Wimblehack: Round 4
WELL, IT'S HERE. Finally. In less than one week, we Americans will celebrate one of our grandest traditions, the victory of Tweedledum over Tweedledee. The occasion will be marked by awe and splendor on all sides, as befits a contest in which the leader of the free world is determined by a race to see which Ivy League graduate is quicker to reach for a duck call at the sight of a Reuters photographer.
Most publications are holding off on tackling that question until after the election. The New York Times, however, ever the teacher's pet who turns in his homework early, already took a whack at it in this past Sunday's "Week in Review" section.
According to the Times, the question "What did it all mean?" is to be answered in flow-chart fashion. If Bush wins, the answer is under an Adam Nagourney byline ("Calls to Reinvent a Party," Oct. 24), and goes something like this: That the Democrats blew this election, which was seemingly in hand, means they are completely fucked and will need to reinvent themselves in a hurry if they ever hope to compete with the Republicans. Meanwhile, if Kerry wins, the answer column under the Elisabeth Bumiller byline ("A Confident Opposition," Oct. 24) will tell you that the Republican base, despite defeat, is as strong as ever and will be back kicking ass in no time.
The Times columns represent the first fluttering of leaves in what will shortly be a veritable hurricane of this kind of flow-chart analysis. If you're old enough to peel an orange without help, you know exactly the kinds of things that are going to be said in these pieces. If Bush wins on the strength of last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts in Ohio, we will hear that this election showed that Republicans have finally matched the Democrats' grassroots organizational skills.
If Kerry wins, and polls show Floridian undecideds were strongly influenced by negative advertising, this victory is going to be chalked up to the emergence of the 527 as a "political force." You won't see the IF-THEN lines buried in the computer code, but they'll be there in almost every article you'll see between now and January: If Bush wins and if the same red-blue patterns from 2000 hold, then that will mean that the electorate is "hopelessly divided" and that the election threw "two Americas" into relief.
New York Press cheerfully guarantees that nothing that doesn't fit in the flow chart, that could not be written by a well-trained chimpanzee, will appear in print anywhere in America in the next month. For things to be otherwise would violate the entire spirit of the affair. Newspapers wait until the results are in to tell us what it all meant to avoid having to confess to what they've all known from the start: that the American presidential election is a gigantic exercise in conventional thinking, in which, no matter what the numerical outcome, the real result is always a sea of slaves cheering the walloping defeat of originality at the hands of craven mediocrity.
It might be that some of us in the media-criticism business have read too much Marx. Or maybe too much Lincoln. Ralph Nader certainly has. Like most of the Earnest Young Idealists who marched against the war in the past year or so (I was one of them), Nader insists, as an article of faith, that the chief reason America's politics are so bankrupt of meaning is that the people are misinformed. Ralph is fond of quoting Lincoln, who said that if people are brought the "real facts" then they "can be depended upon to meet any national crisis." In this world view, the true villains of our national politics are the representatives of the commercial media, who bring us not facts but reams of horseshit about which guy has a better haircut, is smoother at ordering a Philly cheese steak, has a more genuine-looking tan.
That might be giving the people too much credit. Certainly there is plenty of evidence that Americans, when it comes to politics anyway, have always been a group of spineless goons motivated primarily by a hatred of ideas and the fear that a superior person might end up as their leader. It can't be only the media's fault that we are the only people on Earth who demand that our leaders be as dumb as we are.
If Albert Einstein ran for president, we'd make him do photo ops at bowling alleys, eat baskets of french fries, visit Redskins training camp. And once he gave in to that, we'd have another list of demands: no more talk about physics, a round of target practice at Camp Lejeune, a stint juggling lemons with Jimmy Fallon on Saturday Night Live.
And if Einstein were still standing in late October after 18 months of this treatment, the only thing ingenious left about him would be his name. Otherwise, he'd be exactly what we have left for candidates this week: an idiot, compromised and humiliated in a thousand different ways, his only virtue being that he'd proven his acceptance of our orthodoxy by throwing his brains and his personality in a bonfire.
