Athens, Greece
Im in Athens to lecture on American media and politics. Everywhere I find clues some of them inadvertent as to how things work at home.
Across the road as I write, workmen are frantically laboring to complete the apartment buildings that will house the US Olympic team this summer. You dont have to be awfully cynical to think that the preparations wouldnt be running so far behind were it not for the, shall-we-say, lackadaisical construction habits in this country habits not unrelated to the cozy relations between publishers and the politicians whose favor they curry.
Greece, with a population of 11 million, has some seventeen national newspapers, most owned by extra-media business interests that buy influence by starting newspapers unencumbered by the need to tend to their markets or other such mundane capitalist concerns. This system of direct influence concentrates the mind on the wonders of the contrasting American system, in which the collaboration between circulation-building and power-flattering is more complicated.
In last weeks column, I wrote about some of the ways in which the Bush administration availed itself of an accommodating press to convey its picture of Iraq long enough to pull off the splendid little war it had in mind from its earliest minutes in office.
The journalist Jack Newfield aptly wrote years ago that Washington likes its journalists to be stenographers with amnesia. The Clinton administration was more likely to find itself surrounded by vipers with hyperactivity, quests for real estate, sex, and various trivial scandals absorbing the bulk of purportedly serious journalists waking hours. But with George Bush II, most of the established press returned to its standard form.
At least until recently. Under normal circumstances, the press has an unconscious radar that is hypersensitive to quivers in public opinion. Since Bush took office, his popularity has slumped except for those pivotal moments 11 September, the onset of the Iraq war, and the capture of Saddam Hussein when it was spiked up with gigantic headlines. With each point Bushs popularity has sunk, the press has acquired one layer of backbone.
Thus as I wrote in a previous column the question of Bushs phantom career in the Air National Guard, buried since a brief eruption during the 2000 campaign, resurfaced a few weeks ago. This week, the chief political story emanating from the American media concerns the holes in the elaborate cover story the Bush White House has spun for itself to certify its competence. Less-than-flattering stories that were working their ways around the edges of the media are now flowing into the center. So the credibility gap is on its way from a rift to an abyss.
Among the current stories that do Bush no good:
- The official commission on 11 September is taking testimony from present and former administration figures, casting shadows on the sunlit hero postures of the Commander in Chief.
- On Monday, 22 March, came a Wall Street Journal piece by Scot J. Paltrow contradicting various official tales about the presidents actions on 11 September itself. Two are particularly striking. First, Bush has said that on learning of the terrorist attacks, he himself moved the national defenses to high alert. But according to the general in charge of the White House war room that day, the order came from General Richard Myers, the member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in charge. Second, Bush has said that he saw the first hijacked plane ram into the World Trade Center tower on a television set in the Florida classroom where, that morning, he was reading to the children at the time the news of the attack was delivered to him. But no video of the first attack was broadcast until late that night.
- But the biggest story comes from former White House counter terrrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, whose forthcoming book, Against All Enemies: Inside Americas War on Terror, was the subject of a CBS 60 Minutes interview Sunday night, 21 March. Clarke, who worked for Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton before continuing into the first two years of Bush II, asserts that the Bush administration repeatedly ignored his warnings about the threat of al-Qaida. He recalls that in the White House Situation Room the evening of 12 September 2001, Bush urged him no fewer than three times to unearth evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks. I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything, Clarke says Bush told him. See if Saddam did this. See if hes linked in any way. When Clarke declared that al-Qaida was responsible, Bush barked, look into Iraq, Saddam, and walked out of the room.
Some newspaper reports, as usual, minimized the charges by counter posing them to official denials, leaving an inconclusive he-said-she-said impression. The White House sought to depict Clarke as a saboteur with friends in high Democratic places. Its the same sort of ad hominem slur the White House resorted to when former Treasury Secretary Paul ONeill blew the whistle on Bushs dogmatism in the January book by reporter Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty.
But drip, drip, drip, the White House is being drenched by doubts about his transparent deceptions and braggadocio. The revelations wont affect the hard core of Bush loyalists, some 40-45% of the electorate. But they may well hurt Bush in the swing states where, for seven more months, waverers will be first intermittently, then more concentratedly looking to make up their minds as to what sort of man occupies the White House and whether they want to install him there for four more years.
Ive no doubt that the outcome of this campaign will depend heavily on the unpredictable the wild history (the historian Richard Slotkins phrase) that surges out of the blue.
Presidents, terrorists, police, armies, opponents, are hard at work to control events. Sometimes, as this week, the events are predictable: the release of a book; testimony at a hearing. But lets never forget that a great deal of whats to come is unscripted.
As for travelers, the watchword is: expect the unexpected.
