The Coolest Kid in School
TIME Washington bureau correspondent Michael Scherer reminds us what’s wrong with American politics today:
Here’s one thing you need to know about John McCain. He’s always been the coolest kid in school. He was the brat who racked up demerits at the Naval Academy. He was the hot dog pilot who went back to the skies weeks after almost dying in a fire on the U.S.S. Forrestal. His first wife was a model. His second wife was a rich girl, 17 years his junior. He kept himself together during years of North Vietnamese torture and solitary confinement. When he sits in the back of his campaign bus, we reporters gather like kids in the cafeteria huddling around the star quarterback. We ask him tough questions, and we try to make him slip up, but almost inevitably we come around to admiring him. He wants the challenge. He likes the give and take. He is, to put it simply, cooler than us.
It’s hard to tell if he’s serious or not. Either this is a brilliantly insightful parody of a major problem with American mass media today, or a particuarly egregious example of that problem. Analysis of the process by which we choose the leader of the free world shouldn’t be reduced to the level of high school social politics.
And yet, that’s exactly what we see in the media. John McCain seems to be the chosen one, and enjoys favorable media coverage even though voters seem largely indifferent to him.
And while we were all at the pep rally, oil futures hit $100 a barrel, we developed a huge trade deficit, and another year has gone by in Iraq claiming the lives of almost a thousand American soldiers and over twenty thousand Iraqi civilians.
Remember, many Americans voted for George W. Bush in 2000 because he was the candidate they most wanted to have a beer with. Al Gore was seen as too stuffy and a know-it-all. Are we really ready to make the same mistake again?
January 6th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
A chilling reminder, Bill, to where we might be going politically. What next? Hillary doesn’t get to be Prom Queen ’cause she’s too “tough” looking?
January 7th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Questions for conversation…What’s wrong with voting for the coolest kid in school? Isn’t that just a function of being a natural leader? And what’s wrong with the media, who are after all just faliable people, being impressed with a person who enjoys the lively discussion in which journalists are trained to engage? Anyway, who said that we choose (or at least should choose) who our leaders will be based on the press? Isn’t it a bit naive to think we could ever have an “objective” press?
January 7th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Funny. Eight years ago it was Brit Hume of Fox News who was viewing McCain’s charmed media life with alarm.
Oh well, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
January 7th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Ro, you’re on to something there. Hillary Clinton seems to be the candidate the media loves to hate. They demonize her every chance they get, and coverage of her loss in Iowa was just dripping with schadenfreude.
Brian, you pose some good questions. There’s nothing inherently wrong with voting for the coolest candidate. There’s nobody cooler than Bill Clinton. And sometimes the coolness is a definite leadership advantage. Governor Schwarzenegger is able to get a lot of bills through the California State Senate simply because everyone wants to say they worked with the Terminator.
The problem arises when we vote based solely on personal charisma instead of real qualifications. George W. Bush is a fun guy. He’s a former frat boy who owned a baseball team. He’s got a charming sense of humor. He’s the kind of guy you want to have a beer with. None of these qualities qualify him for the presidency. Al Gore was stiff and pedantic. He was actually criticized for being a know-it-all. You know, it might have been nice to have a president that knew a lot of stuff.
And I do think a vast majority of Americans form their opinions of the candidates based on the media coverage. That’s why so much money is spent on advertising. That’s not to say that people should form their opinions this way, only that many do. I don’t hope for an objective press, but I’d like a press that’s less interested in the popularity contest and the horse race, and more interested in substantive differences between the candidates. That is still possible, and there are very real examples of this.
And, Bronx Richie, why do you hate America?
January 12th, 2008 at 2:03 am
Huckabee is the problem candidate in terms of substance-less Republican charisma. At least McCain has some amount of experience, foreign policy and otherwise.
To his credit, he managed to get the “surge” right, even if the war was a bad idea — now that we’re in it, we might as well set Iraq up for as much success as possible.
Inarguably, Mac and The Huckster are also the two viable Republicans with a smidgen of integrity or credibility.