That is what our national elections are all about. It's a gladiatorial spectacle in which individual dignity is ritualistically destroyed over the course of more than a year of constant battering and television exposure. Whether this is a trick of the elite to deliver a frightening object lesson to the population, or whether it represents the actual emotional desire of an impressively mean and stupid citizenry, that's hard to say. Either way, it sucks. And either way, we're going to spend the next two weeks hearing just about every shameless hack in print and on television celebrating this gruesome process as a triumph of democracy and idealism.
Wimblehack, now down to two contestants, will be taking a week off to monitor the finalists during this period. When it returns in two weeks, it will be giving a prize to the winner. You won't want to miss that. The winner, we guarantee you, sure won't.
Without further ado, the semifinal round.
Last week, Fineman, who moonlights as an MSNBC analyst, went on Hardball to discuss the Ohio election with the BBC's Katty Kay, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, the Alan Colmes-ish Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic and the maestro himself, Chris Matthews. Everyone was friendly, everyone was smiling. Matthews, clearly drooling at the prospect of a neck-and-neck Ohio race, had the ear-to-ear grin of a kid on Christmas morning as he posed the question: In the key battleground state of Ohio, who's got the "big Mo"?
Momentum, that is. In the thousands of "key battleground of Ohio" stories that have appeared in the press in the last few weeks, this is almost always the key angle. Who's winning? And why? Did John Kerry's goose-hunting gambit work? Is Teresa Heinz Kerry's big fucking mouth a liability in Cuyahoga territory? Who, goshdarnit, is going to win Ohio?
Very occasionally in these stories, you will see references to enormous job losses in Ohio's manufacturing sector, but these are always placed within a certain context: If the job-loss numbers are up, this is momentum for Kerry; if they're not so bad, that's momentum for Bush.
What is so amazing is that because of Ohio's significance in the electoral college, we now have the whole country staring right at the very face of our vanishing manufacturing economy, and yet what we're talking about is goose hunting, the widow of Chris Reeve and the "likability gap." But that happens for a reason.
Virtually every major company in Ohio has had significant layoffs in the last 10 years-everyone from Monsanto to OshKosh B'Gosh to AT&T, from Ford to General Motors to Pizza Hut. Even FirstEnergy, the state's chief utility and the culprit in the great blackout a few years ago, has laid off some 200 workers from its nuclear operating company, which has some residents worried about safety, particularly in the wake of an emergency shutdown of a Toledo nuke plant in August. This was after that same plant, Davis-Besse, had an acid leak from its reactor in 2002. (Although you won't hear about that, because both candidates have First Energy lobbyists as leading operatives in their Ohio campaign: Alex Arshinkoff for Bush, James Ruvolo for Kerry.)
In this atmosphere, Ohio municipalities have started giving up the store to any company that even threatens to walk, resulting in a devastated tax base and a spate of absurdly draconian business-welfare deals. The best example is probably Daimler-Chrysler's rape of the city of Toledo; the company got a 10-year tax holiday, free water, free site preparation, even free land (including a neighborhood whose residents were evicted) in return for the mere promise to maintain the current level of job decline at its Toledo site. A circuit court ruled earlier this year that the deal was unconstitutional, but plenty of other Ohio businesses have gotten similar deals.
Few would argue that the chief drivers of a lot of these problems in Ohio are the free-trade agreements. An argument can certainly be made (and it is being made, quite a lot, in the mainstream press) that the decline of the great manufacturing heartland in America was inevitable anyway, and that the trade agreements only offered people from places like Ohio a chance to secure better consumer prices and a chance to open new foreign markets during a transitional labor period.
But there are plenty of other people, like about 99 percent of union members, who believe that agreements like NAFTA and GATT simply made it easier for corporations to take advantage of impoverished labor forces in countries without worker protections-in other words, that the agreements are an end-run around fair wages and labor rights.
Whatever you believe, it's certainly the issue in a place like Ohio, where the economy and the whole culture is changing at light speed.
