Profiles in Plastic

The midterm congressional election may be dominating political headlines, but let's not forget that the 2008 presidential race is also well under way—in the media. There's been a flood of stories about likely, possible, and if-only presidential candidates.

Virginia's Mark Warner has been getting extra-special media attention on the Dem side, where a Hillary foil is required for plot purposes. On the GOP front, The New York Times weighed in a few weekends ago with an extremely long, extremely fond Sunday magazine story about Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

What's frustrating about most coverage of would-be presidents is how unoriginal and old-fashioned it is. The school of mid-20th-century political journalist Theodore H. White still predominates, with the candidate as the central character in a grand novelistic journey. What is the cut of the governor's character? Is the senator a good person or a bad person? The reporter endeavors to find out, interviewing siblings, schoolteachers, old pals, and new rivals.

The goal (never spoken, always there) is to find a hero, a giant to adore. Hint: If the word "maverick" appears somewhere in the story, you are in the presence of greatness. The author of the Hagel profile, former Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld, saved everyone a lot of trouble by just asking Hagel if he's maverick. (He is, with certain reservations.)

The quest for presidential character may be a noble project, but it's also quixotic. Of course character matters. In much of life, to borrow John McCain's book title, it really is destiny. But the one place where character is definitely not destiny is the presidential campaign.

Every serious campaign organization now operates just like a corporation selling a brand. The brand is the candidate, and his or her positions and fortunes are shaped by forces that ultimately have little to do with character. The very idea that a candidate might have a fixed, discernible moral essence has become quaint. In the painstaking work of creating a political brand—performed by armies of pollsters, strategists, and consultants—character is an endlessly plastic substance, shaped and reshaped to satisfy the electoral market of the moment.

When it was important that George W. Bush have a moderate, sensitive character, he became a "compassionate conservative." When John Kerry's election seemed to require the backbone of a fighter, he was "reporting for duty." Character is "character." The real person (to the extent one still exists) lives behind a wall of voodoo. There are occasional exceptions—the relentlessly real John McCain types that journalists love—but they never win. Real is a niche market.

In this atmosphere, you might think the Teddy White method becomes all the more valuable: Through interviews and research, the journalist does an end run around the manipulators and their methods. There's still a place for that. But just as crucial is coverage of the manipulators themselves, a sub-genre that goes back to Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President, 1968, which is still a great read.

Image-making has become the core business of politics. Yet coverage of the image-makers—those who do the branding—has never taken off. When a great example comes along, you savor it and wonder why it's so rare. I think back to "The Guru of Small Things," a piercing New York Times Magazine piece by James Bennet that ran during Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign and was all about the role played by data-slicing Clinton pollster Mark Penn. There were echoes of that piece in a fine story The New Republic published just last week, "Welcome to Hillaryland" by Ryan Lizza. Essentially a wiring diagram of the emerging Clinton campaign for president, the piece was a reminder that the way to a modern candidate's character is through her crew.

These stories are hard to get. Still, I think the media should be chasing them like crazy. It now goes without saying that the world of D.C. lobbyists has been deeply undercovered for years. The name Jack Abramoff should have been known to Americans long ago. Likewise in presidential politics, hidden realms cry out to have a light shined on them—scads of "brand managers" working right now to shape the '08 election. Who are they?