Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: Don't Pardon Ex-President Clinton -- Commute His Sentence, by Jonathan Rauch (September 13, 2000) An ex-President jailed? The spectacle would be wrenching, the symbolism right out of some banana republic. Legal Affairs: Boy Scouts Vs. Gays -- The System Is Working Just Fine, by Stuart Taylor (September 13, 2000) A thousand points of pressure are being applied to the Scouts to yield to the emerging social consensus. Political Pulse: Clinton -- Just Doing His Job, by William Schneider (September 13, 2000) President Clinton is sending a message: this campaign is not about me. The Campaign: A Sitting President Cannot Disappear, Nor Should He, by Carl M. Cannon (September 13, 2000) Thank goodness Bill Clinton rode to the rescue and helped set the tone for the campaign. Legal Affairs: Gore-Lieberman -- Racial Preferences Forever?, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (September 6, 2000) Is there anything left of the senator who used to say that the system of group preferences has to end? Political Pulse: A Referendum on Government's Role, by William Schneider (September 6, 2000) In 1988, Dukakis said the election was about competence, not ideology. This year, Gore is doing the opposite. More from National Journal. Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte.

Media: Reality Politics, Anyone? Perhaps the presidential campaigns could take some cues from CBS' new reality-TV series by William Powers September 13, 2000 Welcome back from Yellowstone or wherever you people spend the summer. While you were sticking marshmallows on twigs, we were chasing George and Dick and Al and Joe around Philly and L.A. and a bunch of other places and.... Please don't look at us that way. We love this life. We get to watch history in action, meet major world figures such as Trent Lott, Bob Shrum, and Greta Van Susteren. But right now we're stressing. The fall season is upon us, and these guys are not giving us the drama we need to make this baby go. God, we've tried. Remember way back in the summer of '99 when The Washington Post starting running those humongous candidate bios, giant squids of journalistic excess that sprayed ink in every direction in a doomed effort to generate some excitement? First came the "George W. Bush" series, which ran to nearly 30,000 words and revealed, as one headline announced, that a "strong bond" exists between the candidate and his mother! Then there was "George W. Bush: The Texas Record," an entirely different Post series, which demonstrated beyond all doubt -- and through an additional 10,000 words -- that a politician's personality is not the same thing as his policies. For slow readers, the headlines provided helpful thematic reminders. "Affable Style Succeeded Even as Tax Plan Failed," said one. But you didn't read those stories, America, did you? Political junkies riding the Orange Line from Falls Church to Farragut West read them, hearts galloping, but that was about it. We thought the giant squids would eventually go away, but they just keep coming and coming, like some awful recurring dream. Even now, hardly a morning goes by when you don't encounter another immense character study by one of the major papers, accompanied by grainy photos of either Al or George during his formative years. Out there in the land, you barely scan these pieces, but we read every word -- because we have to. How many times now have we read about Gore's wild Harvard period, when, according to a New York Times investigation, he actually "listened to a lot of Dylan, Motown, Beatles, Buffalo Springfield" and "played poker, house football and took up handball because his group considered squash 'too Harvard'"? How often have we read the tale of Bush as a preppie at Phillips Academy, Andover, where, as USA Today noted in its Bush opus, "he was head cheerleader and high commissioner of stickball"? All that effort in the service of making this race dynamic, and it didn't work. Now we're reduced to faux-hyperventilating about the candidates' recent role reversal in the polls, and the titanic battle over whether Larry King and Tim Russert will get to emcee any debates, among other immensely significant topics. Why are we in this mess? The New York Times offered a brilliant explanation the other day, but a lot of our crowd missed it because it wasn't on the front page or in the political columns. It was on the Arts page, in an article by Bill Carter about a terrible problem faced by the producers of CBS' reality-TV series Big Brother. Unlike the other CBS reality series, Survivor, which allowed the participants to vote on which contestants would be eliminated, on Big Brother it's the viewers who vote, by telephone. And it turns out the viewers of Big Brother -- as pure a slice of middle America as any pollster could hope for -- don't like the more interesting, dynamic contestants. They have voted off the show all the unusual people, including Brittany Petros, who, Carter writes, was "distinguished on the show by her avowed virginity and her hair's changing colors (including purple and green)." What's left is a drab cast of careful types who "seem to be doing everything possible to appear inoffensive." The producers have concluded that "American viewers seem unwilling to accept contestants who stray from mainstream values or opinions," and the result is bad television. Sound familiar? Carter himself saw the connection and brought in an academician to opine that this "audience preference for inoffensive personalities" is the reason the national political scene is so boring. The two parties strive to be moderate in order not to be voted off the show, which in this case happens to be a presidential race. In this show, the only glimpses we get of the real guys come when they think the microphone is turned off and they're talking dirty about us. The good news is, the producers of Big Brother have a solution. They're offering a briefcase full of money -- $10,000 -- to any one of the boring cast members who'd be willing to leave the show and be replaced by someone more exciting, to wit a "very attractive" 22-year-old named Beth. And the obvious question is, why couldn't we journalists do the same? We could all chip in, put a couple million in the briefcase (a lot less than we spent covering the conventions), and write it off on our campaign-coverage expense accounts. We know you might object to our meddling in the electoral process, America, like it's just another TV show. But when one of these guys takes the cash, and the show gets better -- we may steal Beth herself from CBS -- we know you'll thank us. 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.