The Media Sharks Are Circling Their Prey

The Clintonization of George W. Bush continues. The baby-boomer candidate with an embarrassing past gets questioned about his personal life. He responds with half-denials and semi-demurrals; reporters accept these pseudo-responsive responses for a time. But then something triggers their feeding-frenzy gland and they tear into the story until the political waters are red. The media usually win, insofar as they chew into the candidate’s soft private underbelly, but in doing so they provoke a sympathy backlash among the public. No doubt that’s what Bush was thinking about when he decried “the politics of personal destruction,” which was one of the ex-Arkansas governor’s favorite phrases.

Bush has long said he won’t discuss his past drug use. That was an honorable position, shared by a many other boomers, who wish they could remember the glory days of Woodstock or the March on the Pentagon but can’t, because they were lost in their own pharmaceutical haze in a college dorm room back then.

But Bush’s bid for a chapter in the post-heroic yuppie version of “Profiles in Courage” is likely to end soon. Proving yet again that the media are the Great White Sharks of American life, Bush’s resolve has begun to blanch as he stares into those camera teeth every day.

On Wednesday, he said that he hadn’t used any illegal drugs in the past seven years. Chomp. On Thursday, he said he hadn’t used drugs for seven years before his father’s inaugural in 1989. Chomp. Chomp. So that would seem to take him back to 1982, which would be 17 drug-free years, but then he also indicated that maybe his body had been a drug-free zone for 25 years. More chomps.

This is the wrong way to play the press. For all their biases and prejudices, their real goal in life is less to change the world and more to make the mortgage. And the best way they know to guarantee their employment tomorrow is to do what worked for them yesterday. That means ask the same questions over and again, hoping the answers change, even slightly. Each change is then parsed, compared to past statements and new questions are formulated, in a process that makes theological debates about angels dancing on pinheads seem like a freewheeling bull session by comparison.

Bill Clinton, of course, was a particularly tough case. His never-broke-the-laws-of-my-country-and-I-didn’t-inhale type of answers had reporters flummoxed for a while, but eventually they learned to crack his code. And so, for example in 1998, when Clinton tried to get away with saying there “is” no sexual relationship between himself and Monica Lewinsky, reporters immediately concluded, correctly as it turned out, that there “was” such a relationship.

And so that’s the mental template through which the media see Bush; he is bleeding, and they, the reporters, are hungry. To be sure, more than a few Democratic partisans are roiling the waters. Two weeks ago, Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) told reporters that past drug use was “a legitimate question” and indicated that a press follow-up that was anything less than “Jaws”-like would be construed as going easy on Bush.

The irony of all this frenzied feeding is that nobody really cares about the naughty past of politicians, so long as it isn’t visibly affecting their performance in office. As far back as 1987, the voters yawned when then-Sen. Al Gore said he had smoked marijuana. And for more than a year, the public was force-fed stories about Monica, and the only result was that Clinton went up and the press went down; according to a Freedom Forum survey released last month, 53% of Americans think the press has too much freedom, up from 38% just two years ago.

The final irony is that if Bush were to win this battle, not only would the public cheer, but most reporters wouldn’t really mind. In their heart of hearts, most Big Chill generation journalists sympathize with him, just as they did with Clinton. But a job’s a job. And so, in the final analysis, Bush is just another piece of prey, bobbing and bleeding in the water.