But you can't have a referendum on that issue in Ohio because a) both candidates are free-traders and b) because both candidates are free-traders, neither candidate is talking about free trade and c) the mainstream media, owned almost exclusively by big pro-trade companies, is not particularly interested in discussing free trade.
Now, General Electric is a major employer in Ohio. Its subsidiary, General Electric Aircraft Engines, has eliminated some 4000 jobs, at least 800 of which were from its plant in Evendale since 9/11. Most of those job losses were chalked up to slumping airline orders after the terrorist attacks, but many of those jobs were exported as well. In general, GE-whose representative at the NAFTA hearings in 1993 told Congress that the pact "could support 10,000 jobs for General Electric and its suppliers?. these jobs depend on the success of this agreement"-has been one of the largest net exporters of NAFTA-related jobs, losing about 3500 positions overseas in the first seven years of the agreement.
So it stands to reason that neither GE nor its media arm, NBC, is going to spend a lot of time calling public attention to the deleterious effects of the free-trade pacts. Nor is it likely to remark upon the seeming absurdity of a presidential race between two enthusiastically pro-trade candidates hanging on the voting choices of a state ravaged by manufacturing job losses. Instead, what it does is put a couple of clowns on the air to insist to the public that what Ohioans really want is not a job, or answers, but a man who is "human enough" and "acceptable enough" and will save a baby from a burning building. We bring you Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman:
MATTHEWS: Howard, you've been out in Ohio covering both these fellas running for president. Who's got the big mo' right now, the momentum?
FINEMAN: Right now in Ohio, John Kerry is doing better and George Bush has lost some steam in that state. Doubts about the war, one reason. Continuing doubts about the economy are the bigger reason in that industrial state. You go to these rallies, the Kerry people are pumped up. They're excited. Are they excited about John Kerry himself? No. And John Kerry's effort now is to try to make himself at least human enough and acceptable enough to pull those people over who've already decided they don't want to rehire George Bush for four years. You talk to the Kerry people, they're pumped.
MATTHEWS: So if he saves a baby from a fire this week, he's in good shape.
FINEMAN: He's got to do something like that. Got to do something like that.
Just think about how condescending this whole election process is: Big business takes away people's jobs, guts their public services, gives them two pro-corporate candidates to choose from in the election, and then hires a bunch of fawning mouthpieces to go on television and describe U the voter as a dumb savage who will vote for the first candidate who shows them a cuckoo clock or a shiny new penny. It's amazing that angry mobs don't round up people like Fineman and Matthews and chop their heads off on general principle.
Later on the same show, Fineman again penetrated the tough issues of the Ohio race:
"The question still outstanding is whether Kerry can win it. And Kerry's whole theme the last week and the week ahead is going to be, 'Trust me. Let me reassure you or whatever. I'm going to talk about my faith. I'm going to talk about the future. I'm going to be upbeat. Come with me.'"
It's a good thing there are professional journalism schools. You wouldn't want to leave work like that to amateurs.
REPORTERS HAVE THOUSANDS of tricks for avoiding discussion of policy issues in campaign coverage, some more clever than others. The majority of them are obvious and are of the sort that jump out at the public: the constant focus on the People-magazine angles about the candidates' looks, their relationships with their wives (how often do they touch in public?), the musical instruments they play, the hobbies they pursue at their respective Viceroy retreats, etc.
Unfortunately, we're not yet at the stage where campaigns can be conducted without any mention of policy issues. We're headed in that direction-I'm guessing it's about three elections off, when the Rock decides to make his run against incumbent Tom Hanks-but we're not quite there yet. This puts both candidates and the press in a bind. They're still forced to give at least superficial lip service to the ostensible intellectual purpose of this exercise, but they have to do it in a way that makes it sound like they're not doing it. Fortunately, there are plenty of media innovations to help them out here, and one of the best is the Tumulter-sault.
Named after Karen Tumulty, who pioneered and perfected its use, the Tumulter-sault is a neat little literary device through which reporters refer to "details on the issues" without ever elaborating upon those actual details. The typical way the writer uses this one is to just slip it in, offhand-like, in between the more important details: "Candidate X, who boasts an impressive record on environmental issues, spent the weekend snowmobiling in Jackson Hole with a pair of one-armed Marine veterans..."
