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 Caveat lector 30 March 2000 Our current howler (part III): Two stories
Let Simon complain that the hopefuls were dumb—many others despaired of their character. Margaret Carlson took an interesting tack, discussing that interview Bush had given to the thoroughly upset New York Times:
For years, Clinton was bashed for living-by-polls. Now, a pundit scrambling for novel complaints had suddenly rediscovered their wisdom. That's right, folks. To today's upset scribes, everything's wrong with those hopefuls! Some of the nattering about Bush and Gore involved the two candidates' life stories. Marjorie Williams reviewed Bill Turque's new Gore bio. Writing in Salon, she found a good deal not to like:
If you don't have anything nice to say, you're perfect for the modern press corps. Until recently, Senator Gore was frequently cited for his progressive career. Now, Albert Gore is bombastic and prideful; Pauline Gore is calculating and cool. We're allowed to hear that she was smart as a way of being told that he wasn't. But don't think that Williams isn't fully prepared to go after that Dub-man also. On March 17, she penned a piece in the Washington Post about how Bush and Gore don't apologize correctly. Nothing pleases modern natterers more than making hopefuls gulp down humble pie. So this naughty tendency on the part of the pair was especially troubling to Williams:
Could it possibly be that the hopefuls sometimes don't think they've really done anything wrong? That they "fess up" to get scribes off their back? Williams complained about Bush's Bob Jones mea culpa; "his letter [to Cardinal O'Connor] went onabout how unfairly he had been criticized," she groused. But Bush surely had noticed what Williams won't say—that other pols had gone to Bob Jones without complaint—and he likely believed that the scribes complained now just because Saint McCain was complaining. Williams, of course, had different ideas about what makes the deadly duo so depressing:
Williams says that she "tends to think" that Bush has a "blustering inability," while Gore has a "heightened sense of shame" (text below). Her work is full of reports of "impressions." She tells how things "could be" and "seem," and also how things "tend to" strike her. But then, when you're the master of the psycho-insight, there's no impression you aren't prepared to pass on. On January 7, Williams had said, in the Post, that Bush may be too "peevish" to be a good president. Here's one way she could tell:
To be honest, when we watched Bush's joke to Hume, we weren't sure whether Bush was mocking himself, or mocking the caliber of the newspapers. But Williams—able to spot a "shadow of a sneer"—makes the incident a referendum on Bush's suitability for office. Does Bush have a "surly edge?" He has a five-year record as governor of Texas; has the "surly edge" shown up down there? There is no sign that Williams has tried to examine how "peevish" Bush has been in office. (His reputation, we must report, is the opposite.) Like others in the Know All, Tell All Brigade, Williams is able to form her "impressions" on the basis of smirks, sighs and sneers. That's right, folks—it's hip these days to trash the hopefuls, and there's no judgment the natterers won't make. Williams' review of Turque's book for Salon was titled, "Does Al Gore have a heart?" And Williams is up to making the call; she tells us, right in paragraph one, that underneath Gore's surface layers "is an emotionally isolated man of almost total opaqueness." "It's beige down there, all right," she attests. Because of those bombastic, cool parents, she says, Gore was "from the start, a tiny politician, a pleaser," an example of "the children who grow up hollow." To us, that's a pretty sweeping diagnosis, but modern scribes are ready to make it; we've seen The Scribe become The Shrink in earlier pundit psycho-bios. We always get a little uneasy when we see weekly pundits put pols on the couch, but it's especially troubling when the pundit has recently offered plainly divergent diagnoses. Is Gore "an emotionally isolated man of almost total opaqueness," the type of kid who "grew up hollow?" It didn't seem that way two years ago, before slamming the hopefuls had become de rigeur. Here's what Williams wrote about Gore in Vanity Fair, just two years back:
Say what? Read on. There was more:
And remember how we said that political pundits used to say nice things about Dad? One of those pundits was Marjorie Williams. Dad had seemed different back then:
Two years ago, Senator Gore was "out of Central Casting," as he still was last month in Salon. But the Official Story pundits told then was less negative that the one they tell now. Pundits now are hurt and upset that the voters have made such ridiculous choices. So the family man is suddenly hollow, as he confronts the surly man with the sneer.
Tomorrow: Negativity's end. Home cookin': We haven't had a chance to read all of Turque's book, and we don't want to condemn it in any way. In our opinion, some reviewers have drawn simple-minded themes from the book that simply aren't there in Turque's text. But one small passage does help show how modern scribes sometimes push favored themes. Turque is discussing Gore's decision to go into the army in 1969:
It's press corps dogma; Gore tends to "stretch." Here Turque extends the treasured theme even to Gore's reference to Carthage, Tennessee as his home town. What would Turque have had Gore say? Apparently, Gore should have said this:
Please. In the next paragraph, Turque puts the word "hometown" into quotes, not being drawn into Gore's latest stretcher. Gore's draft board was in Carthage for an obvious reason. In this passage, the fact that Gore speaks the English language becomes the latest sign that he won't tell the truth. |