Yahoo News columnist Matt Bai has written a look-back book on the demise of Democratic politician Gary Hart, “All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid.” It’s all about a pivot point in the coverage of American politics that occurred when the media in 1987 went after this promising presidential candidate over his relationship with model Donna Rice. The story would killed Hart’s presidential bid as well as later attempts to take on a role as U.S. Elder Statesman. “[T]he story of Hart and the blonde didn’t just prove to be Hart’s undoing; it was the story that changed all the rules, a sudden detonation whose smoke and soot would shadow American politics for decades to come.”
In those decades, Bai argues, the media is motivated to find character problems, hypocrisies that will drive web traffic and segments on cable news. Example: When Bai was working for the New York Times Magazine, he interviewed 2004 presidential John Kerry about his foreign policy vision. At the start of one of the sessions, Kerry rejected a bottle of Evian water, demanding instead that an aide furnish “my water.” When Bai asked about the candidate’s aversion to Evian, Kerry responded, “I hate that stuff. They pack it full of minerals.”
So Bai kicked the matter around, in an attempt to make conversation with the guy. He asked what kind of water Kerry liked. “Plain old American water” came the reply. Bai asked whether that meant tap water:
“No,” Kerry said carefully. “There are all kinds of waters.” He tried to think of some while i sat there waiting, awkwardly. “Saratoga Spring,” Kerry said. Then, after a pause: “Sometimes I drink tap water.” The rest of our conversations went more or less like this.
The reporter would well sense Kerry’s trepidation, namely that he was playing “gotcha” with him. “Was I going to write that he made a show of drinking tap water like a regular person, even though we all knew he could afford to buy Evian’s entire spring if he wanted?” writes Bai.
Then comes an interesting twist. Bai comments that Kerry’s skittishness was entirely justified, though not because of his own “subterfuge.” The entire political echosphere erupted over a single quote in the resulting New York Times Magazine piece: “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” said Kerry. The Bush campaign ran ads off of the quote, and the “nuisance” quote “dominated the coverage on cable TV,” notes Bai, who continues:
All this punditry had virtually nothing to do with any real debate over the nature of terrorism and ideas for combating it; it was about character and hypocrisy. Once again, Kerry had been caught pretending to be something people wanted him to be (in this case, a fervent antiterrorist), when in fact we now had proof that he didn’t consider terrorism to be a problem any bigger than an illicit game of Texas Hold-’em. That he hadn’t said that, exactly, and that I had offered a more thorough explanation of his point in the piece, was irrelevant. Context required too much explanation…
That U.S. politics have become shallow and trivialized, of course, is hardly news, though examples like this one certainly add context and gravity to the pile of evidence. Whether the Hart drama served as a turning point or watershed in this trend, however, is a far more complicated question, one that we’ll have to drill into in subsequent posts.
