The Gore-ing of John Kerry
They've already made fact-free charges that he's a "phony" with deep "identity" problems. Will a toxic press corps eager for a takedown poison the senator's presidential chances the way it did Al Gore's?
By Ben Fritz
May 7, 2003 | Media accounts describe him as phony and calculating, incapable of making a heartfelt statement. His history is analyzed cynically, sometimes falsely: Misrepresentations of his statements and actions metastasize into myth. As a result, he is seen as the archetypal slippery, soulless politician. That much of the supporting evidence is false seems utterly beside the point.
That's how Republicans caricatured Al Gore in 2000 -- a line the media dutifully parroted. And as the 2004 presidential campaign gets underway, it's happening again. This time the victim is Sen. John Kerry.
Like Gore, the Massachusetts Democrat has been characterized, with some justice, as being aloof and cold. On Saturday, when asked about his haughty image during the first debate among the Democratic candidates, he tried to laugh it off (in much the same way Gore unsuccessfully joked about being stiff in 2000) by suggesting he "ought to just disappear and contemplate that by myself."
But the press has pushed its pseudo-analysis of Kerry far beyond the innocuous observation that he lacks charisma. And in so doing, it is following the same irresponsible course it did with Gore.
As Gore and now Kerry are learning the hard way, you can't laugh off an image problem to a press corps that now almost always takes personality more seriously than policy. That reporting style has exploded in popularity ever since the New York Times' Maureen Dowd took her acid observations on the presidential campaign trail in 1992 and became a household name. The Washington Monthly observed at the time that "Today's campaign planes and buses are freighted with Dowd disciples: hyperliterate capital-W Writers with an eye for detail and an ear for the shuffling going on behind the curtain." Over time, it's created an even greater blood lust among political reporters for that canny observation or cutting insight -- and whether they are true or not doesn't always seem to matter.
Take Kerry's recent statement at a New Hampshire town meeting that "we need a regime change in the United States." In many ways, the quip illustrated much that might be seen as objectionable about Kerry. The slogan, after all, has been used to describe the U.S. effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power and implies that the regime in question is illegitimate, perhaps even fundamentally evil. Was this an inflammatory and crudely partisan effort to stir up the Demos' Bush-hating base? You could make a pretty good argument that it was.
But the Weekly Standard's Noemie Emery saw much, much more. Rather than just criticizing the implicit comparison of Bush to Saddam, she wrote that Kerry's "turn of phrase can be put down to pandering, over-exuberance, or the wish to appear as too fiendishly clever"; described the "outburst" as motivated by polls showing Kerry tied with Howard Dean in New Hampshire; and announced that "Kerry is now brilliantly situated to make a run for President of France." In one article, Emery demonstrated three of the key tropes built into the media's coverage of Gore and turned them against Kerry: the assumed phoniness of everything he says, the assumed cold political calculation behind every move he makes, and the belief that individual gaffes demonstrate deep, fundamental character flaws.
It would be tempting to attribute these patterns to Emery's basic ideological disagreements with Kerry if her tactics weren't so eerily parallel with those of the press covering Gore three years ago. The absurd lengths the press went to in its coverage of Gore has been well documented (by no one more than Gore friend and partisan Bob Somerby, and also by Salon and others), and showed that, as the American Prospect's Paul Waldman wrote, "In 2000, reporters hated Gore's guts. They bristled at his inaccessibility, they derided his campaign's strategy and, most of all, they thought he was a phony." Mainstream, conservative and even some liberal journalists frequently portrayed Gore as an inveterate liar, harping on myths such as the false charge that Gore claimed he invented the Internet or that he inflated his journalistic experience by two years on his résumé.
No matter how untrue these claims were, they proved irresistible to the press, and were used by outlets such as the Boston Globe to justify conclusions like: "Gore has regularly promoted himself, and skewered his opponents, with misleading and occasionally false statements," according to a story by Walter Robinson and Michael Crowley. Gore was also often portrayed as a cold and calculating political robot -- at one point, CNN political analyst William Schneider suggested Gore might have "planned" to make himself perspire at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire in order to "make himself look like a fighter."
This is not to say, of course, that Gore and Kerry have not engaged in their share of exaggerations and political calculation over the years. Kerry has been legitimately criticized, for instance, for taking unclear and seemingly contradictory positions on issues such as the Iraq war and affirmative action. He has also benefited from misconceptions in the media that he threw away his own medals during a Vietnam War protest, and that he is Irish. But these individual examples don't come even close to justifying the dominant narrative that treats the candidate as a lying phony -- nor the contortions journalists have used to support it.
Next page: The Boston Globe exposes Kerry's "identity" problem