Just update the names in this 41-year-old critique of political journalism

Journalist and author James M. Perry was covering politics for The National Observer when he took a sharp look at the beat’s “tradition, habit, laziness” in an April 1974 cover story for a journalism review named [MORE]. (Now 88, he outlives both publications by many decades.)

These excerpts are from his three-page piece, headlined “I See a Big White House . . .” I rediscovered it on a rainy Monday while browsing through long-saved original issues of the Manhattan-based monthly. Yes, that’s what a journalism nerd does during a Christmas week work lull. Don’t judge.

“The whole business is bunkum: Nobody can predict now what’s going to happen in 1976. We tried the same sort of thing before the last election. . . . We were prepared, before the first primary, to award the nomination to Muskie. . . .

“And it was silly: We shouldn’t even have been in the predicting business. Maybe, if we have any sense, we won’t be again.”

Fond dream, Jim. Or should I call you Pollyanna?

“But, of course we are. And it’s a reckless business. . . . The media’s credibility will get worse if we continue to predict events that never happen.

“Consider, for example, that first Harris poll [in October 1972], when the voters were interviewed [about 1976] prior to the 1972 election. Harris actually ran [Ted] Kennedy head-to-head with the man everybody once agreed would be the Republican candidate for president in 1976 — Spiro T. Agnew. Well, we won’ be holding that election.

“Is it possible that if we hadn’t been so interested in whether Agnew would one day be president we might have learned a little more about what sort of man he really was?

“Why do we do it?

“Tradition. Habit. Laziness. Because, sometimes, our editors want us to do it. Because we see politics as a kind of game, a race between various performers, and we’re the time-keepers. Because it’s easy and because, maybe, it’s fun.

“It’s tough to write a story about what kind of governor George Wallace is; it’s easy to write a column about his chances for winning the Democratic nomination. We do like to ride the bus with our peers, and if the few of us who cover politics between elections can go on a private plane with a Connally or a Rockefeller or a Kennedy, all the better. . . .

“Instead of trying to guess who the next president will be — Ford, Rockefeller, Reagan, Connally, Percy, Kennedy, Wallace, Jackson, Mondale, Bentsen, or somebody we hardly even know yet — it would be helpful if we began telling our readers something substantial about the people we’re talking about. . . .

“As I say, we made fools of ourselves back in 1972. Is there some law of nature that says we have to do it all over again?”

Well, actually . . .