or disappear over the next two, three, four weeks because there's not much substance behind in that respect.

JIM LEHRER: It was only--in other words, that's not--

WILLIAM KRISTOL: It was Mrs. Dole. It was the people on the podium.

JIM LEHRER: It was only a podium deal.

WILLIAM KRISTOL: But we shouldn't mislead people into thinking that these conventions have no effect. I mean, if you look at recent presidential elections, the conventions, the acceptance speeches have been big moments in several campaigns. So there are still lots of people watching, even when we talk about a diminishing number.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. We have to leave it there. Thank you very much, Kathleen in New York and gentlemen here.

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