MOLLY-FIED: Molly Ivins has written a book review of Frank Bruni's "Ambling Into History." It's the story of "New York Times" reporter Bruni and his time on the campaign trail with President Bush. It has the requisite funny lines you'd expect from Miss Ivins, so it's fairly enjoyable, but I have a couple of quibbles. In a description of Bush's visit to other countries, here's what she has to say:
That first visit to Mexico, where the people are so cortes y formal, was a disaster: The President thought he was being charmingly informal, and the Mexicans thought he was dissing them. The two European trips were the same, but we get no hint of it here. Sorry to be mean, but Mr. Bruni spends so much time bitching about sleep-deprivation, he apparently had no time to read the local press.
As blogger after blogger (and, most recently and spectacularly, James Lileks) has pointed out, who the hell cares what the European press thinks of Bush? How stupefyingly wrong have they been about so many things in the past year? Sorry Molly, but fretting about what the Euro-weenies think about us is so, so Sept. 10. Here's Molly's conclusion:
So we watched a campaign based on a tax cut painfully canted toward the rich and a bunch of malarkey. Shouldn’t that have been the “story line,” rather than “Can the goofball from Texas beat the stiff from Tennessee?”
OK, it's hard for me to tell if she means the tax cut is "painfully canted" toward "a bunch of malarkey" in addition to the rich. Maybe she should move "a bunch of malarkey" right after "a campaign based on." But never mind that now. Did Molly just wish there had been more blatantly biased "soak the rich" coverage of Bush's campaign? I mean, it's true that political campaigns are fairly shallow nowadays, but it's not like Bush's proposed policies weren't subject to intense scrutiny. In fact, a study shows that Gore got a much more favorable response from the media when policies were discussed. Of course, studies such as this are always open to interpretation, but here's a direct quote from the study's analysis of the campaign's final month:
Gore had an advantage when policy issues were covered. Bush could profit from positive statements about his personality.
Even though that "personality" was portrayed as belonging to a bumbling, unintellectual incompetent. As it turned out, Bush won the closest election in history, and as Molly failed to point out, he didn't even capture the popular vote. If she wants to blame somebody for that, blame Ralph Nader. Leave the media out of it.
