Tell
Me It's All a Bad Dream
So here
we are, right where we always knew we would be, with two of the least
likeable candidates in recent memory - each of them already having proven
several times over that he is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve
victory - lining up for eight months of incessant bashing, distortion,
attack ads, dirty tricks and accusations short on substance but long
on repetition. Hey, I don't know about you, but I can hardly wait for
hourly television spots of Al Gore in the Buddhist Temple or George
W. Bush at Bob Jones University.
Through
it all, of course, the world will be watching, amused and bemused. One
suspects it will not be impressed. Here's the way British columnist
Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian, describes the putative Democratic
candidate: "leaden.dead-eyed Al Gore..a dismally poor candidate." Think
that 's harsh? She's even crueler in assessing Dubya: "dapper, slightly
simian, too small eyes too close together, he is a feeble shadow of
a feeble father. That president without qualities has brought forth
a man with only negative qualities and less than nothing in his past
history to recommend him." Ouch! Imagine what she'll have to say about
Pat Buchanan.
Ah yes,
Pitchfork Pat. It seems that our only hope for getting at least a few
more laughs out of all this as the days drag on.and on.and on.will be
those fine folks in the Reform Party. It is already fascinating watching
Buchanan trying to trip his way lightly between the fundamental libertarianism
that fuels that odd political conglomeration and his own virulent social
conservatism, especially an anti-abortion commitment that makes Gary
Bauer look like a rampant liberal. And there remains the possibility
that Ross Perot will soon emerge from his self-imposed exile to try
and wrest the nomination away from Buchanan. Anyone who caught the near
riot that occurred when the Reforms were merely electing a party chairman
a while back knows that such a nomination battle would be, as they say
all too often these days, awesome.
Democrats,
of course, salivate at prospects of a Buchanan candidacy. The conventional
wisdom is that his presence in the race would seriously damage Gov.
Bush's campaign by drawing votes from that portion of the electorate
which would otherwise be inclined to hold their noses and accept compassionate
conservatism ("compassion" not being a word in the political vocabulary
of either Buchanan or his most ardent followers) as the best available
alternative. Personally, I suspect that the abortion issue and his neo-populist
tirades would allow Buchanan to take some measurable segment of the
Democratic vote as well. Seems to me there's another consideration too:
might not a Buchanan campaign allow Bush to argue that he was not at
all the darling of the right and thus him protective cover for with
regard to his ties to the likes of Falwell, Richardson et al?
If you
had asked me a month ago, I'd have said the election is in the bag for
Gore, given that the country is, on the whole, doing well economically.
That means incumbency should be a great political asset, especially
since, no matter how often journalists and GOP diehards ramble on about
"Clinton fatigue," Bill Clinton remains the most popular President ever
at this point in his term. Gore's comeback against the Bradley challenge
only began when he stopped running away from Clinton; he presumably
won't make that mistake again. Then again, he makes enough other errors
to easily meet the Minimum Daily Requirement.
At this
point, I'm thinking that Dubya, whose willingness to shift positions
and embrace today what he rejected yesterday is at least as reprehensible
as the Vice President's more often-noted tendency to do the same, has
a chance. He's done a good job so far of taking what have long been
considered "Democratic issues" and making them, if not his own, at least
competitive. The down side of that, of course, is the risk that the
Religious Right and Congressional Republicans will either abandon him
(it's already been reported that many House troglodytes are planning
to pretty much ignore the Bush candidacy and run separate campaigns)
or drag him over the cliff with them in the traditional march of the
lemmings.
The
Real Message
"The press,"
Bob Novak announced the other night during one his seemingly hourly
appearances on CNN, "is finally showing its true colors."
You know
what that means.
Forget
"asshole" and "big time" blurted out in front of an open microphone.
Ignore Dubya's apparent unfamiliarity much of his own economic program
or, for that matter, the English language. And take a moment or two
to realize that the debate over the debates was really a principled
stand in favor of..well, somebody will get back to you on that.
None of
those things has anything really to do with the downward spiral of the
Bush Campaign over the past month, snarl Novak and his ilk. It's all
the fault of those nasty reporters, who are slipping what the folks
down in Texas call "subliminable" messages into their stories and newscasts.
Just when
you thought it was safe to go back into the water, the evil, all-pervasive
Liberal Media Elite strikes again.
