The Media Seesaw

The worm is turning. As any bright 7-year-old might have predicted, the Gore-on-the-rise, Bush-on-the-wane theme of recent presidential campaign coverage is shifting in favor of a plot line that has a "rejuvenated" Bush "retooling" his effort and "reaching out" to "seize the attack." The briefly invincible vice president, on the other hand, is suddenly wallowing in a spate of negative stories about doggy-gate. Republican charges of Democratic hypocrisy toward Hollywood are getting a serious hearing in the press, and the Gore campaign's rigid message discipline--seen only last week as the stamp of its genius--is now the subject of critical stories.

The cycle of building them up and knocking them down has become so predictable, and so speedy, that the press writes knowing, self-mocking stories about the process even as it performs its latest narrative shift. But there's an underlying dynamic that hasn't been much noted: While both candidates are being subjected to this fickle treatment, only one candidate is being fundamentally redefined each time it happens.

Gore is the devil we know. His assets and qualifications--experience and brains--are clear, if sometimes underappreciated. And his debits are also clear: the association with Clinton (he may have allayed the morality problem with the selection of Joe Lieberman and the Big Kiss, but there's still the baggage of the 1996 Clinton-Gore fundraising scandal); his difficulties in getting voters to see him as a likable person; and the perception that he will say anything to get elected, overstating or misrepresenting essentially true things in ways that make him look shifty or ruthless.

The truth-stretching charge reappeared this week when the Boston Globe revealed that Gore had embellished details in complaining that his mother-in-law's arthritis medication cost three times as much as the identical drug prescribed for his dog. Whether the Bush campaign's success in flogging this story will resonate with voters remains to be seen. But either way, the press coverage of Gore accepts that his liabilities are real ones, and differs from cycle to cycle only in measuring how well he has managed them and how heavily voters weigh them.

The much more interesting case is George W. Bush, because the pendulum of his coverage swings back and forth between two irreconcilable pictures of him. He is either (a) a late-blooming natural politician of huge charm who has somehow solved the intrinsic puzzles of Republican Party politics, or (b) a total dummy, thrust by his name and his party's desperation into a suit several sizes too big for him.

Before this week's little signs that Bush's stock is due for a rise in the media market, he was "stumbling," "losing his footing," full of "verbal miscues." It wasn't just that his campaign made some bad moves; he was suddenly revealed as a man who could barely utter a full sentence without scrambling his tenses, mixing up his millions and his billions, and mispronouncing words.

But before that he was the canny orchestrator of a unified convention, which in turn was a symbol of how shrewdly he had finessed the tensions within his fractious party, and the man whose post-primary campaign was a brilliant series of moves to the center. By far the most prevalent media message about Bush from April through June, according to a study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, was that he is "a different kind of Republican."

The media's wavering portrait of Bush is mostly a function of his relative newness on the national scene: Reporters simply haven't had the time and experience with Bush to assemble a portrait that integrates his strengths and his weaknesses. The good news in this, for Bush, is that he has been free of the kind of ingrained caricature that has haunted Gore in the worst weeks (and even months) of his campaign, and the press is free in turn to inflate a small gesture like his peck on Oprah's cheek into a maneuver of Churchillian eloquence.

But in the closing weeks of the race--especially in the way the media will assess the presidential debates that start the week after next--Bush's fortunes are apt to be far more volatile than Gore's, subject to wholesale revision by a single blunder or moment of grace. I would far rather be in Gore's place, arthritic dog and all.