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  Recent commentary from National Journal: Legal Affairs: Oops -- There's Much, Much More Gore And Reno, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (July 6, 2000) Gore's April 18 testimony illustrates how slippery and disingenuous (if not perjurious) he can be even when under oath. Political Pulse: Drilling for Blame, by William Schneider (July 6, 2000) Many voters are suspicious about the causes of soaring gasoline prices. And with good reason. Social Studies: Farm Forecast -- Aid, With 32.3 Billion In Scattered Dollars, by Jonathan Rauch (June 27, 2000) In 1986, Congress paid farmers $25.8 billion, but conservative Republicans have left that record in the dust. Legal Affairs: Why We Should All Be Grateful to Janet Reno, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (June 27, 2000) Reno wasn't just protecting Clinton and Gore from independent counsels. She was protecting the country. Media: Too True to Mention, by William Powers (June 27, 2000) A New York Times Magazine writer abandoned political "balance" and revealed his personal beliefs. It was great. Political Pulse: OK, Al, Who Are You Today?, by William Schneider (June 27, 2000) The Gore campaign seems to be suffering from multiple personality disorder. More from National Journal. Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. |
 Media:Swing Low, Sweet Press Corps Over here in the press booth, we're down in the dumps. Listless, deflated, fogbound, can't sleep, no appetite. Nothing seems to help. Green tea is useless, Zoloft gives no loft. Those on the Gore-Bush beat are in the worst shape of all. The richest, most potent civilization on earth is electing a new leader, and we journalists can't climb out of our funk long enough to get excited about it. We're going through the motions. Take the Barbara Walters interview with Al and Tipper Gore last week -- did you catch that horror show? There was a staged bit where the three of them were walking awkwardly on the porch of the vice presidential mansion, and at one point a weird, desperate look crossed the face of ABC's diva, like at any second she was going to throw herself over the railing. We felt like going with her. Walters even asked Tipper if she gets depressed lately. We thought Barbara might be projecting. The whole interview was forced and empty. Al seemed sincere when he said of his wife, "She is ... just the coolest person I know," but the remark made us cringe about our profession. This is our work, our contribution to the world? We felt bleaker than ever. In the same day's Washington Post, Marjorie Williams had a nicely turned op-ed regretting the way some reporters cover the character of each candidate as if it were just another element of political theater. What matters to these reporters is not character, but the appearance of character, the acting job. This, Williams wrote, is "part of a larger trend toward meta-coverage of campaigns, in which the choice of a pollster or the sagacity of an ad buy is weighed at least as seriously as the plan for restructuring Social Security." Too true! we wailed to ourselves, and buried our face in our hands. We wept ourselves dry, mixed a drink, and picked up a New York Times profile of Gore we'd been saving. "Al Gore's Journey: A Character Test at Harvard," it was called, and it seemed to be exactly the kind of piece Williams was calling for: an earnest character study, devoid of meta-anything. "When he speaks of his wife today," wrote Melinda Henneberger, "it is with awe, gratitude and an explicit acknowledgement that even his parents had a less formative influence on him.... Recently, an interviewer mentioned having met with her earlier the same day, and he beamed with pride: 'Isn't she cool?'" Sometimes you want to fold yourself into a little ball and roll away into a totally different life. That's how we felt as we read those words. Then we had a fantasy. We would dig out from our "keeper" file the definitive profile of Al Gore, which appeared in Vanity Fair in 1998 and was written by none other than Marjorie Williams. We'd make dozens of copies, one for every reporter in the press section on the campaign plane. We'd watch as they read Williams' thesis about Gore, which is that he's a good person who went into government to please his parents, and basically hates it; and that this explains his political awkwardness and his blunders. We would ask all the reporters what they thought of this notion and write it up as a scene piece, maybe give it a cute title like "The Boys and Girls on the Airbus." A piece like that could be quite revealing, if you did it right. Then it hit us: That would be more meta-journalism, more coverage of the world around the candidate rather than the candidate himself, the authentic article. (Is there an authentic article any more? We wondered for a second, but the thought scared us and we banished it.) Now we felt awful about ourselves all over again. No matter how hard we try, we wind up in the same downward spiral. In some ways, we know our mood is cyclical -- we're always somewhat adrift between the end of the primaries and the start of the first convention. But this time, the low feels lower. Did Al and George suck the life out of this contest, or did the system do it by rewarding dullness? Or are we to blame? We slept badly. Next morning we turned on National Public Radio in time to hear Daniel Schorr reviewing the news of the past week. We hoped the dean might offer some optimism born of long experience, but it was all gloom on gloom. Gore's new campaign finance scandal, the lost nuclear secrets, Bush's death row, and of course, the gas price crisis that we've turned into another grim campaign issue. Hearing about the gas problem plunged us into awful recollection of the 1970s, with its gas shortages, its inflation, its Watergate, its Bee Gees, and finally, its national "malaise," as Jimmy Carter put it in that career-ending speech. But come on, you'd have to be awfully bad off to see any connection between now and the '70's. Wouldn't you? "Let me add one small point to this discussion," said Schorr, as if on cue. "I read that the gas-guzzling sports-utility vehicles were classified as trucks, which means that they are exempt from fuel-economy standards. And all you can say is where is Jimmy Carter and the moral equivalent of war when we need it?" That's how dire things have gotten with us. We're having flashbacks to the '70s, and the '70s are looking good. And they're not just flashbacks. An old Nixon speechwriter named Pat Buchanan is running for President. So is Ralph Nader. And Nader says that next to his own scintillating self, Gore vs. Bush is "the drab" against "the dreary." And the really depressing thing is, he's right. 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. | ||||||||||||
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