Hey, I'll
admit the Bushies have some reason to be upset. Once they got over their
love affair with John McCain earlier this year, the press was all over
the Texas Kid, writing favorably about anything and everything he did
and pretty much giving the impression that not only was he a Sure Thing
for the Presidency come November, but that they very much approved of
the idea.
Then came
the Democratic Convention, the Big Smooch and the incredible surge of
the past three or four weeks which has taken Al Gore to the top of most
polls and seemingly put this whole political year right back where everyone
thought it would be a year ago.
As the
polls turned. so did the press. Who'd a-thunk it?
Most of
the hot-shot pundits and big name reporters still might not like Gore
very much (more on that in a minute), but if the public was turning
away from the supposed inevitability of Dubya, self-preservation required
them to take a harder look themselves.
A Hard
Look is not exactly what the Governor and his faithful Texas Mafia are
used to. That it has come just when they are flailing about trying to
"get back on message" (whatever that message might be this week), may
be poetic justice, but it can't be much fun there in the bunker when
everybody is suddenly piling on.
But let's
get it straight, boys and girls: the press isn't, for the most part,
either liberal or conservative.
What the
press is, is easy.
Be one
of the gang, offer a wink and a smile, not to mention a frat boy type
nickname, and they're as willing and eager as the last lonely soul at
the bar at 2 AM, wondering where the hell everybody went. Buy 'em a
drink, figuratively speaking, and chances are you're gonna get lucky.
But they
may not respect you in the morning.
The Liberal
Media Elite thing, if it ever truly existed at all, has been over for
years now. I don't know what's sadder about it, that the Right Wing
can't seem to grasp the fact that they have, in many ways, won the war
and move on or that there are still so many people out there who will
buy into the whole idea that there's a great conspiracy which is somehow
preventing the warm and kindly policies of Tom Delay, Dick Armey et
al from transformed the world into a better place.
The truth
is that it is Al Gore who has most often gotten savaged by the press
over the last several months. While his opponent, even today when he
supposedly being ripped by the media, is able to shift positions, change
policies and deny the obvious with impunity, anything Gore does that
is even minimally different from what he did yesterday is "pandering."
Old and discredited stories from months and years ago are repeated as
fact in story after story and unsubstantiated speculation about hidden
motives for his every action are offered up routinely.
Think I
overstate? Consider this little tidbit from a report in London's Financial
Times a month or so ago, a source which has no dog in this fight:
"The
Gore media, for all its experience, sometimes appears to step over
the line in its pursuit of critical coverage...At the heart of the
press corps are three reporters, known to their politically-incorrect
colleagues as the 'Spice Girls'. The three are perhaps the most influential
reporters on the Gore campaign, having covered the vice-president
almost without break this year: Ceci Connolly of The Washington Post,
Katharine Seelye of The New York Times and Sandra Sobieraj of the
Associated Press. They can also be the most hostile to the campaign,
doing little to hide their contempt for the candidate and his team."
As it happens,
a few hours before beginning this column, I caught Connolly as a guest
analyst on the Fox Sunday News and the cynical side of me swears she
was auditioning for a permanent slot on what is arguably the most influential
right wing program on network TV (it is also, by the by, usually the
best of the Sunday morning news hours, if only because it doesn't try
to hide its biases behind a false shield of impartiality).
The topic
of the moment was the so-called "RATS" advertisement put up by the Bush
folks. All agreed that the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot and
purely accidental. Then Ms. Connolly, the only true "reporter" in the
bunch blurted out something like this: "but if that had happened the
other way around and it had been done by the Gore Campaign, they would
have done it deliberately."
She wasn't
kidding either. And that sort of reporting, I suggest, is the real subliminal
message of Campaign 2000.
Prescience,
Synchronicity, or Political Acumen?
On
the very day Jack wrote the above column and made particular mention
of the Washington Post's Cece Connolly, it turns out that the paper's
very own ombudsman columnist did
the same (albeit without naming names).
Jack's
feeling pretty smug about his reportorial perspicacity, and verbally
spiked the ball in an email to his friends and fans. We liked what he
had to say and copped a bit of it to share with our readers. Go here
if you want to see what he has to say for himself.
