Recent commentary from National Journal:
Legal Affairs: The Supreme Court—and Others—Flub the Challenge, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (December 20, 2000)
If this cloud has a silver lining, it is as a reminder that judges are just as fallible as politicians.
Political Pulse: An Election—and Much More—Lost, by William Schneider (December 20, 2000)
When the lawyerly fog cleared, Al Gore was a big loser. So was the Supreme Court.
The Campaign: After All the Acrimony, the Election Ends on Grace Notes, by Carl M. Cannon (December 20, 2000)
Gore conceded with grace and class, while Bush emphasized the need for bipartisanship.
Social Studies: Nice Process In Florida—Too Bad About the Candidates, by Jonathan Rauch (December 13, 2000)
The surprise has been how well most of the actors have behaved, and how many alarms have been false.
Legal Affairs: No Exit—How the Supreme Court Boxed Gore In, by Stuart Taylor Jr. (December 13, 2000)
The D.C. Nine have sent a subtle, but fairly unambiguous, signal that Al Gore's hopes are doomed.
Media: Beyond Argument, by William Powers (December 13, 2000)
Give them some credit. Cable TV news operations are getting a whole lot better.
Political Pulse: Time Is Running Out for Gore, by William Schneider (December 13, 2000)
While Gore is arguing the facts, Bush is arguing the law. But Bush has the clock on his side.
The Campaign: A Fond Look at the Nagging Riddle of Al Gore, by Carl M. Cannon (December 13, 2000)
The striking thing about Gore is that he has always been such an unnatural politician.
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Media:Image-Poor
The story had everything we dream about: high stakes, giant egos, real ideas, and naked power-lust. So enormous were its strengths, and so irresistible was its energy, that nobody even noticed the one flaw, although it's been staring at us every day since Nov. 7.
The pictures were lousy.
True, we might still see a rare stunner of the Nixon-helicopter-wave variety, some operatic final image that both closes and sums up the story. Even as I write this, a sloppy, cathartic Bush-Gore bear hug could be just moments away. (Don't hold your breath.) And if this story stays true to form, the hug shot will be as thrilling as C-SPAN's mood views of the Capitol dome.
The strongest political story of modern times has been the weakest visual story of modern times. This isn't the fault of the photogs and videocam jocks, who worked as hard as ever. It's the fault of the story itself, a story driven by abstractions that are tough to convey with images. Election law, vote counts, judicial processes, even personal ambition—none of these translates easily into compelling photos or video. They require another ingredient: the dynamism of a human interaction captured tellingly on film, the tension of a remarkable scene, or the charisma of one remarkable person. Watergate had the hearings with Sam Ervin at the mike, and Nixon himself. The Cold War had missiles and tanks rolling through Red Square, and Reagan and Gorby in Iceland. Iran-Contra had Colonel Ollie taking the oath. The Gulf War had Colin Powell, and missiles lighting the sky over Baghdad. Monica had Monica. And Election 2000 has—what?
For action, let's see, there were the vote-counters themselves. Several still pics and video sequences of weary Floridians holding punch cards up to the light did brief turns as cultural wallpaper. The images grabbed us because they caught the prosaic drudgery at the heart of the story. But prosaic drudgery is unmemorable by definition, the opposite of epic, and those shots will endure only as perverse mementos. There were the protesters in Florida and in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, but protest images never work in a big way; they're too stagy and literal. Indeed, the stars of these shots were not the people, but the texts of their signs—"Sore Loserman" on the front of The Washington Post and The New York Times, "ALL VOTES NOW" on the New York Daily News.
As for charisma, who in this story had the stuff to make an image burn? Not our two contenders. Both are cursed with anti-charisma—the remarkable ability to make large, exciting moments feel small and pedestrian. Will future generations look back and treasure the bandaged boil, or the Potemkin touch football game at Observatory Hill? Then was it David Boies? Katherine Harris? Warren Christopher (!) or James Baker? Sanders Sauls? Antonin Scalia?
Scalia and his cohorts might have given us memorable scenery, if they'd let us in the room. But they didn't, and we endured countless repeats of those cruel official images of the court, in which they file into a cavernous space and stand awkwardly in a row, like finalists in the world's saddest beauty contest. (Desperate for visual interest, my eyes kept resting on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's sweet brown shawl, the only humanizing detail in a lifeless tableau.)
Some of the Florida courts did allow cameras, and the results were surprisingly flat. Every room looked like a traffic court. Watching this stuff, you began to respect the canniness of the Rehnquist Court, which knows that its power rests not just in the Constitution, but in mystique. By limiting their public exposure to audiotapes released after the event, the Justices preserved their royal inaccessibility. But they didn't feed our eyes.
Lacking the goods, editors and producers made do with what they had. Newspaper fronts gave us scintillating images of cardboard ballot boxes. One day, The New York Times devoted most of its upper front page to an intricate flow chart showing various possible outcomes to the crisis. It was the sort of thing that usually runs deep inside a paper's crisis coverage, and for good reason. The three newsweeklies, which need a new cover design every seven days, were in the most pitiable position, forced (like this magazine) to play over and over with images of the two candidates and various props and gimmicks. Among the warhorses rolled out were the facades of the White House and the Court, the scales of justice, the presidential seal, and a cartoon of Bush and Gore as, get this, prizefighters. Only Newsweek's cover, displaying a half-and-half head shot of the two men with the White House behind, sang. The low point came this week, when all three mags resorted to the same desperate conceit, the Constitution as backdrop for a catchall headline.
Since this is a visual age, there's something unsettling in this story's failure to find its visual "voice," a nagging fear that without a few good pix, some day it will be as if the story never happened. But the picture gap is also oddly encouraging, and precisely because we didn't even notice it. For a nation of alleged image addicts, we sure paid close attention to all those dreary legal abstractions. In fact, in the past six weeks, the text side of the business—especially the moribund world of newspaper editorials—came roaring back to life, because we needed text to really understand this story. That truth alone is worth a thousand pictures.
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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.
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All material copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
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