Dr. William Schneider is a CNN political analyst, journalist, and former University professor. From 1990 to 1995, he served as the Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. Visiting Professor of American Politics in the BC Political Science department. He graciously agreed to sit down for an interview with BCPSAN Midwest Representative Patrick Tuohey '93 to discuss his career, Boston College, and the 2008 Presidential Election.

Patrick Tuohey '93: How do you describe what you do at CNN?

William Schneider, Ph.D.: I am a political analyst, which means really my job is to explain what is going on; "What does it mean?" I am not quite a reporter. And I am not a commentator, which is the role of saying, "You know, here is what I think." My job is to really explain, "This is what happens; here is what it means."

How long have you been at CNN?

I have been here about 18 years. I have been full-time in the past 7 or 8 years.

What did you do previously?


I have had three different careers. I started out and I got a Ph.D. in political science. I was teaching at a university for a number of years in the seventies. Then I came to Washington and began writing for publications, the Atlantic Monthly magazine, the Los Angeles Times, National Journal. I continue to write a weekly column for National Journal. And then in 1990 I was asked to work for CNN and joined the network at the beginning of 1991. So it's been university teaching, print journalism, and now broadcast journalism.


You've taught at three universities: Boston College, Brandeis, and Harvard. You were a student at both Brandeis and Harvard. What brought you to Boston College?

I had friends who were teaching in the department and they had the [Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas P.] Tip O'Neill endowment to invite visiting professors to Boston College. They invited me to come for two years as a visiting professor. That was when I first was broadcasting at CNN and I was not then a full-time employee. So I arranged the schedule and came to BC two days a week to teach. I very much enjoyed it. The position was initially offered for two years and I ended up doing it for five years because I was delighted to do it and the department was pleased with the relationship.


Of the three, then, how did BC compare? Did anything stand out about the school or the student body?


[Laughter] Well, they are all, of course, very different. Brandeis is a Jewish-sponsored institution. Boston College is a Jesuit-sponsored institution. So you got a little taste of different academic [cultures]. Neither one was really restrictive at all of academic freedom. There is no question about that. Both were completely open.

But you've got a different kind of student body. I think the BC students were more politically attuned. I recall when I first went to BC and asked students, "Have any of you ever been involved in a campaign?" About half the class raised their hands and said, "Yes." This surprised me. It was a whole class of political activists, which is normally the kind of people I attract to a course. But when I started asking them specifics, they said, "My sister is a selectman from Hull," "My brother-in-law is in the state legislature and I was involved in a campaign for mayor." In fact, my teaching assistant there actually was a Republican mayor in a town in Massachusetts. The students had all had a lot of experience in politics at BC because it was in many cases personal and family ties, much more than you would ever find at Brandeis. Students at Brandeis and Harvard were politically active, but they tended to be more cause-oriented.


Is there a difference in the type of person who is involved in either "cause politics" or "candidate politics"?

It seems to me if people are involved in personal and family ways, it's often a more professional involvement. They see it as a job or a career. They have a more personal identification with what politicians and elected officials do.

At a place like Brandeis, of course, causes are very important, whether it is a liberal cause or the cause of Israel or the Middle East. There are some conservatives at Brandeis, but they tend to be far more ideological.

The students at BC I didn't find particularly ideological, but quite interested in the political calling, the political vocation. They had commitments to issues and causes, but they tended to see things from a more professional point of view.


What have you been working on lately for CNN?

Just today I was asked to do a piece on "How long does Obama have to show a turnaround in the economy?" And I actually went back and looked at the experience of Ronald Reagan when he first got elected through to Bill Clinton when he first got elected. Both of them turned the economy around, and I discovered some very interesting patterns and differences.

The Republicans under Reagan lost a lot of seats in the first mid-term election because the economy got a whole lot worse, but Reagan said, "Stay the course," and a lot of people stuck with him. He minimized the losses and, of course, things started getting better in the second two years of his administration. By 1984 they were able to argue, mostly because of a decline in inflation, that it was "Morning in America."

In Clinton's case, the economy actually improved quite a bit in his first two years, but his party still did terribly in the mid-terms. My conclusion was that it had less to do with the economy than with a whole lot of other issues like the healthcare plan, the tax hike, the gays in the military issue, and particularly the gun control issue. So it wasn't particularly the economy. This led me to reach the conclusion that mid-term grades come out in two years and final grades come out in four years, but presidents get graded on a lot of subjects, not just the economy.


What role does the Internet and 24-hour news networks like CNN have on a president's ability to urge for patience on results? I would imagine it has shrunk dramatically since Reagan.

