Dowd's McCain Bug; Kelly Girls; The Torch Comes into His Own
There are two things a traveling Washington journalist hears on any trip into the American hinterland, no matter what part of the country he's visiting, no matter what class of person he's dealing with. The first is the question, "Who do you think our next president's going to be?" This never stops?Americans apparently never take a vacation from wondering who the next president's going to be.
The second thing you always hear is, "Oh, I just love that Maureen Dowd!" What's odd is that this partiality for the New York Times columnist is always advanced with a bulletproof confidence in the speaker's own taste, a tone not of challenge but of collusion, as if the speaker is agreeing with something you've already said. The speaker's admiration is presented as a credential of belonging to the politically au fait national upper middle class. Dowd is, in the original biblical sense, a shibboleth.
I have never known what to say on any of the dozen occasions when a screenwriter in Los Angeles or a cellphone executive has blurted out, with that fraternal glow on his/her face, "You're from Washington? Well, I just love that Maureen Dowd!" That's because I don't read her. This isn't a question of antipathy, or even of having soured on her column or gotten to know her tricks; it's just one of those there's-only-so-many-hours-in-a-day things. So I usually splutter some nothing along the lines of: "She sure is something, isn't she?"
The weight of these testimonials finally broke me this week, so I picked up her column and read it. She may be terrific most of the time, but the first thing that struck me was, she has the McCain bug awful bad. Reading her has convinced me that maybe I've been wrong all along about McCain-Feingold. If Maureen thinks it's the wave of the future, then so does the country's Top 20 Percent, and if they think that, then the thing is unstoppable.
McCain's primary campaign evoked the same feelings in me: I didn't have a clue what the guy stood for (aside from his signature issue, which has always been making flights out of National Airport more convenient for politicians), but I sure liked his electorate?even if they didn't have a clue what he stood for either.
In this light, one of Dowd's sentences put me in mind of Coleridge's gloss on the opening lines of Samuel Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes," which are: Let observation with extensive view survey mankind, from China to Peru.
Coleridge remarked that, translated into normal English, the couplet boiled down to: Let observation, with extensive observation, observe mankind extensively.
The offending Dowd sentence was the one in which she really let her affection rip. "The Senate's most righteous rebel," wrote Dowd of McCain, "is obsessed with pursuing the issues he feels passionately about." If we give it the Coleridge treatment, we wind up with: The Senate's most passionate rebel is passionate about his passion for the issues he feels passionately about.
It's hard to think of a mightier term of praise than "passionate." C.S. Lewis remarked in his great Studies in Words that adjectives like "villainous" or "gentlemanly" are always on a slippery slope. They're always losing their original denotative meanings and taking on connotative ones, as simply fancy-Dan synonyms for "good" and "bad." Maybe we can blame Tom Peters' 1985 management-meatball book, A Passion for Excellence, but it seems the word "passionate" has sledded downhill to the point at which it now means something like "superb." About half the resumes I get asked to read have that word in it?not quite along the lines of "...I am passionate about entry-level clerical work...," but close.
And in this spring's L.A. mayor's race, the protege of outgoing Mayor Richard Riordan has sought to use the word as a stepping stone to full management-meatball grandeur. Steve Soboroff, the San Fernando Valley real-estate tycoon, told a reporter for the Torrance, CA, Daily Breeze a few weeks back, "I'm passionate about children, about traffic, about this city." Wow! You can tell the word "passion" has been devalued when a guy thinks he can accede to the job of running the Capital of the Modern World on the strength of the slogan Steve Soboroff: A Passion for Traffic.
Kelly Girls
This makes me think that John McCain himself has turned into a shibboleth for the bien-pensants. I must not be much of a pundit, for there has never been a story like campaign-finance reform to rivet the attention of my Washington colleagues?not the impeachment, not the Kosovo bombing, not the Florida recount?and I find myself totally unriveted. These thoughts are reinforced by a photo that ran on page 1 of The Washington Post last week, in which McCain was shown explaining his plan to those "sharks" who make up the Washington press corps. They certainly didn't have that beetle-browed intensity that they bring to an interview with, say, Paul O'Neill or Hillary Clinton. No, a couple of them had their heads thrown back and big smiles on their faces, and were howling with laughter. The scene looked like it was transpiring not in a hearing room but in a pub. That's our John! That's a good lad!
More evidence of McCain mania is that Catherine, a staff assistant at the magazine where I work, has a childhood friend from Charlottesville, VA, named Kelly, who's just done a few episodes of Undressed on MTV. If you've never seen it?and I never had, until Catherine got sent a few video clips over the Internet?it's like a softcore porn artifact from some other culture. (German culture, to be exact.) I don't know if Kelly is really a lesbian or just plays one on tv, but the scenes in which she entertains dorm mates who need help "studying"...well, they do grab you a bit more than the Hagel alternative or the Feinstein-Thompson hard-money ceiling compromise or the Wellstone 60-day-countdown issue-ad ban. But not my fellow journalists.
No sooner had the clips begun running than people began to scramble away. "What? They're voting on the non-severability amendment? Who's got C-SPAN?"
In considering campaign-finance reform, I must confess a weakness. From week to week, there's no politician who more consistently interests me than Robert Torricelli. The Torch may not have a reputation in Washington as one of the great truth-tellers of our time?but in some ways he actually is. His problem is that he's such an operator that he winds up doing 180-degree reversals on everything he says. But if you were a freshly landed Martian who could only stay for one news cycle, you'd reboard your flying saucer with the impression that the only person in the U.S. Senate willing to speak truth to power was the senior Senator from New Jersey.
This has been obvious even since before the debate on campaign finance broke the surface. Take the Torch's willingness to consider Bush's budget plan, precisely because it promises tax cuts for the rich. New Jersey, after all, is a rich state. "I wasn't elected to help the struggling families of the Great Plains," Torricelli bravely said. "I was elected to help the struggling families of the suburbs."
But with the McCain-Feingold tumult he has really come into his own. Take what he said on Imus the other day. Torricelli had just succeeded in appending to the bill an amendment that mandated broadcasters must give political candidates their cheapest ad rates. Manifestly unconstitutional, but there it is. The bill passed 70-30, and Imus set Torricelli up to crow about his bill as a triumph of idealism. But Torricelli would have none of it: The great thing about McCain-Feingold was that it appealed to politicians' worst instincts. "They are voting for all kinds of things just because they think it might cause some kind of mischief," he said of the bill in general. "In my case as well, a lot of Republicans voted for it because they wanted the national broadcasters to get angry."
So then Imus asked: "Doesn't this have something to do with the fact that none of you folks like McCain?"
"I think this has more to do with what's going on inside the Republican Party," he said, not denying for an instant, even in front of one of McCain's most devoted myrmidons, that most senators were as far from being bien-pensant as it was possible to be.