I am not kidding. If someone had showed me a copy Elisabeth Bumiller’s New York Times article and told me it was a spoof, I would have believed him. I would have had no trouble accepting it as some conservative group’s attempt at mocking the American left’s selective indignation, specifically the way the Times uses its front page to editorialize for the liberal Democratic agenda.
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(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
If anything, I would have thought it a bit over the edge to be effective satire. After all, isn’t it a bit preposterous, after all the corny showboating of the Clinton presidency, to make a fuss over the way the Bush administration works to create favorable images of the president for the nightly news?
But that is exactly what the Times’ story does. The Times reporter wants the public to be aware that the Bush team is seeking an image of the president that will stand him in good stead during the next election campaign. What the Times calls “Bush’s ‘Top Gun’ landing on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln” prompted the story. It was, says the Times, “one of the most audacious moments of presidential theater in American history.”
I guess it was also one of the most effective, to get the editors of the Times up so up in arms. They seem determined to make sure the American public is warned that the Bush administration is “going far beyond the foundations in stagecraft set by the Reagan White House,” by “using the powers of television and technology to promote a presidency like never before.” Like “never before?” Baloney. But more of that in a little while. Let’s first make sure we get an accurate picture of the Times’ complaint, lest anyone think I am being unfair. The paper’s position is that “the White House does not seem to miss an opportunity to showcase Bush in dramatic and perfectly lighted settings. It is all by design: The White House has stocked its communications operation with people from network television who have expertise in lighting, camera angles and the importance of backdrops.” The Times credits three individuals for this skillful use of television imagery: Scott Forza, a former ABC producer, Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman, “who is considered a master at lighting,” and Greg Jenkins, “a former Fox News television producer in Washington who is now the director of presidential advance.” We are informed that these three “understand they have to build a set, whether it is an aircraft carrier or the Rose Garden or the South Lawn.”
And to make sure everyone gets the point: “They understand that putting depth into the picture makes the candidate or president look better.” I think it fair to say that the Times’ implications is “better than he is.”
Where to begin? First of all, does the Times reporter expect us to believe that there is something new about presidents working to create favorable television images of themselves? That only Bush and Reagan used the “powers of television and technology to promote a presidency?” Come on: working the cameras is not some uniquely Republican ploy. The Times knows that the image of John F. Kennedy as a Catholic family man, dutiful to his wife and children was an outright fabrication. Kennedy must have had a hard time squeezing in those warm and fuzzy shots with Caroline and John-John between his dalliances with interns and mob-linked bimbos.
Does the Times think the cameraman just happened to be out for a stroll one afternoon when he got those shots of Jimmy Carter in his overalls looking for plant rot on the corn stalks on his farm? The venerable “paper of record” is perfectly aware that Michael Dukakis’ handlers were seeking to do exactly the same thing that the Bush handlers accomplished with the landing on the aircraft carrier, when they posed Dukakis in that infamous picture in the tank. There isn’t something sinister about the fact that Bush looked relaxed and natural in his flight suit, because he once was a fighter pilot in the Air Force Reserve, and Dukakis looked like such a dork in the tank that the Republicans later used the images in their own television commercials in that election.
But we don’t have to go back to the 1980s to illustrate the Times’ double standard in this matter. The Times knows full well that Clinton administration did all the things that the paper now finds disturbing when carried out by the Bush media team. Or if the Times editors are not aware of that fact, maybe selective indignation leads to selective amnesia. The Clinton team was as media conscious as any in history. Talk about using media “pros” to sell an image! From Clinton’s first presidential run to today, the man has worked on manufacturing a public persona. Consider all the different hair colors and hairstyles that both he and Hillary have experimented with. Consider the mawkish Clinton film biography turned out by the television producer and Clinton crony Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, “The Man From Hope.” Look at the pictures of Hillary now, in comparison to the Hillary who was the governor’s wife in Little Rock. She has had a complete Hollywood makeover. They could be the “before and after” picture for a magazine ad for a wrinkle cream.
Consider the time when Clinton walked the beach at Normandy, and stopped to make a little cross with a pile of stones he came across on the beach. Does anyone think those stones just happened to be there, and that a cameraman just happened to be around at that spot at the moment? It isn’t the Bush team’s fault that the servicemen warm up so genuinely to Bush when he appears with them, and gave little more than polite applause to Clinton when he also appeared on aircraft carriers and at military bases. It looked as if they had been ordered to applaud Clinton when they would have preferred not to (which is exactly what happened, many in the military insist). Clinton’s trips to those bases cost just as much money as Bush’s. They just weren’t as effective because Clinton was trying to project an image that was too contrived to sell.
I hesitate to make this next point, for fear it might be a cheap shot. But here goes: Consider the fate of “Buddy,” Clinton’s dog. Clinton never seemed to need canine companionship before he got the White House. Are we to believe that he got lonely in the White House and longed for a dog when that thought had never struck him in Little Rock? Isn’t it more likely that some media advisor thought scenes of a dog running and slobbering to greet Clinton when he landed on the helicopter pad at the White House would look great on the nightly news?
In any event, Buddy stopped being part of Clinton’s life as soon as he left the White House. He was housed in the Clinton house in Chappaqua, the house they had to buy so that Hillary could establish residency in New York to run for the Senate. He was cared for there by Secret Service agents (who had nothing else to do in Chappaqua since the Clintons are hardly ever there) until he ran into the street and was killed by a car a short time afterwards.
Doesn’t the Times remember Clinton’s famous entrance to give his speech at the Al Gore’s nominating convention, when he was filmed with a rolling camera at ground level as he came down the hallway to the convention hall? Commentators on the left and the right joked about it at the time, comparing it to the entrance of World Wrestling Federation stars as they stride from the dressing room to meet their foes.
Look: I don’t know if it is a good thing for president’s to sell themselves as they do these days. I suspect it isn’t. But the process wasn’t invented by George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. The fact that the New York Times acts as if this tub-thumping is only a problem when it works to help Republicans tells us much about where the Times is coming from. And why it is now obvious to all but the most partisan liberal Democrats that the paper no longer maintains the time-honored journalistic code of keeping separate its news coverage and editorial page content. The “Gray Lady” deserves all the heat it is getting of late.