Certainly the voices are louder; the protests are going to be immediate; you are going to hear a lot of people shouting from all directions. That has always been true, but of course it is more efficiently done these days because ordinary citizens have been empowered by blogs, by the Internet. I mean, how many millions of blogs are there in the country, not to mention twittering and instant messaging and text messaging and e-mails and all that? So, the voices of the public get louder. It has been empowering. That is not a bad thing. Members of Congress are certainly sensitive to it. That's one of the reasons why some Democrats are raising questions about Obama's request for the second half of this bailout money that was just transmitted by President Bush. It's unpopular.

There are a lot of voices out there that say, "Don't do this. You are just throwing money at the people who got us in trouble in the first place." So, unbelievably, one of the consequences is that President-Elect Obama has had to issue a veto threat saying that if the Democrats don't release or block the money, he'll veto their measure to block the money. That's partly a result of what's happening on the Internet. It certainly has made those voices louder. Whether it's made things happen faster, I don't know.

The government works by its own rules, of course. But I think America has always been a very populist country and [the Internet] has probably made the voice of populism in this country even stronger.


What effect did new media have on the election in general? How important do you think online news sources were versus traditional media? I guess now cable news is considered traditional media.

That's right. The definitions change all the time. Now we're talking about all kinds of new things. You know, one of our anchors, Rick Sanchez, has a show every day where people twitter. They respond to him online directly and their comments are right there on the air.

Everything is changing very rapidly and everyone knows that the media environment is shifting, and I would say it is shifting in the direction of a greater populist voice. My feeling in a nutshell is this: The United States is the most populist democracy in the world. Here the people rule. Sometimes they want things that conservatives like, sometimes they want things that liberals like, but it's a populist voice. That's always been true of this country, and it is becoming more and more true because the voice of the people is easier to hear. It's apparent right there on the Web.

Sometimes you have to be careful that only the people who are angry or the people with the loudest voices will go on the Internet and blog or express their opinions. You've got to be sure — and that's what polls are all about — that you take into account intensity. Intensity does matter and it should matter, but it has to be balanced by a sense of what the large numbers of Americans feel.

Certainly that voice has become louder. We saw it in the Elian Gonzalez affair in the Clinton years and the Terry Schiavo affair in the Bush years. That voice can say very different things, but the voice of the people has gotten more direct and louder, and I should say that Barack Obama turned that to his advantage because he devised a whole political movement around the new media. That is the basis of the Obama movement. I am sure it would have been the basis of Ronald Reagan's if he had had access to it, because he formed a similar kind of political movement when he first ran for President, a movement that's still very much alive, the conservative movement. But the new media really enabled Obama to raise money from ordinary voters who felt passionately about him, just as Ronald Reagan did in the old days when it depended not on the Internet but on direct mail.


In 1985, you authored a study that surveyed journalists and concluded that there was a leftward tilt in American media. Much has been made of that tilt in this last election and probably in the last several elections. Can you speak to the degree to which there is a tilt or perhaps the nature of the tilt?

Well, that was a piece I originally wrote with a colleague at the Los Angeles Times. I actually helped start the Los Angeles Times Poll and, you know, that has been validated by a number of different studies. People in the press, journalists, especially national journalists, do tend to be liberal in their orientation. The question is how much that influences their coverage and their reporting. My experience in Washington is that when reporters do their jobs, they tend to put their own personal views aside as much as possible. It can't be a hundred percent. But if you talk to liberal politicians, whether you go back to Ted Kennedy or Gary Hart or Bill Clinton, you often find that they had sometimes a lot of difficulties with the press; a hostile relationship. Some conservatives like Ronald Reagan have had good relations with the press. When they do their jobs professionally, they usually, and in all the best cases certainly, make a serious effort to put their personal views aside. I am not saying they are always successful, but that's what professionalism means in the press.


Is there anything that the media can do to ensure balanced reporting? What do they do now to kind of check on themselves?

Well, here at CNN, we have a committee that looks over scripts. Every script I do must be approved. They look for any conscious or unconscious bias, that you have a balance, particularly if you are a reporter or an analyst. So any prepared script tends to be very carefully vetted.

Also, there is a lot of receptivity [to the public]. People don't believe this, but if you call or e-mail or send a message, those things get looked at and they get distributed to reporters. We are always finding out if people out there have objections or think you are unbalanced or biased in your reporting. We get a lot of feedback, and that is true of all the major news organizations. Those of us in the press are very conscious of treating candidates as fairly as possible, liberal or conservative.

I would say if there is any "bias" in the press, it is a bias toward a good story. We're always looking for an interesting, exciting story that is going to grab viewers' or readers' attention. That sometimes means that the good story will get all the attention and a boring candidate or boring story will get less attention than they ought to because in the end you've got to produce good copy. You've got to get readers interested in what you are doing and what you are saying.

Sarah Palin was terrific copy. She claims the press was unfair to her, and she has an argument. She says they are not treating Caroline Kennedy the same way. But my reading of the press right now is that Caroline Kennedy is being given pretty tough treatment by the New York press in her effort to gain the appointment as a United States senator.


