"Two Men, Fates Linked," ran the New York Times headline on a Wednesday article about George W. Bush's then-pending role in the scheduled execution of Texas inmate Gary Graham. Bush faced a decision about whether he could or should grant a 30-day reprieve of Graham's lethal injection in light of serious doubts about the fairness of his trial, including statements by three jurors that had they heard the testimony of witnesses who have since surfaced, they would not have voted to convict.
But the facts of Graham's case were covered in a second Times article. What was on the mind of this piece, labeled "News Analysis," was the far more cynical question of how Bush should frame whatever action he took.
Bush, wrote Times correspondent Frank Bruni, now "faces a second, amplified challenge." (Beyond, that is, the challenge of deciding whether or not to kill a possibly innocent man.) "It is to demonstrate, through the tone of his voice and the set of his jaw, that he feels the full weight of his responsibility. And it is to show, through his bearing and his choice of words, that he comes by his steadfast position in support of the death penalty after extensive soul-searching and careful thought."
Note that this is not an examination of whether Bush does feel the weight of his responsibility, or whether he has searched his soul; it is a piece about whether Bush can so position himself as to be seen to have felt and searched.
It may be unfair to pick on Bruni's piece, which because of the grim subject matter is only a particularly stark example of a kind of journalism that almost all major media are practicing. It's the coverage of political character as theater: a malign bastard sired by the horse-race school of political reporting from the legitimate form of journalism that examines character itself.
This seam in our political narrative is, of course, part of a larger trend toward meta-coverage of campaigns, in which the choice of pollster or the sagacity of the ad buy is weighed at least as seriously as the plan for restructuring Social Security. But perhaps we can put a collective finger in this one hole in the dike: the substitution of appearance for reality when it comes to personal character.
Al Gore's primary campaign, for example, was widely covered in part as the story of his miraculous reinvention as the Nashville-based, earth-tones-wearing neo-populist. No one actually believed that Gore had undergone a personal transformation, but his willingness to stage one was still received--even by reporters who joked about the clothes--as a sign of a muscular new chapter in his campaign. And so a limited series of politically deft acts was reported as if it were a reasonable approximation of Al Gore having actually changed something about himself. Part of his current problem, the same sages say, is that this avenue is now blocked to him: Sorry, pal, only one fictive transformation to a customer.
John McCain, too, came in for his share of cosmetic/characterological advice: Was he too angry to be president? (A legitimate question.) Would he be able to show, or at least to seem to show, that he wasn't? (In the end, the reviewers ruled that he had.)
This kind of analysis, always dressed up in the trappings of neutrality, is essentially a manifesto from the judges of a sporting event, set forth to tell the contestants exactly where we are setting the bar this year: whether we will be grading more, this time out, for technical perfection or degree of difficulty--or tone of voice or set of jaw.
In most of these cases, the analyst is touching on a genuine character issue. It does mean something that Bush has in the past so lightly dismissed the possibility that any of the 134 executions that have taken place on his watch might have been flawed by incompetent counsel or any of the other judicial nightmares that can send an innocent person to death row. And it's legitimately disturbing that, according to Tucker Carlson of Talk magazine, Bush mocked the pleas for mercy of one of the people Texas put to death. But the Times analysis, for all its air of judiciousness, does nothing to advance the reader's assessment of what genuine gravity Bush has brought to his involvement in capital sentences.
In Gore's case, the theater of character also masks a legitimate issue, which is the vice president's profound love-hate relationship with politics. The real question about Gore's slashing style, his apparent willingness to do or say anything, is not whether he can "shake this image," as we like to say, by Election Day; it is why he has manufactured a political self who seems so unrelated to the better parts of his character, and what this would mean to his presidency. In McCain's case, the real task should have been to explore whether he really was a powder keg, and why.
But it is much harder to address those questions fairly than it is to handicap how much we in the political echo chamber feel like caring about them on a particular day.
