Recent commentary from National Journal: Political Pulse: Can Rick Beat Hillary? Maybe, by William Schneider (May 31, 2000) Democrats want to nationalize the New York Senate race; the GOP wants to personalize it. Social Studies: Two Cheers for the Clinton Doctrine. (OK, Maybe Just One), by Jonathan Rauch (May 31, 2000) The people want humanitarianism on the cheap, and that is what the Clinton Doctrine gives them. Media: Oprah Waldo Emerson, by William Powers (May 24, 2000) To the media class, Oprah is the epitome of life's bottomless cruelty. Legal Affairs: Why You Can't Sue Your Rapist in Federal Court, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (May 24, 2000) "When you think about a rape in a college dormitory, do you think about interstate commerce?" Political Pulse: Ho Hum, the Shootings Go On, by William Schneider (May 24, 2000) So far, a tidal wave of public support for gun control has not swept over American politics. More from National Journal. Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte.

Media: Style as Substance China trade debate coverage has been dominated by lumbering masters of the Henry Kissinger school of prose by William Powers May 31, 2000 Have you ever noticed that when our elected rulers are facing a big, meaningful decision, something with a true earth-stands-still quality, the media commentary often feels kind of drab and dead? I'm not talking about factual substance or reportorial reliability. Here on the information assembly line, we're quite skilled at placing fact A next to fact B and screwing them together nice and tight before they're boxed and shipped off to market. The current national vogue for finger-wagging about our-shameful-media has obscured the fact that this business is full of trusty Gradgrinds who seldom make serious factual errors. In fact, our Gradgrindism may be the source of what I am talking about, which is style: the web of words and sentences that the media's anointed deep thinkers spin around a subject like this week's China trade vote. Though deemed an utterly "momentous" and "crucial" event by all the best news outlets, and covered in the most impressive factual detail, the China story was debated with a noticeable lack of stylistic verve. On the day before the vote, for instance, I turned to The Wall Street Journal's editorial page -- home to some of the verviest opinion writing in all of modern journalism -- to see what it was serving up. A clueless newcomer to the subject, a China virgin who had read little until this week, I wanted to know exactly what made this vote so "momentous" and "crucial." In short, why I should care. Naturally, I figured The WSJ would be full of stylish passion on a subject straight up its free-market alley. If Peggy Noonan and Mark Helprin can produce so many singing, stinging phrases on Bill Clinton's character, which is with us for only eight years, surely there would be rich reading on the China trade question, which will matter for decades. There were two op-eds. I licked my lips and dove in. The first was by Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan trade negotiator, and it began thus: "Tomorrow, Congress will decide whether to grant permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) to China in conjunction with China's bid to join the World Trade Organization. As a former U.S. trade negotiator, I have often been too critical of U.S. trade deals that gave too much and got too little. But in the case of China, careful review can lead to ..." Okaaaaaaay, not exactly the aria I was hoping for, so I moved down to the other entry, a piece penned by former Clinton adviser Rahm Emanuel and headlined "Free Trade Is a Winner for Democrats." "As a Democrat," it began, "I am proud of the tradition of global leadership exerted by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman at the end of World War II. They secured the peace abroad with bold vision and decisive action. Their international agenda was complemented by strong domestic programs like the GI Bill. Today we need a similarly far-reaching plan to secure the peace in the wake of the Cold War...." I'm sorry, my head fell on my chest for a moment there, and I think I was drooling. I dreamed I was back in Mrs. Sherman's fifth-grade classroom, where all of us wrote in the very same toneless, row-row-row-your-boat style employed by Mr. Emanuel. What is it about serious policy questions that drains the life out of the public conversation? I think a couple of factors are at work. One is that the best and most engaging stylists are not much interested in the topics that animate (so to speak) the good folk who dwell in the cold, lightless depths of the think-tank world. You don't see Maureen Dowd or many other of the verbal exotics swimming around down there, and they dart away from any subject requiring the use of multiple abbreviations (in the case of China, let's see, we have PNTR, WTO, AFL-CIO, to name a few). Who can blame them? The panel-speak proclivities of the policy monks can rob any discussion of all its drama, and much of its meaning, quicker than you can say "interagency process." Thus, op-eds on these subjects are likely as not to come from nonscribes like Prestowitz and Emanuel, long on insider expertise but short on flair. The second factor grows out of the first. There's an unspoken assumption in the policy world that truly serious subjects are demeaned by stylish writing, that heavy questions require heavy prose. This is the Henry Kissinger school of composition, and it's easy for any of us -- insecure souls that we are, eager to seem intelligent -- to buy into it. What we overlook is an ancient truth about writing and all communication: Style is a form of intelligence, and vice versa. There are exceptions to the drear. National Journal's own Clive Crook churns economics into chocolate cream for the mind, without any loss of seriousness. But Clive doesn't count -- he's British. On China trade, I did come across one memorably written piece, an essay in The American Prospect magazine by Los Angeles Times columnist and China expert James Mann. It opened simply, with the sentence "America is in the midst of a supposedly great debate over China policy." And that word 'supposedly' -- weary, deadpan -- set the tone for the rest of the piece, which was smart and quietly stylish. Or, rather, smart because it was quietly stylish. What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.