Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (34 page)

But our establishment media is anything but rational. In U.S. national elections, eagerness to wage war is equated with “character” and “toughness.” There is no such thing as being excessively militaristic. Quite the opposite, there exists a direct relationship between a candidate’s willingness to support and threaten wars and the respect the candidate merits from the establishment press as a serious and tough foreign-policy hawk. And thus, while McCain would pay a substantial price for his war support in a rational world, in our Beltway Media World, it becomes a reflection of his strength and seriousness. And the media, with a straight face, depicts McCain as a moderate and an independent, notwithstanding his loyal support for the most radical and destructive Bush/Cheney policies.

In this regard, and so many others, John McCain’s candidacy is similar to that of George W. Bush. In 2000, the dominant media theme was that likeability—choosing the candidate with whom one would “most want to have a beer”—was the key determining factor in selecting a President. As is now amply documented, the 2000 media corps revered George Bush the way hordes of insecure high school freshmen revere the star quarterback, while they despised and mocked Al Gore just as the overly earnest school nerd is taunted.

Evidence demonstrating the influence exerted by the 2000 media’s Bush-love and Gore-hatred is far too abundant to chronicle here. But perhaps the most vivid account reflecting the press corps’ love affair with George Bush was the 2003 book by
Time
magazine’s Margaret Carlson, titled
Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House,
in which she reminisces about the tight and affectionate bond between her fellow journalistic colleagues and candidate Bush:

I miss George Bush. Sure, I see him every day up on a podium, breezing into a fund-raiser, or walking across the South Lawn to Marine One. True, I was only a few dinner plates away from him at Katharine Graham’s house and within joking distance at the White House Christmas party, where he charmed my goddaughter.

But once a man is president, he changes, you change, and the situation changes. He’s Mr. President (“Trailblazer” to the Secret Service). Anyplace you might see Bush up close is now off-limits. He’s surrounded by men in black talking into their wrists and driving armored Chevy Suburbans with gunwales. He travels on Air Force One. You travel on the press charter behind him….

The campaign, or specifically the campaign plane, is the last time the press gets to see the man who would be president more closely than an attentive viewer of C-SPAN. Bush didn’t like campaigning, so he treated the time on the press like recess,
a chance to kick back between math and chemistry classes. He was seductive, playful, and most of all, himself. It’s a failure of some in the press—well, a failure for me—that we are susceptible to a politician directing the high beams of his charm at us.
That Al Gore couldn’t catch a break had something to do with how he was when his hair was down. Only it never was.

Carlson added that the media hated the earnest Gore as much as it loved the playful Bush because Gore was “intent on proving he was the smartest kid on the planet.” She continued at length in that same vein—invoking seemingly every high school cliché to explain the 2000 election dynamic as one driven by the press’s petty personality obsessions. As
The Daily Howler
’s Bob Somerby wrote in reviewing Carlson’s book:

Carlson goes on, at considerable length, about how Bush “bond[ed] with the goof-off in all of us” on that plane. Persistently, she portrays the press corps—and herself—as if they were feckless teen-agers. On the plane, “[Bush’s] inner child hovers near the surface,” she writes. And not only that; “Bush knows how to push the buttons of your high school insecurity.” But then,
“a campaign is as close as an adult can get to duplicating college life.”

Bush “wasn’t just any old breezy frat brother with mediocre grades…He was proud of it,” Carlson writes, approvingly. This seems to explain the press corps’ preference. “Gore elicited in us the childish urge to poke a stick in the eye of the smarty-pants,” she writes. “Bush elicited self-recognition.” Yes, those sentences actually appear in this book, and yes, they seem to be Carlson’s explanation of Gore’s lousy coverage.
“It’s not hard to dislike Bush’s policies, which favor the strong over the weak,” she writes. “But it
is
hard to dislike Bush.”

Carlson’s unintentional confession—that the press corps’ attitude toward candidates is primarily the by-product of journalists’ residual high school personality scars, which drives them to worship the cool popular kid and hate the overly serious geek—really does explain the crux of how our national presidential discourse is shaped.

Underscoring how much like “college life” our national journalists treat presidential elections, Carlson even cited the far better food served to journalists by the Bush campaign plane than the Gore plane as a metaphor for Bush’s far cooler persona. On Bush’s plane: “There were Dove bars and designer water on demand, and a bathroom stocked like Martha Stewart’s guest suite. Dinner at seven featured lobster ravioli.” But:

Gore wanted the snacks to be environmentally and nutritionally correct, but somehow granola bars ended up giving way to Fruit Roll-Ups and the sandwiches came wrapped and looked long past their sell-by date. On a lucky day, someone would remember to buy supermarket doughnuts. By contrast, a typical day of food on Air Bush…consisted of five meals with access to a sixth, if you count grazing at a cocktail bar. Breakfast one was French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon.

In sum, as reporter Richard Wolffe—then of the
Financial Times,
now of
Newsweek—
admitted in a documentary produced by Alexandra Pelosi: “We were writing about trivial stuff, because [Bush] charmed the pants off us.” The disparity in the Bush/Gore treatment by the press was so severe that even conservative Joe Scarborough acknowledged it on MSNBC in November 2002:

I think, in the 2000 election,
I think [the media] were fairly brutal to Al Gore.
I think they hit him hard on a lot of things like inventing the Internet and some of those other things, and I think there was a generalization they bought into that.
If they had done that to a Republican candidate, I’d be going on your show saying, you know, that they were being biased.

One would have assumed that the last seven years, which brought us Iraq and Katrina and chronic lawbreaking and pervasive corruption and torture and Abu Ghraib and all the rest, would have trained our vapid press corps to avoid the high school popularity mind-set when covering our presidential campaigns. But in 2008, one actually finds exactly the same dynamic—and the same verbatim themes—that caused our media stars to fall in love with George W. Bush driving their fawning, adoring coverage of John McCain.