Speaking of liberals versus conservatives, you designed the rating system that National Journal uses in ranking legislators on an ideological basis. How did you design it?

In most rating systems, organizations like an environmental or a conservative organization will pick key votes and determine how many times a member of Congress voted right or wrong on the key votes. [National Journal] wanted a system that was more objective, so I worked out a statistical technique to rank members of Congress. The only judgmental part was picking the votes that were important in policy terms. But we just picked the key policy votes and then ranked members of Congress according to how many times they voted with the liberal position and how many times they voted with the conservative position. It was a percentile ranking. In other words, a member would be in the 5th or 20th or 40th percentile of conservatives according to that ranking.


How successful do you think it has been? It seems to get attention every cycle.

All rating systems get a lot of attention. I would say it's been successful, although of course, you know, it's a bit of a controversy because Obama was voted as the most liberal senator. I did not select the issues, but when I devised it, I said, "You have to select the most important congressional votes of the last year in order to rank people." So this magazine tried to do it as objectively as possible. That is, not "These were the good [ways of determining who is] a liberal or conservative," but "These were the most important votes." Obviously, there is a matter of judgment involved in that, and politicians will often quarrel with the judging views. I think the reader or the viewer has to look at what votes were included and decide, "Was this really an important vote? Did they leave something important out of the ranking?"


As you know, CNN and other outlets were criticized for calling candidates either before those states' polls have closed or before the West Coast states' polls have closed. In 2000 and 2004 there appeared to be problems with exit poll numbers. How have the networks reacted to those criticisms?

Very vigorously. For one thing, CNN does not call an election — we don't actually call elections; we project a winner — we do not project a winner until after all the polls are closed in any state, not just a majority of the polling places. Some states like Florida are overwhelmingly in one time zone, but a small part is in the Central Time Zone, the far western panhandle of Florida. So if the overwhelming majority of people have voted, it used to be the pattern that networks would project the winner. We do not project the winner on the air until all of the polling places in that state have closed. That is a change, but it is only state by state.

We will project the winner, say, in Florida or New York before California closes because, in our view, if the people are finished voting and we know who the winner is, we are not going to keep that information from our viewers. If Congress thinks that's unreasonable or unfair, there should be a uniform poll closing time across the country, which is I think what they do in Canada.


What are your thoughts on the Obama campaign?

I think he always ran as a uniter. That was the basis of his appeal as a candidate. He promised to deliver what Bush promised, in fact what Clinton promised. Clinton came in and said he was a "New Democrat," the "Third Way." It turned out the country was deeply divided during the Clinton presidency. Bush came in and said he was a "Compassionate Conservative," that he would be a "uniter not a divider," and the country was united for one year after 9/11. Then when the 2002 mid-year campaign got under way and the Iraq War started, the country once again became bitterly divided.

I think what got Obama elected was in large part his appeal as a unifier, and he is trying to deliver on that. That's what Americans like about him. He reaches across racial lines; he is literally bi-racial. He is a new generation who can reach across generational lines. If you read his book, The Audacity of Hope, he talks about how he doesn't want to be the candidate who bears the grudges and fulfills the revenge sentiments of the baby boom generation, of students on college campuses that have thirsted for revenge against the right for 40 years now. He said that is not his agenda. He wants to bring the country together. That is what the country likes about him.

And already in his transition, which is where we're talking right now, he has made an effort to reach across party lines. He is meeting with Republicans. He is going to meet with the Republican Conference Committee in the House of Representatives. There are Republicans in his Cabinet. He has made an effort to include their concerns from tax cuts in his economic recovery package, and that has angered some Democrats and a whole lot of bloggers.

So he is making an effort to build the new consensus in American politics. Some people on the left are angry about that, are worried about feeling betrayed. When he talks about the fact that closing Guantanamo could take some time, a lot of them got very angry. I think that is a deliberate strategy on his part, not ideologically-driven, but essentially to deliver on the promise that he made that he would bring the country together.


In previous years we've talked about the solid South, soccer moms, hockey dads, the Catholic vote.

NASCAR dads. [Laughter]


NASCAR dads, that's right. [Laughter]


I did that for CNN. That was more fun than I've had doing a story in my life. [Laughter]

Where did that take place?


It was Talladega, Alabama, 2004.

Did any similar demographic groups play a large role in this past election?


No. Well, there was no critical swing group, although there were a number of groups that people talked a lot about. There were a lot of questions about whether Latinos would vote for an African-American. There was a lot of anxious speculation. Would they vote for an African-American Democrat? It turned out it wasn't a problem. Yes, they did in bigger numbers than they voted for previous Democrats. There was an awful lot of speculation about things that turned out not to be a very big issue. Would conservatives stick with John McCain? Yes, they did. He made an effort to try to go after his base, the Republican base, because he wasn't their favorite candidate, but yes, they did stick with John McCain. So a lot of the speculation about this or that thing happening didn't really happen.