Forgetting about Bumiller and Bennet for a moment, it's worth pausing and recognizing Tumulty's contribution to the development of this device. She has always been the best at it, and this year she really set the tone. Take this passage from a piece last month ("Coolness Under Fire," Sep. 20):
"Kerry hardly lacks a platform at home; his health-care and fiscal policies are far more detailed, if less numerous, than Bush's. But the campaign didn't pivot from the past to the future after Boston and then hammer home Kerry's ideas. That left Bush a huge opening-and he reached for it in New York City."
Tumulty has a corollary use of the technique that not only obliquely refers to the existence of complex policy positions without explaining them, but simultaneously berates the candidates for even bringing them up. Here's an example from a piece she wrote about the selection of John Edwards as running mate ("The Gleam Team," July 19). In this one, she highlights Kerry's unfortunate tendency to talk about his policies in polysyllabic detail:
"When he finished, Kerry couldn't resist jumping in with a mini-seminar on trade policy that included references to the fine print of the antidumping and antisurge laws. But at least Kerry answered the question."
The Tumulter-sault is an important innovation because it paves the way for a future in which discussion of "the issues" can be replaced by the actual words, "the issues." With this kind of help from the press, we may soon reach a point at which the candidate who uses the word "environment" more becomes the environmental candidate and the candidate who uses the word "security" more becomes the security candidate. We're not quite there. But thanks to certain reporters, we're well on our way.
Both Bumiller and Bennet pulled Tumulter-saults in recent weeks. Bumiller's was more elaborate. In an Oct. 21 piece she co-wrote with third-round dropout Jodi Wilgoren ("A Blistering Attack by Bush, A Long Indictment by Kerry"), Bumiller managed to relay 1325 words of Bush-Kerry accusations on security issues without including one detail about what their actual Iraq policies are. In the spaces where those explanations should have come, she and Wilgoren just stuck in Tumulter-saults, as in this passage:
"Mr. Kerry sought to rebut Mr. Bush with a detailed policy speech Wednesday, unusual for this late stage in a campaign. His aides said Mr. Kerry delivered the speech because he must prove himself as an acceptable wartime leader before he can win over undecided voters on domestic issues like health care and embryonic stem-cell research."
This is a good one, confining a "detailed policy speech" to the words "detailed policy speech" in order to leave room for more newsworthy stuff like this:
"Mr. Bush's aides said they were delighted to see Mr. Kerry spend the day discussing national security, the central component of the president's campaign, because they believed it meant he was on the defensive."
Try to imagine that scene. Elisabeth Bumiller is sitting somewhere in Iowa chatting up a Bush aide (or "aides," according to the attribution). One of the aides deadpans: "You know, Elisabeth, we're delighted that Kerry spent the day discussing national security, because that means he's on the defensive."
Bumiller nods seriously, writes it down in her notebook... And then an hour later, she fucking publishes it? Her husband must have to restrain her from taking notes when they go used-car shopping.
Meanwhile, Bennet's Tumulter-sault came in his last debate wrap ("A Television Event that Delivered High Drama and Garnered High Ratings," Oct. 15):
"The 30-second advertisements and prepared texts dropped away as each man, haltingly at times, supplied specific detail on plans for health care and taxes, and a vision of sorts for America's conduct in the world."
Again, this is a classic use of the trick, as "specific detail" is confined to the words, "specific detail." And this might have been enough for Bennet to stay within striking distance of Bumiller in this round, except for one thing: He wrote it two weeks ago. Since the last round, he hasn't filed, which is a shame because Bennet was the breakout star of this tourney.
We hope to see him next time around, if we're not all tending mutant sheep in a post-nuclear desert by then. In any case, New Yorkers will have at least one championship contestant this week, as Bumiller will attempt to pick up Brian Cashman with a win in the finals. Does the Times have what it takes to win? Find out in two weeks! o