Just as Bush was the honor-bound, though still likeably cool, high school jock who intimidated and thus inspired great respect in our media stars, so, too, does John McCain engender in them the feeling that they are privileged to be near him, lucky that he knows their names, honored that he is willing to spend time interacting with them. One need not speculate about any of this. The media stars seem bizarrely unashamed of copping to the swooning.

One highly representative sampling came in November 2007, courtesy of
Time
’s new campaign reporter Michael Scherer, in which he cast the McCain v. Romney primary battle as
The GOP’s High School Debate: The cool kid vs. the valedictorian:

Here’s one thing you need to know about John McCain. He’s always been the coolest kid in school. He was the brat who racked up demerits at the Naval Academy. He was the hot-dog pilot who went back to the skies weeks after almost dying in a fire on the U.S.S.
Forrestal.
His first wife was a model. His second wife was a rich girl, 17 years his junior.

He kept himself together during years of North Vietnamese torture and solitary confinement.
When he sits in the back of his campaign bus, we reporters gather like kids in the cafeteria huddling around the star quarterback. We ask him tough questions, and we try to make him slip up, but almost inevitably we come around to admiring him.
He wants the challenge. He likes the give and take. He is, to put it simply, cooler than us.

Scherer underscored what is, in any event, self-evident from reading the reporting from our press corps—they view our presidential elections from the perspective of an insecure freshman seeking to recast their painful adolescent years and view even presidential candidates solely through the prism of vapid high school clichés. And just as George W. Bush did, the towel-snapping playboy John McCain is a unique beneficiary of this absurdity. Scherer continued,

So here is the situation that Republicans in New Hampshire face on Tuesday: Do we elect the jock or the overachiever? Do we go with cool and confident, or cautious and competent?…So who won? It depends whom you liked in high school. Did you want to park with the jock? Or did you admire the smart kid who volunteered Sundays at the foodbank? It’s your call.

It is true that with regard to all presidential candidates—not just McCain—one effortlessly finds such stunted, high-school-based character analysis pervading the stories from our nation’s most prestigious political reporters. Here, as but one example, is the 2007 analysis from
Newsweek
’s Howard Fineman of the two top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination:

You knew Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in high school. At least I did. They were candidates in the student senate election. She was the worthy but puffed-up Miss Perfect, all poodle skirts and multicolored binders clutched to her chest. He was the lanky, mysterious transfer student—from Hawaii by way of Indonesia no less—who Knew Things and was way too cool to carry more than one book at a time. Who would be leader of the pack?

Presidential elections are high school writ large, of course,
and that is especially true when, as now, much of the early nomination race is based in the U.S. Capitol. It is even more the case when the party in question, and here we are talking about the Democrats, is not sharply divided ideologically. They have a good chance in ’08 to oust the fading prep/jock/ROTC/Up With People alliance.

But just as was true for the rich, privileged, frat-boy persona of George Bush, the media’s feeling of intimidation in the presence of McCain’s bad-boy, fighter-pilot coolness produces almost uniformly favorable coverage. Even media critic Howard Kurtz, of the
Washington Post
and CNN, who normally loathes criticizing his journalistic colleagues for unduly favorable treatment of GOP politicians, acknowledged “McCain’s ability to charm the press” and even admitted that such “charm” shapes the bountifully favorable, even uncritical, media coverage of McCain:

Journalists tend to reward those who engage them and get testy when they are stiffed, concluding that such candidates are overly calculating and wary of unscripted exchanges.

Kurtz even quoted
Time
’s Ana Marie Cox as claiming that journalists are cognizant of their abundant affection for McCain:

“The journalists who covered McCain in 2000 feel very self-conscious about the criticism that the press came under for apparently being so taken with John McCain,” says Ana Marie Cox, the
Time
blogger who has been covering him. “There’s a sense that the first time was so fun and exciting, but this time we’re really going to be sober and critical and the dispassionate observers we’re supposed to be.”

The aspiration that Cox claims her colleagues share—to conduct themselves like actual professional reporters around McCain rather than giggling, swooning, grateful cheerleaders—is nowhere to be found in press coverage of McCain. Rather, the type of playful banter more appropriate for a loving couple, which Kurtz ended his column by recounting, continues to govern press behavior in McCain Land:

As the Straight Talk Express rolled from Greenville to Spartanburg, McCain, sipping a Coke, was upbeat with a half-dozen reporters…. After he fielded questions on strategy, the economy, abortion, Iraq, Romney and Huckabee,
the assembled journalists seemed to run out of ammunition and the conversation grew more relaxed….

“What did you do without us this morning?” asked
Chicago Tribune
reporter Jill Zuckman, since the senator had taken the unusual step of traveling separately from the press corps.

“It was terrible,” McCain replied. “Withdrawal. Shaky. Had to have a couple of shots of vodka and calm myself down.”

“Were you hanging out with other reporters?”

McCain acted horrified. “I was not unfaithful,” he insisted.

It’s as though adoring reporters deplaned from Bush 2000 and stepped right onto the equally playful 2008 McCain “Straight Talk Express” bus.

Time and again, watching reporters fawn over John McCain is redolent of the media’s Cult of Personality that arose around George Bush in 2000. McCain’s pronouncements are passed along uncritically, and every interview appears designed to bolster his character mythology. In January 2008, on the eve of the GOP’s South Carolina primary, the primary election that likely decided the outcome of that party’s nominating process, CNN political reporter John King had the opportunity to interview McCain while riding with him in the press bus, and these are all of the “questions” that were broadcast: