Monday, Nov. 17, 1986
A Letter From the Publisher
By Richard B. Thomas
A good political correspondent, like a good politician, always has his eye on the next election. So the timing was right when Washington-based Laurence Barrett was named National Political Correspondent last January, just as the 1986 midterm election campaigns were getting under way. A 21-year veteran of TIME, Barrett provided analysis of the ambiguous voting trends for this week's ten-page special report on the election outcome.
Barrett, who was White House correspondent during the first five years of the Reagan Administration, plunged into his new duties by following such potential presidential candidates as George Bush, Robert Dole, Jack Kemp, Gary Hart and Joseph Biden as they campaigned for this year's crop of state and local nominees.
"If you don't get close to these people very early in the election cycle," Barrett says, "you will have a very difficult time understanding them once they're nominated for the presidency or elected. By then they are too closely insulated."
He followed the "class of 1988" into 18 states. Along the way he made good use of his time aboard campaign flights to get to know the candidates, just as he had done with Ronald Reagan. TIME drew heavily on that campaign reporting in its 1980 Man of the Year cover story on Reagan. Barrett subsequently wrote a book about Reagan's first two years in office, Gambling with History.
To cover the off-year campaigns, TIME correspondents fanned out across the country, often to out-of-the-way locales. Los Angeles Bureau Chief Dan Goodgame found himself climbing up the sideboards of mud-spattered beet trucks while covering the campaign of Idaho Republican Steve Symms, who won a second Senate term. Bonnie Angelo, who heads the New York bureau, searched a small town in Maryland with Democrat Barbara Mikulski, who would later win her Senate bid, as she tried to find the hall where she was supposed to speak. In Sheyenne, N. Dak. (pop. 307), Chicago Bureau Chief Jack White found supporters of successful Senatorial Aspirant Kent Conrad so enthusiastic about having a representative of the national media in their midst that they once gave the startled White a round of applause. Notes Atlanta Bureau Chief Joseph Kane: "The trouble is that just when you begin to think you know a little something, the campaign ends abruptly, and you have to start all over again." That, as Barrett will attest, is the name of the game.