Of
Oprah, Regis & Diversity
I
chose "The Great Disconnect" as an overall title for these
periodic ramblings because I felt it was a perfect description for contemporary
American politics. As luck would have it, there may not have been a
better week in this whole campaign than the one just past to underline
that point.
The
relationship between what the two major candidates have said and what
they have done has never been more tenuous than in recent days. Further,
we also had the spectacle of one of those soft money third party advocates
finally going over the edge, putting up a despicable television ad in
the Missouri market which did as much to undermine the entire carefully
planned campaign of one of the candidates as has anything that's happened
all year. Trouble was, the campaign that got sucker-punched is the one
this dodo is supposedly supporting. Life is sweet sometimes.
But first things first. Let us consider Vice President Gore and Governor
Bush have been doing and saying here in late September as the Presidential
Campaign hits a lull of sorts, public attention diverted by the Olympics
and, to some degree, in a holding pattern until the October Debates
and one last chance to take the measure of the only two men with any
real chance of becoming the next President.
The
Veep first. Mr. Gore's reputation for being fast and loose with the
truth to gain political advantage may be largely undeserved (fanned
by a GOP spin operation that must burn out fax machines by the hour,
and a lazy - or worse - political media that perpetuates discredited
stories rather than risk diverting from the herd), but it is not entirely
without merit. His tightrope walk on the "Hollywood, clean up your
act or else!" issue, castigating entertainment moguls in campaign
speeches and cajoling them at fund-raisers (often on the same day) has
been something less than inspiring. And his call for the President to
release some of our oil reserves, while arguably a sound option in the
current crisis, was a change from his previous statements, no matter
how deftly spun. There was also bit of a flap recently about whether
his mother-in-law or his dog pays more for drugs, but I never did get
a handle on that one. Thing is, newly-hatched Loveable Al does not benefit
from even passing reincarnations of Old Al.
Meanwhile,
Governor Bush announced that his campaign would now focus on issues,
a declaration trumpeted by his entourage as if it were some sort of
staggering new concept in politics. Dubya then proceeded to spend much
of the week making the rounds of daytime TV shows, conventional wisdom
being that this is the way to appeal to women voters, who seem increasingly
disenamored of his charms (personally, were I a woman voter, I would
be enraged by the premise). Oprah and Regis were the beneficiaries of
the candidate's presence, but certainly not of anything substantial
about what his opinions might be on those issues upon which he was now
concentrating. Still, Bush had his best week in a long time and even
got off a funny line or two. "I want some specifics," Winfrey
pressed him at one point. "I know you do," smiled the Governor,
"but I'm running for President." Hey, anything Charming George
can do to wipe away the image of Dumb George can't hurt, you know?
Unfortunately,
especially for a campaign which devotes an inordinate amount of energy
trying to paint the opposite side as false and untruthful in the face
of overwhelming evidence that approach isn't working (another sort of
Great Disconnect, that, a peculiar GOP-centric version first manifested
during the Impeachment disaster), the funniest part of Bush's Oprah
appearance came right afterwards when his Communications Director, Karen
Hughes, burbled excitedly to the press: "We've talked with people
who saw it in different cities all over the United States, and the feedback
is overwhelmingly positive. 'Home run' is the phrase most frequently
being used to describe the appearance." Trouble was, the show had
been seen only in Chicago at that point and wasnÕt shown to the rest
of the nation until later in the day. Oops.
To
be fair, we should note that Gore preceded his opponent in a sit-down
with Ms. Winfrey (who is apparently now a political kingmaker as well
as arbiter of the books we should be reading - how come she isn't running
for President?) and did "Top Ten" shtick on David Letterman
before that. And, yes, that really was Joe Lieberman on Conan at Night,
singing "My Way," and cavorting on the radio with Don Imus,
apparently having put his campaign for National Rabbi on hold for the
moment. Personally, I'm anticipating, not with much excitement, a Dick
Cheney soft shoe routine on Leno any night now.
Shaking
off that disturbing vision, allow me to direct your attention instead
to the fine creative work of one Richard Nadler, who heads up an "independent"
group called the Republican Ideas Political Committee. He has produced
a 60-second pro-Republican TV spot, narrated by a woman (aren't they
all, this year?) who complains that she and her husband had to yank
their son out of public school. Why? "We didn't want him where
drugs and violence were fashionable. That was a bit more diversity
than he could handle (italics mine)." At that point, the camera
pans across a picture of multiracial kids. Interestingly, there is currently
a school desegregation struggle going on in Kansas City, one of the
primary markets in which the ad is running.
