What we love about surprises is obvious and easy; they are a good story. And this year’s seemingly endless political surprises have provided a kind of running suspense and titillation for audiences everywhere. But at some point I would think those of us who have been creating soon-to-be-exploded premises all year long should give some thought to the possibility that this is not exactly a glowing commentary on our own powers of observation and analysis.

It’s all very well to respond, as many will at this point, with some mutters about the volatility of the electorate and so on. But the fact is that the missed and misunderstood story has become such a staple feature of contemporary journalism that we more or less don’t even notice it anymore. We just say something giddy about the year of surprises, the volatile electorate, etc., and move on. The collapse of the Soviet empire was of course the model for this. When we are asked how so many journalists so closely covering a story could so completely miss it, we point out that American intelligence officers and diplomats, as well as those of other countries, missed or at least underestimated what was coming, too. Likewise, the diplomats and intelligence people all have an explanation of why they misinterpreted the signs of a hundred different events, to which they will immediately add that they actually did pick up the signs of a thousand others they are (naturally) not at liberty to reveal.

So we all have our excuses, but the biggest excuse, to my mind, resides in the very word “surprise” itself. It is a dodge. Think of all the lead sentences in all the news accounts you have read in the papers or heard on TV over the years concerning, say, the economy, that began, “In a surprise development yesterday. . .” Or consider the political narrative’s use of the term. It is a dodge because the implication is that the surprise is itself an independent phenomenon with a life or a cause in nature of its own-a kind of a separate thing out there, like a monsoon or a volcano or a herd of rhinoceroses charging by. The reporter or the pundit-prognosticator simply comes upon it in the course of his scholarly travels. And he then dutifully and faithfully records it. Never mind, especially if he is a pundit-prognosticator, that maybe last week on the TV shout-and-bash show of which he is a regular member, he said that precisely the opposite would happen.

Let me be plain. Sure, there are some events no one could have predicted. But for the most part in political reporting there is no such thing as a “surprise development.” There is only a development that takes somebody by surprise. Us. And why should that be? This is the question that journalists and political consultants, pollsters and all-purpose groupies should be asking themselves after the election is over. George Bush seems to think it is significant, in a sinister sort of way, that the press is talking about doing some self-analysis as to fairness after this election; he thinks it means we believe we were unfair to him. But the press always does endless self-analysis about fairness after elections-earnest seminars, cushy conferences, printed symposiums that nobody reads, world without end. We don’t so often ask the simpler and more shaking question of how we managed throughout the year to be taken so often unawares by what was really going on in the story we were covering or opining about.

Partisans for different sides will promptly tell you that the answer is obvious: we were all misled by personal bias, the wish was father to the prediction, and so forth. There is some truth to this, but not much; political bias is not the principal reason for our so often doping the thing out wrong. Journalists consider being found wrong the worst thing that can happen to them professionally. This explains not just why we go to such lengths to ignore or dismiss the frequency with which it happens, but also why it is nonsense to suppose that we are simply giving rein to our political preferences without a care for whether they are humiliatingly disproved by the next day.

I suspect the answer has less to do with political bias than with an impaired ability to understand what others are feeling and thinking, to understand why they behave the way they do, what their lives are like, what their interests are, how things that matter appear to them. I will be grander here: to the extent that this is the journalists’ or political specialists’ problem, it is probably part of the more general disintegration of shared experience and understanding that marks the society today. And we aggravate the problem by insisting on viewing one another not as full human beings but rather as the little shorthand demographic entities we find useful in our charts and press accounts-black thises, middle-class thats, conservative Baptist the other things. This is as true of the right-wing political hotshots who thought it would be clever to stage disastrous Night One of the Republican convention in Houston, with its punishing message, as it is of any of the journalists who misheard the voice of the voters in other respects along the road to the election.

What makes all this alternately pitiful and funny is the extent to which we have brought our state-of-the-art technology to bear on the task of figuring out what we are saying to each other. All those hand-held gadgets that allow people being surveyed to record their emotions second by second when the debaters debate, all that incessant, complicated polling and repolling and asking and analyzing and on and on through the months. We can listen to everything, measure it down to its last millimeter and still not know how the object of our interest is putting his thoughts together. Too much science, not enough sense.