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One never knows where one will come across jarring historical artifacts. Lately the Times Dining Out section has been especially fertile ground. Frank Bruni's column yesterday on "restaurantspeak" reminded me that George W. Bush in 2000 was perhaps the luckiest candidate in American political history.
First a bit of background. Now the Times' Restaurant critic, Bruni was the NYT reporter assigned to cover the Bush campaign in 2000. Bruni's coverage of Bush was famously soft, as is evidenced by his memoir of the campaign Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush. Publishers Weekly describes Bruni's book as focusing on the seemingly trivial aspects of Bush's personality, small moments that he believes "reveal every bit as much about Bush as large ones": Bush sticking his fingers in Bruni's ears to indicate something is off the record. Or Bush holding his pinkie to the corner of his mouth … la Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies.
This type of anecdote-obsessed coverage was typical of Bruni's reporting throughout the campaign. From the start he seemed smitten with Bush's back-slapping, hail-fellow-well-met persona.
All of which brings me to Bruni's restaurant column yesterday, which he basically devoted to complaining about servers using the word "enjoy" too liberally - as in "are you done enjoying your entree" or "would you like to enjoy some coffee with dinner." Bruni bristles at waiters presuming him to be "enjoying" his dish without even asking. Fair enough. But is this really so annoying as to merit an entire column?
I think this column is noteworthy for exposing Bruni's pettiness, a fixation on style over substance that characterized all of his 2000 campaign dispatches. Bruni seems to simply that a few phrases from the waiter can mar an entire meal, irrespective of how tasty the actual meal is. Similarly, one can imagine him taking a shine to George W. because he was a funny guy - irrespective of his lack of experience or policy knowledge.
Just read the Bruni column and ask yourself: was this really the reporter whom the newspaper of record designated to cover a Presidential candidate? Karen Hughes probably spun Bruni simply by forbidding the campaign flight attendants from telling him to "enjoy" his diet cokes!
Seriously though, Bruni's restaurant criticism's sensitivity to irrelevant details (I thought a restaurant critic was supposed to write about food) does give some insight into his weakness as a political reporter.
Bruni's caprice struck me becuase I read the "restaurantspeak" column just after completing a post about media coverage of Gore in 2000. Bush was incredibly fortunate to draw Bruni as his NYT campaign tail rather than the very critical Kit Seelye. And this accident of history mattered. Did it determine the outcome of the election? Certainly not. But in a contest as close as the 2000 Presidential election, NYT coverage almost certainly influenced some voters' in Florida (and other swing states) toward Bush. Hopefully future journalistic historians will mine Bruni's restaurant columns for insights into his misguided reporting in 2000.
Jokingly linked to in my last post, Evgenia Peretz's Vanity Fair article actually deserves a serious read. It's a well-researched indictment of the anti-Gore bias that pervaded mainstream reporting throughout the 2000 election. The author singles out Kit Seelye of the Times for sloppy reporting that helped unfairly brand "GORE IS A LIAR" onto public consciousness. Seelye, as well as Maureen Dowd, is also faulted for uncritically promoting "honest frat boy versus arrogant untrustworthy geek" as the election's dominant narrative frame.
As a writer of opinion pieces, Dowd's disdain for Gore and seeming soft-spot for Bush are questionable as a matter of judgment but not evidence of journalistic incompetence (perhaps of bad taste though, given her gall in writing puff pieces about George W. during the campaign and then a few years later publishing Bushworld, whose premise is that she knew what the Bushes were about all along). The examples from Seelye's reporting are more troubling; that Seelye still covers politics for the Times (see her story on the Obama SNL skit) makes past errors in her reporting very relevant. Without intending to join the (mostly conservative) bloggers who exist solely to second-guess NYT writers (e.g. Krugman Truth Squad), I will be reading Seelye's stories extra-closely throughout this election (especially if Hillary gets the nomination and the right-wing echo chamber really begins to pound). One hopes they will not resemble her real-time web commentary on the second Presidential debate in 2004, when she largely ignored substantive clash to applaud various "Bushisms" ("he looked at me like my buzzer was up") and offer the following concluding observation: "Bush is charged-up and feisty; Kerry seems wordy."
The frustrating question of why American media in 2000 transformed a serious, far-sighted Vice-President (and future Nobel Peace Prize winner) into a gutless and mendacious hack remains far from answered. At least Evgenia Peretz has begun to compile the evidence.
Just to be clear, I don't revive the issue of Gore's 2000 media coverage in the hopes of him receiving better treatment in 2008. Steve Kornacki of the New York Observer convinces me that Barack Obama pre-emptively sapped the thunder from a Draft Gore campaign. In allying themselves with Obama, activist progressives largely disappeared as Gore's natural base. Unlikely to serve again in government, one hopes that private citizen Gore will continue his outstanding efforts even under a Democratic administration.
On a final and totally irrelevant note, check out the above link to Seelye's NYT profile: doesn't she resemble Annette Bening as Sydney Ellen Wade in The American President? Not a bad look. I wonder how Seelye would cover a real life President Andrew Shepherd. The fictional Shepherd shared Gore's commitment to mandatory cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions; unlike Gore, he was willing to stake the White House on climate change legislation. Since the movie's release in 1995, President Shepherd's proposed legislation has seemed pure utopia; today's Times suggests such legislation to be inching closer to reality. I barely need mention Gore's role in making this happen.
