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Character flaws
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Feb. 3, 2000 |
The answer, for the most part, was a qualified no. After living with a candidate and his handlers day after day, being told to stay on message and generally having your access controlled, most reporters are jaded. It's like being in a telescoped version of a failing marriage: By the end of your short run, you're plenty sick of the other person's routine. It's a cliché to say that the media coverage of the primaries has become as much about coverage of the media -- one of those life-threatening, suffocating clichés that needn't be mentioned but still seems to be strangling us. Where once the viewpoint of "the boys on the bus" was novel, now it is expected and worse. In a sense we are all on that bus and we're the ones who've been taken hostage. But our captors are like one of those splinter groups that can't decide what to demand or who to kill. After about six solid hours of viewing on Tuesday, I can say that the reporters covering the primaries fall into two camps. One is the conventional wisdom side, prognosticators who made predictions months ago and seem rather annoyed when things go other than as expected. (These are pundits for the most part, professional commentators and often former players themselves.) Many of them are pissed that John McCain beat the spread and think that Bill Bradley should have been eliminated in this round. They point with glee to the flotilla of Republican congressmen headed for South Carolina to blow the Arizona senator's boat out of the water and savor the thought of Bradley going up in a puff of black smoke, like a latter-day Mario Cuomo. The other camp consists of foot soldiers, the men and women covering the candidates from the front lines and they are the ones savoring a good story. McCain defies gravity? God bless him. Bradley scores going negative? Thank you sir, may I have another. George W. Bush may have to start talking to people? Recalling his father's famous trip to the supermarket (during which he was seemingly introduced to the miracle of universal price coding), they rub their hands in anticipation. It is worth noting that the candidate who fared the best with voters and reporters was the one who was most accessible, in both senses. Not only was McCain ubiquitous in New Hampshire and on television (I sometimes think there are two of him), he was the reporter's best friend. When asked by Greenfield if the candidates they were covering regretted anything, the reporters might as well have cued up Edith Piaf: "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien." Except for McCain's people, who (according to Candy Crowley) were starting to regret the nonstop 24/7 availability the senator offered reporters. Footage of McCain was notable for the flying wedge of press people who surrounded him, notebooks in hand. (The Weekly Standard's Tucker Carlson appeared to be joined at the hip with McCain.) And frankly, she admitted, it could be a bit exhausting, with McCain going late into the night answering questions reporters hadn't even asked yet. To their credit, McCain, Bradley and even Al Gore all sense that the voters want substance, and McCain at least still sees reporters as a conduit through which to reach voters. (Quaint idea.) Unfortunately, many of the people handling the reporting seem unprepared to deal with substance when they are dished it. For so many elections now, the story has been about image -- usually referred to Tuesday as "character" -- that talking about the issues qua issues is viewed as a chump's game. McCain won because he had the best story, according to MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "There's an Audie Murphy quality to John McCain," he said, halfway through the evening. "He fought for his country, he came back." And story, in political coverage as in Hollywood script meetings, equals character. Or, perhaps, caricature. Bradley and McCain were discussed in terms of being mavericks and outsiders (which must make Steve Forbes, who seems to have contracted a bad case of cooties between Iowa and New Hampshire, a true space alien). It may not be totally true but it makes the race interesting. And as Howard Fineman on MSNBC quoted Richard Nixon as saying, "The worst sin in politics is to be boring." The Newsweek scribe went on to accuse Bradley of being just that -- boring -- while McCain was "the Ho Chi Minh" of this war, taking advantage of every opportunity the Bush camp has left open to him. Never mind that the former Arizona senator was once a reluctant guest of the North Vietnamese president; the imagery is what matters. Ho Chi Minh, Audie Murphy, Stalin, Satan -- someone once called it the "Maureen Dowd syndrome," but all this iconography and pop-culture reference is ultimately unfulfilling. We respond to these images for the same reasons the reporters come up with them: They are part of our lingua franca, and a hell of a lot easier than coming up with something fresh. But after a while it's like staring at the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band": Who are all those people and why are they with the Beatles anyway?
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