The
Bush people quickly rejected the spot as "inappropriate,"
which was nice if a bit understated. The last thing that struggling
campaign needs is any reminder that the "We are Family" theme
of the Republican Convention in Philadelphia this summer was, well,
not exactly reflective of the party as we know it. It may be apocryphal,
but it has been reported that one more typical GOP delegate, looking
up at the heartwarming gathering on the stage, blurted out "most
of those people couldn't get into my country club."
This
stuff probably depresses you, no matter which side you're on. Well,
here's a comforting thought: it's only a little over six weeks until
the start of the 2004 Presidential Campaign. Feel better now?
The
Defining Moment?
Is
George W. Bush really nothing more than an inarticulate dolt who's running
for President solely on the basis of a recognizable family name and
good connections within the GOP power structure? Well, despite his having
regularly gone out of his way to further that stereotype, I'm not prepared
to dismiss the Texas Governor so cavalierly. It's a cruel thing to define
someone as "dumb" without concrete and irrefutable evidence, or to do
so even then, comes to that.
Astonishingly,
however, what we have been seeing of late is that even Dubya 's supporters
are accepting the premise that their man is something of a dim bulb.
Hell, they go so far as to suggest that a lack of intellect is a positive
feature of his candidacy!
Writing
in The Washington Post a week or so ago, in a column in which
he attempted to cast the voters' choice as between "Dumb and Dishonest,"
Michael Kelly called the Texas Governor "a candidate who is smarter
(and more experienced in high office) than the average bear, but not
a whole lot more" and suggested that "the country can afford a 40-watt
president." A similar argument was put forth on Salon a few weeks
earlier and is often the, you should excuse the expression, subliminal
message or subtext of arguments offered by Republican spinners in TV
interviews.
All
this, of course, is part of the build-up to the first Presidential Debate
on Tuesday, October 3. This is, we are told, likely to be "The Defining
Moment" in "the closest Election in modern times." How much of that
is hyperbole I leave to each of you to decide for himself, but I will
note that we have already had enough "defining moments" in this campaign
(Bush vs. McCain in South Carolina after the McCain win in New Hampshire;
Bush's acceptance speech at the GOP Convention; Gore's stepping from
Clinton's shadow at the Democratic Convention) to make one wonder if
the pundits would know one if it wasn't handed to them, pre-defined.
Bush's
people look hopefully to 1980 when Ronald Reagan, burdened by many of
the same perceived weaknesses as Dubya, not least of which was the idea
that he was not too bright, ate Jimmy Carter's lunch in the debates,
winning by force of personality and affability over a man then considered
the smartest to ever occupy the White House. They dream that the Governor's
likeability, as indicated in the polls, will be the decisive factor
that will allow him to slide his way past Gore's experience and grasp
of the issues. It may be asking too much, however, for George W's frat
boy smirk to live up to Reagan's almost mystic charm which even his
political enemies were prey to. Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill (who
surely spins rapidly in his grave whenever former aide Chris Matthews'
deplorable Hardball airs on CNBC) once said Reagan "knows less about
the budget than any president in my lifetime," yet happily and often
joined him for an after-session bourbon and chat when Congress had finished
its daily blather.
All
that said, there's no doubt that the debates are a bit of a mug's game
for the Vice-President. It is so firmly ingrained in the public consciousness
that he is the stronger debater of the two--indeed, even the finest
political debater extant, as the GOP talking heads would have it--that
there is no way he can be perceived as winning Tuesday night. If Bush
is able to get through by using the sound bite answers he has mastered
on the campaign trail and emerges essentially unscathed, he will be
declared the winner. If he instead makes a major gaffe or two, Bush
will be seen as having lost but the story will be that it was inevitable
rather than that Gore was victorious.
The
only way this particular debate will be "defining" is if Bush is demolished,
if he falls completely apart and comes across as, yes, a dolt. I doubt
he would be able to recover from that. It's unlikely that the polar
opposite could occur (Bush demolishing Gore) but not impossible. A more
likely alternative is that Bush could win if Gore makes a self-serving
misstatement or comes across as bullying his opponent and lecturing
to the public, faults which are often attributed to him. In that case,
Bush would certainly be in the more commanding position, but the advantages
enjoyed by the incumbent might still allow him to come back before Election
Day.
