Archive

About the Editor

Best of 2PC

Back to 2PC

On your marks, get set, emote

May 27, 1999

This is politics as it's never been before.

Or maybe the way it's always been, just never this bad.

Or this early.

This is Al and Tipper Gore on the cover of a recent Newsweek, described as "off and stumbling" in a callow campaign for U.S. president.

This is May 1999.

This is eighteen months before the November 2000 election.

This is destroying American politics.

This is how to warp something until it's unrecognizable: start talking about it 502 days beforehand as if it's only a week or two away. Furrow your brow at "bad poll numbers." Cross-examine someone arrogantly and self-righteously.

In other words, do what Newsweek did.

I heartily applaud the attempt to change the subject after last year's garbage disposal -- which everyone who couldn't wanted to shut off, but nobody in a position to do so did.

But this isn't much better, in terms of how America views the White House: pasting "Team Gore" on the cover of Newsweek; painting it as a last-gasp effort; badgering Gore in an interview, "Why are you behind so early?"

Gore wisely replied that the campaign "really hasn't started yet." But you wouldn't know it from the buzz in major newspapers and magazines. Laughable polls that pit Gore against George W. Bush reek of election-year summer.

We're not even into summer of the year before.

Gore is widely portrayed as an underdog down by four runs in the seventh inning. Actually, he's hardly taken batting practice yet.

But this is the state of presidential politics these days -- the politics of personality over policy. Gore is interminably pegged as wooden and dull. Obviously unfit for office. Never mind that no one has a clue what he would do as president, nor what anyone else would.

And the press almost challenges them to try, to shove it through layers of spin. Gore could hit the stump and promise everyone a free pony and no one would notice, what with the press clucking its tongue about how "wooden" the whole thing was.

A caption to a photo of Gore in a loose embrace with a Oklahoma tornado victim actually questioned if he was ready to be "Emoter-in-Chief."

That's not just careless or irresponsible. It's dangerous. When an election metamorphoses into a junior high popularity contest, it ravages respect for our national leadership.

Not all the blame can be plopped on the media, of course; for one, there are too many forms of media out there covering things in too many ways for us to safely whirl around reliable and universal scoldings.

For another, the candidates themselves all too often play along with the popularity contest approach. For example, Gore, while nobly fending off Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman's incredulous queries about how Gore could possibly not be panicking, nonetheless resorted to breezy blather about keeping "our prosperity moving...[bringing] about stronger families...and [making] certain America leads the world."

You can't blame the escape from substance on the media when you take in sewage like that.

Still, I fear the popularity contest is on.

New Hampshire is a summer, fall and winter away, and already people are counting electoral votes. George W. Bush hasn't said much of anything yet, besides basically whether he takes cream and sugar with his coffee, and they're picking out new knick-knacks for the Oval Office.

The problem is, just when we need to leave the National Enquirer alone to do its job again, major media outlets seem more eager to analyze hairstyles than possible first 100 days. We need to know more about Al Gore than his stiff posture, more about Bush than his photo-ops, more about Bill Bradley than his history, and more about Elizabeth Dole than her gender.

We need to more meaningfully evaluate what these individuals would do as president.

Instead, the press has shown signs of not just distracting us from our democratic duty, but overtly impeding it by stifling candidates' messages and dealing with polls as facts.

We all need to sit back and let the candidates campaign.

Not already, not all at once, but watching and listening to them across the country, listening to what they would do as leader of the free world and why.

This is democracy.