A lot of the independent voters, those swing voters who have always been there, they often divided in the past. They did vote in 2006 and 2008 strongly Democratic, and that's what turned the tide in both of those elections. There was a theory during the first term of President Bush that independents no longer mattered, that you could win simply by rallying your party base, and Bush did that in 2004. It turned out that he won a bare majority and it was a very divisive strategy which a lot of voters were uncomfortable with. I think we've now seen really in the last couple of elections the return of the force of the independent voters, the swing voters in the middle who were thought to have virtually disappeared. They are still there.


Were there any surprises in this election?

Surprises? That Americans were willing to set aside, not even to set aside, that they were willing to ignore race for the most part. I mean, there were, of course, some racial backlash voters. It will take them some time. I grew up in the segregated South. Like millions of Americans on election night, I went to bed saying, "I never thought I would live to see the day." We have lived to see the day, and it wasn't a big deal. Barack Obama of course is African-American and half white as well. He calls himself, he regards himself as an African-American. Americans were willing to look beyond racial issues.

What is so interesting about him is, of course, he's young. He did not come up through the civil rights movement like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, so racial issues have not been the basis of his political background. He happens to be African-American, but that's not the core of his agenda. The ability of American voters to look beyond race, to really not treat it as the central issue, was quite impressive for someone who has been around as long as I have and who grew up in the South. I mean, he won Virginia, he won North Carolina, he won Florida, he won a number of southern states. He won a lot of white votes in the South.

The point is the candidate for president in particular has to rise above the particular concern that may have initially given the candidate prominence, like a labor candidate. You are not going to become president of the United States if you are identified as the labor candidate or the business candidate or simply the religious right candidate or the civil rights candidate. You've got to run as the president of all Americans, and Obama did that.


I came to BC as a high school graduate from North Carolina. When I was your student, we discussed the 1990 election of Senator Jesse Helms over Harvey Gantt and whether polling underreported Helms' support. This phenomenon was discussed again in 2008 as the "Bradley Effect." Do you think there ever was a "Bradley Effect," and if there was, do we still see that now?

The answer is yes, there was. Apparently, by our own experience, there was a "Bradley Effect" back in the 1980s.

And your second question is no, I don't think it had any significant influence on this election. The polls, the pre-election polls were quite accurate. The people didn't seem to have any reason to lie to poll takers. There did seem to be a phenomenon back, say, in 1989 when Doug Wilder ran for governor of Virginia. It started in 1982 when Tom Bradley ran for governor of California where whites said they would vote for in those cases the Democratic candidate and ended up not doing that. But these days, I think there's a lot more comfort in voting for a minority candidate. And we just didn't see any evidence that the "Bradley Effect" played a significant role either in the primaries or in the general election this year.


Are there any aspects of the last election that interest you but that you haven't had an opportunity to discuss?

That interest me that I haven't had the opportunity to discuss? Good question. Gosh, I've discussed so much about the last election.

Well, there is one issue that still remains, and that's "Why do we still have the Electoral College?" That was an issue left over from 2000. What interests me is that in 2004 and 2008 the candidates spent all their time in places like Lackawanna, Pennsylvania, and Chillicothe, Ohio, and tiny out-of-the-way places because they're in swing states, battleground states. After 2000 I guessed and a lot of people guessed that the voters would rise up in anger against the Electoral College. They didn't because they were so angry about Florida.

Well, the point is the institution remains; it's unlikely to change because the small states are not going to vote to abolish it. But if we were going to vote to abolish it, I'll tell you what would happen. The candidates would spend all their time in New York, Los Angeles, and Houston because those places, which is where a lot of voters live, they don't see any campaign now because those are not swing or battleground states. If we changed the Electoral College, we'd see a huge change in American politics. But as far as I can tell, even after Florida, there's been no serious effort to make that change.


And my last question: How many pundits can you fit on the CNN set at one time?

Oh, what we do is we have a bigger and bigger set, and we have a lot of people out there with a lot of voices. I have to go on the air in about two minutes, so I have to get upstairs.

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Note: I am grateful for the 35 minutes Bill Schneider spent with me on the phone for this interview and the many years of counsel he has offered. Both before and after my graduation in 1993, Bill was a great help in my education and career. He made himself and the CNN studios available to me at the 1992 and 1996 Republican conventions. In 1994 Bill introduced me to Republican pollster Frank Luntz who later hired me and started my career in market research. Throughout this, Bill afforded me opportunities to watch tapings of Crossfire before there was a studio audience and Larry King Live which has never had one. And of course, a meal never tasted so good as when Ted Turner was picking up the tab!

All questions, comments, and ideas for future Viewpoints topics should be directed to bcpsan@bc.edu. Please include "Viewpoints" in the subject line.