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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: Who Can Win in 2004? Just Use This Freshness Test. (October 21, 2003) Like milk, presidential hopefuls have a sell-by date. They only have 14 years to make it to the White House. By Jonathan Rauch. Political Pulse: Democratic Dynamics (October 21, 2003) Campaign 2004 pits outsiders against insiders, "true" democrats against "new" ones. By William Schneider. Media: All in Good Time (October 14, 2003) Why did the Novak spy and Schwarzenegger sex stories take so long to emerge? It's a story all its own. By William Powers. Legal Affairs: Why the Jobs Went to China—And How to Get Them Back (October 14, 2003) If the yuan were revalued the Mack companies could start making computer servers again. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: The Triumph of Change (October 14, 2003) Next year Bush will be selling just what Davis was selling—continuity. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: The War Against Iraq: All a Big Mistake? (October 14, 2003) With hindsight, the war in Iraq looks ever more doubtful. By Clive Crook. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Too Good to Last
What's odd about K Street, and riveting if you give it a chance, is its indifference to all the familiar ways of thinking about Washington by William Powers ..... It's looking bad for K Street, the HBO series that's become a bit of a cultural whipping boy. From the moment it first aired last month, this experiment in television has been driving a lot of media people around the bend. Yes, K Street's arrival was attended by all the usual goofy buzz: the inane interviews, the gossip items, the sightings of producer George Clooney at various Washington venues where no remotely attractive human had ever before appeared. Clooney in D.C. is like Hercules moving through the Land of the Dead: Everywhere he goes, the pale white hands are reaching out, desperate for a touch of living flesh. One even heard breathless speculation that K Street might be the Next Big Cable Thing. If HBO could do it with the Mafia and morticians, why not Washington lobbyists? But amid all the hypey chatter, there was another strain to the K Street conversation, dark and dyspeptic, curiously offended by the whole project. It's been there from the start, and as the weeks have passed it's grown stronger. Our great national media outlets are full of people who simply despise this show. To read them, you'd think Clooney and his partner, director Steven Soderbergh, had committed a crime. On the day the show first aired, The New York Times ran an Alessandra Stanley review that read like a print version of acid reflux. Soderbergh's "original idea," she wrote, "was to fuse real people and up-to-the-minute political happenings into a drama about Washington. But in the first episode, at least, the director did the reverse: he built a superstructure of Washington retreads and threaded it with the thinnest filament of fictional intrigue. The show relies heavily on the personalities of James Carville and his wife, Mary Matalin, who instead of having cameos in the background of a larger canvas, are at the epicenter of a story that has yet to begin.... Viewers learned as much about them in the 30-second Alka-Seltzer commercials that the couple made after the 2000 campaign. Here, they ad lib their creaky routine—bad-boy Democrat/Republican scold—for close to 30 minutes, drowning out any more interesting material." Alrighty, then. And Stanley is far from alone. "Sitting through K Street," wrote Robert Bianco in USA Today, "was like watching a group of show-off kids hanging around amusing each other when they should be working. You'd think these people would have better things to do with their time, particularly the ones who are drawing a salary from the public treasury." There are even suggestions that K Street might be bad for us, a danger to our children. Michael Kinsley, writing in Slate, argued that the show's handheld-camera authenticity confers "populist nobility" on "a group of people [lobbyists] who charge a lot of money to give disproportionate influence in our democracy to people with even more money. And somewhere in America, there is a child who watched K Street and is thinking this week, 'I want to be a lobbyist when I grow up.'" In what could be the final blow, it turns out that K Street is not drawing a sufficiently massive audience. This week, The New York Times's TV reporter, Bill Carter, wrote that the show has been losing viewers and "its status at HBO seems to be mixed." If true, that's too bad. Maybe I have awful taste in television—I never liked The Sopranos—but what fascinates me about K Street is exactly what I suspect repels its critics: The show takes a city and a political culture we all think we know very well and suggests that maybe we don't. We are trained by Hollywood to think of Washington in one of two ways: 1) the earnest, big-people-doing-big-things plotline that runs from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington right up through The West Wing; and 2) the dark, power-corrupts storyline of Dr. Strangelove, All the President's Men, and Wag the Dog. In both traditions, there are pretty clear lines between heroes and villains; when they are blurred, it is done so self-consciously, for complexity's sake—the "interesting" exception that proves the rule. What's odd about K Street, and riveting if you give it a chance, is its utter indifference to these categories and to all the familiar ways of thinking about Washington. Here the lobbyists are not the noble heroes Kinsley suggests they are. But they're not villains, either. They're just people, each with a confounding, ever-shifting mix of good and bad, greed and generosity, joy and anger. There's one creepy character, mystery man Francisco Dupre, who at various times mirrors almost every hard-core Washington type I've ever known—so painfully smooth he's often hard to watch. Carville and Matalin are not merely the figures we've known for years, doing their old shtick. Here they're weirdly exposed, both as characters in the plot and as real Washington players being themselves, more or less, while the camera's running. This week, Carville exploded when the Drudge Report fingered Matalin as a possible suspect in the White House spy-leak scandal. In fact, Drudge had done just that, and at this point, we don't know whether she or any of her former colleagues in the vice president's office might not somehow be involved. There were moments in her performance when Matalin seemed genuinely anguished by the whole affair. The puzzle was whether this was good acting, real emotion, or both. Did someone say this is boring? Since K Street may not be long for this world, I say let's appreciate it while it's here. Deadsville has never been so alive.
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. 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. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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