Meanwhile,
the constant bleating about Gore's "dishonesty" and willingness "to
say anything to win," continues, usually from the same folks who look
to Ronald Reagan as Dubya's model, yet conveniently forget the Gipper's
tendencies to confuse movie roles with reality or his oft-repeated stories
about non-existent "Welfare Queens" in Cadillacs. And the laughably
indefensible "damned Liberal Media" thing is almost at a crescendo,
proving once again that those whose message does not work will always
blame the messenger.
We're
even getting the tired old "90 percent of the Washington press corps
voted for Clinton in 1992" mantra, usually offered with the sort of
Bush-like smirk that indicates the speaker thinks he's hit a triple
(that's an old Ann Richards reference for those who recognize it). My
answer to that, back in the day, was always, "strikes me that those
statistics indicate that the people closest to the campaigns and the
candidates clearly felt one was superior to the other."
A
few years ago, I finally asked an old college pal, who'd become the
head of a major newspaper's Washington Bureau, if it was true that most
political reporters were liberals and, if so, why? "I think we probably
are," he said. "Why? Well, when you see what's going on here in Washington
and you travel regularly with the President and become aware of some
of the problems in America and around the world, with what some people
face every day, it's pretty hard not to be a liberal."
Works
for me.
So,
Who Won?
My
favorite comment on the first of the Great Presidential Debates of 2000
came from Maureen Dowd, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the
New York Times:
"I
wanted to strangle Gore and slap Bush."
There
they were, the two guys vying to become Leader of the Free World, dressed
in identical TV-correct costumes to underline, albeit inadvertently,
the absolute phoniness of the whole process. In this year of the Lowest
Common Denominator, all Gore wanted to do was not to look like an overbearing
bully and all Bush wanted to do (perhaps all he is capable of doing)
was to not look like a dummy.
They
both failed.
Miserably.
Sighing
audibly, interrupting incessantly, slipping frequently into his slow,
infuriating "lecture" mode, the Vice-President managed, against all
odds, to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Forget the immediate
snapshot impressions that he won the debate - he did, overwhelmingly
- and look at what happened in the days since. By his performance, Gore
gave an opening to the Bush team to switch attention from their candidate's
woeful inability to explain his positions to a spurious but apparently
successful focus on Gore's supposed "embellishments," And, tell me,
who was the man's make-up person? Was the Vice President really supposed
to look puffy and bloated, if not damned near embalmed, or was the idea
(I swear this is evident in certain perspectives) to resemble, more
than a little bit, Ronald Reagan?
Governor
Bush? Well, he managed to get by, barely, and to appear to be competently
participating in the debate by offering vague generalities and a constant
"fuzzy mathematics" mantra. Said historian Richard Norton Smith on PBS:
"What we learned tonight is that Gore knows a lot and that Bush knows
enough," which was probably an accurate description of what most viewers
thought. But let's face it, Bush showed no real grasp of either the
issues or, God help us, his own centerpiece tax proposals. I mean, the
man is running for President of the United States. Is it too much to
ask that he actually show some grasp of what the job involves and offer
an argument for his candidacy more substantial than "I'm a Governor"
and "I know how to lead?"
The
second big story of the week, after the almost universal fascination
by the pundits with style rather than substance, was the often informative,
never personally combative debate between the two vice-presidential
candidates, the official storyline being that we would all probably
be happier and better off if both tickets were reversed and Messrs.
Lieberman and Cheney were the presidential candidates. Well, maybe,
but the reality is that neither is and that both will now disappear
from center stage.
Did
I mention that the political press once again disgraced itself?
See,
the job of these folks should be something more than just running with
whatever story one or the other campaign provides for them. For example,
among the many differences in Gore-Bush scrum was the issue of the Bush
tax cut. The positions seemed pretty clear. The Vice-President charged
(again and again and again) that Dubya's plan would spend more on a
tax break for "the wealthiest one percent of Americans" than he would
spend in total on defense, social programs, et al. The Governor responded,
often pausing and crinkling his eyes charmingly as he tried to remember
the lines he'd been given by his staff, that this was "fuzzy math."
