"There are probably a fair number of people in the press who don't think he deserves to be that high," says Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol. "There's a real eagerness to find any straw -- or invent a couple of straws in the wind -- to claim it's all falling apart for him." Newsweek's cover -- "Like Father, Like Son?" -- questioned whether the younger Bush would also be a war hero and domestic flop. " 'Crime in the suites' is finally stripping some of the Teflon off this president," the magazine says.
There's probably some truth to that. (God knows my colleagues are liberals; there was blatant cheering and booing in the newsroom on Election Night 2000 as the results kept shifting from Bush to Gore, and you get one stab at guessing who they were cheering for.) But we can't overlook the media's thirst for any kind of scandal.
One thing that leaped out at me was the ideological fairness of this article. Beside Kristol, "Nation" executive editor Katrina vanden Heuvel is quoted, as is Jonathan Alter, the co-author of the "Newsweek" cover story in question. If only more "news" stories could be that balanced. And it has a great headline: "Egg on his Teflon?/For Bush, an increasingly sticky situation." (They should have gotten the word "media" in there somewhere, but space is often a problem on news pages, and few newspaper Web sites bother to change heads in the transition to the Net.)