Look,
we're talking real numbers here. Either one candidate was dead wrong
or, more likely, they were both playing with the numbers in some fashion.
Can anyone out there cite a single independent, unbiased news source
which analyzed that issue? That went and looked at the Bush figures
and then told us which of them was correct?
Of course not.
Serious
consideration of the candidate's statements would involve actual reporting
(not to mention being subjected to immediate charges of being part of
the "liberal media elite" if it turns out Dubya was, you should pardon
the expression, embellishing). It's so much easier to just go with the
flow and recount over and over again about if or how or when Gore "lies,"
no matter whether that's true or not.or even if it is relevant.
As
far as I know, only CNN bothered to send a team to Florida, to talk
to people there and to determine the facts about the now famous 15-year
old girl whose classroom was so crowded that she had to stand rather
than have a desk. It took them a while, but they finally moved beyond
the quick and easy surface reporting that her situation was temporary
and due to all the expensive new equipment in the room. In fact, the
teenager was the 36th student in a 24-person class, other students in
the school were also in overcrowded classrooms and without desks for
a time and her father, a Republican no less, did indeed send a letter
to the Vice President about the matter. In short, the claim made by
Gore was accurate.
Then
again, what else should we expect from those who still regularly repeat
tired, long discredited stories about how the Vice President claims
to have invented the internet, discovered Love Canal and never worked
on his family' s Tennessee farm during his boyhood summers as if they
didn't know they were false? Not that the Vice President doesn't invite
these things, understand, given his seeming inability to stop blurting
out things which allow him to be painted as a dissembler. But still...
Here's
a thought, for Gore and others. I promise this: the first candidate
in the next presidential campaign (coming to a neighborhood near you
in roughly four weeks now) who swears off the Reagan-invented and Clinton-perfected
tactic of telling anecdotes about "real people" to support their arguments
will get serious consideration from me, whatever his, or her, policies.
Enough, I say, enough.
Until
then, my choice and yours, assuming we want our votes to count in a
positive rather than negative manner, is Gore or Bush. That decision
for most of us appears to be down to whether or not one of them is too
overbearing for us to bear listening to him for the next four years
or whether the other is anywhere close to smart enough to be in the
Oval Office.
I'm depressed.
In
the Land of the Blind
Some things
to think about, with less than three weeks to go until Election Day:
The
Undecideds. I've been an undecided voter twice, both times
right up until I walked into the voting booth. Once was in 1968, when
the whole country seemed to be coming apart and what had looked like
a cakewalk for Richard Nixon had turned into a real race by Election
Day (most experts, looking back, suggest that Hubert Humphrey had all
the momentum and would have won had the race gone on a week longer).
I could not bring myself to want to vote for Humphrey and the idea of
Nixon (a candidate that the GOP, in its wisdom, put on its national
ticket every election save one from 1952 through 1972) appalled me.
I thought McCarthy was a fraud, so that option was non-existent. Humphrey?
Nixon? Which one? For years afterwards, I blanked out and literally
could not remember for which one I eventually pulled the lever. I'm
pretty sure now it was Hubert. Pretty sure.
The
next time was 1980. Disillusioned with Carter and frightened of Reagan,
I remember walking to the polls with my wife and asking her to give
me just one good reason to vote for Ronald Reagan. She snorted. "What
makes you think I'm voting for Reagan?" She was for John Anderson, who
in my mind was even more fraudulent than Clean Gene had been. That year,
for the first and only time, I deliberately threw my vote away, giving
it to Libertarian Ed Clark secure in the knowledge that he could not
win.
The
popular wisdom these days is that the undecided voters will determine
our next President since those who have already committed to one candidate
or the other have broken out at about 50-50. It's a scary thought if
you believe the undecided to be accurately represented by the dolts
whom all the TV networks have been trotting out in focus groups these
last few months. Well, as is the case every election, some significant
segment of the undecideds does consist of such people, folks who are
not quite paying attention or who don't really understand anything much
more complicated than who looks nicer to them or appears likely to win
and thus gets their votes so they can be on the winning side. They will
vote or not vote for reasons beyond our comprehension and it's a waste
of time thinking about them.
But there still is the rest of the undecided block, the ones who could
choose the next President. They, I have come to believe, are voters
who are inclined to vote for the Vice President on the issues, but who
cannot yet bring themselves to actually commit to doing so. Why? They
find his personality annoying or they are still angry with the current
resident of the White House, for example, or maybe they feel somehow
uncomfortable with rejected Dubya, who they find charming if not particularly
inspiring. Most of them will vote and, I believe, will "come
home" to Gore, which means that this race is really not so close as
it seems.
Or
maybe that's just wishful thinking.
The
Press. I know I've pretty much beaten this hobby horse to death
in this space, but I remain astonished at the strange coverage of this
campaign. Mike Schmidt, the Hall of Fame third baseman for the Philadelphia
Phillies once famously said of his home town that it was the only place
"you can experience the joy of winning and then the agony of reading
about it in the newspapers the next morning." Al Gore must feel exactly
like that.
From
the perpetuation of all those silly stories about his claiming to invent
the internet or to have discovered Love Canal or his supposedly lying
about working on a farm in the summers of his youth--stories which
have been shown to be completely untrue and which those repeating them
almost always know to be untrue--to the no-way-he-wins standards
used to judge the three debates, the Vice President has been pummeled
unmercifully for nearly ten months now, save a brief three or four week
span in late August and early September when the Bush campaign was stumbling
so badly not even the press could ignore it.
Just
imagine if, in the second debate, it had been Al Gore who smirked and
came close to bouncing up and down in his seat with excitement while
he gleefully talked about executing people. Or, in the third debate,
it was Al Gore who seemed to shrink away in fear whenever his opponent
came near or who whined to the moderator rather than answering a question.
What do you suppose the Katherine Seelyes and CeCi Connollys of the
world would have written then? Can you imagine the Bob Novak column?
The Maureen Dowd column? The headlines in the Washington Times
and New York Post? Can you actually hear Chris Matthews or Tim
Russert phrasing the careful, accusatory question which can be answered
only one way?
The GOP National Committee has admitted, in an interview which ran in
the Knight-Ridder newspapers a week or so back, that they instituted,
long before this campaign even began or either man was nominated, a
concerted effort to raise questions about Gore's integrity and truthfulness
by seizing on every possible story, no matter how irrelevant (or true,
let me add), and turning it into a Big Thing. That it seems to have
worked may attest to a certain political brilliance (if not much moral
character), but it only worked in large part because news outlets from
the sainted New York Times and Washington Post on down
happily ran story after story which could have come directly from the
RNC fax machine.
Look, folks, it's not just me. Here is what managing editor Sam Perry
wrote at http://www.consortiumnews.com/
last week:
"While
this botched and biased campaign coverage might seem trivial to some,
its cumulative effect has been to transform the presidential election
campaign from one that had been dominated by issues to one controlled
by the Republican/media's harsh assessment of Gore's character and credibility.
"What
has made this development a direct threat to the democratic process
is that the media's treatment has been extraordinarily one-sided and
often erroneous.
"The
national press corps has acted as a political collaborator with the
Republicans in a scheme to defame Al Gore and effectively hand the election
to George W. Bush.
"If
George W. Bush is elected president on Nov. 7, he will owe a huge debt
to a national press corps that has become a national disgrace."
The
Rest Of The Ticket. This is the point in most campaigns where the
rats usually desert the ship in droves, even if it's only listing a
bit rather than outright sinking. House members generally jump first,
followed by Senatorial and Gubernatorial candidates caught up in tight
elections. As soon as it becomes fairly certain who is going to win
the Presidency, it becomes every man for himself and to hell with the
national campaign. It happened to the Democrats in '84 and '88 and the
Republicans in '92 and '96. But this time, nobody knows what's going
to happen. As a result, the only outward sign of distancing from
the party candidate that we've seen is the fact that virtually no Republican
candidate on any level is running on the Bush tax plan and several have
offered alternative plans of their own. Yet that's been true from the
beginning of the campaign and can't be taken as a sign of panic.
Quite
simply, almost every candidate's fate remains tied to some degree to
the fates of the two Presidential nominees. That puts everything into
play, so that 2000 could end up being a watershed election which would
give one party control of both the White House and the Congress. In
a year in which there is as clear a difference as has ever been offered
between the two candidates on the place and meaning of government in
our lives, the winner may actually be in a position to inculcate his
philosophy into the nation's future policies for some time to come.
