Hail, hail the press gang`s all here. The national press corps, the media-ocracy, the great ganglion of our electronic society, the mod Medusa, snaked into Little Rock this week, cameras in tow and word processors in hand. The object: to cover a special session of the Arkansas legislature starring Bill Clinton as governor and presidential hopeful, not necessarily in that order of interest. Right on schedule, a child-welfare program was wheeled into place much like scenery for an operetta. It`s the perfect set piece to break the medium tedium of this campaign.
If the omnipresent media cannot cover a candidate, it will cover itself, or in desperation even Arkansas. Before this campaign is over, the very columns of the state Capitol will have been asked the same oh-so-serious questions, and the same oh-so-serious answers will have been duly recorded, dispatched, edited and analyzed before being tossed into the Great Flux that is American opinion.
Instead of seeking interviews, this week I found myself granting them. The Philadelphia Inquirer asked the same, inevitable, unanswerable question:
What is Bill Clinton really like? That question had finally got me about three weeks before, when it was the New York Post asking, and I burst into a laugh that may have sounded maniacal because it was. (How often can one be asked the same question without an occasional breakdown?)
The young lady from the Post guessed I was laughing because she was a novice on the Clinton Trail while I had been observing, reporting and appraising Bill Clinton, a.k.a. Slick Willie, since shortly after The Flood. Her supposition hurt my feelings; I would never laugh at a stranger-or laugh off a question from another inky wretch of the press, having been on the receiving end of condescension all too often.
No, I hope I would never be so rude. It`s like this, I explained: Here I`ve have been trying to answer that question myself since A.D. 1976 with little success. The experience has been like visiting a carnival midway and wandering through the House of Mirrors for about 15 years. Unable to find the way out, one day you realize you`re back at the same exact point at which you entered the mirrored maze years before, only to hear a voice from the New York Post inquire, ”Could you please show me the way to the exit?”
What else is there to do at that point but laugh?
To think that Edmund Burke mistook the disparate, disheveled and thoroughly disoriented legion that is the press for a Fourth Estate! That overused description has to be one of the few misjudgments of an otherwise luminous mind. An assortment of scouts and stragglers, bushwhackers and camp followers, pundits and suckers, now descends on a special session of the Arkansas legislature to observe Bill Clinton in situ. The members of the press could not have chosen a better observation point, even if their presence will surely affect what they observe. (There is a Heisenberg Effect in politics, too, and nothing may determine a politician`s message or even mannerisms like proximity to a reporter.)
The most observant and least obsequious of this madding crowd will understand that they are seeing in this special session a typical performance by our increasingly absent governor. The state had to be deluged with horror stories and hit by a lawsuit before his attention was caught. Arkansas`s child welfare program is being reformed only after its chronic crisis has become acute and, more to the point, politically embarrassing.
The reform being proposed comes without any clear way to check on its effectiveness. Yet it will be hailed by the governor, and by others eager that he look presidential, as a ”model” program, ground-breaking in its sweep, noble in its compassion, the best in the country, and an outstanding example of how government can be made to work again. The New Covenant in action!
Bill Clinton is one of those highly skilled political operatives usually found behind the scenes; he is a Lee Atwater, James Farley, and Marc Hanna all rolled into one. There hasn`t been an all-around political talent like his since Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton is a lot smoother. He`s his own best press agent, and as a campaign manager he outshines the pros he`s surrounded himself with. Who else could have emerged as the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race without winning a single primary?
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With so many talents, there`s little room for a person in Bill Clinton`s bulging persona. Whatever his political principles may be-and they are the subject of an intense search these days-they are definitely not Edmund Burke`s. (”The principles of true politics are those of morality enlarged . . . .”) We tend to become what we do, and what Bill Clinton does is politics-or, more precisely, political advancement. Just about every waking hour. That much should be clear by now. And still these reporters from distant points keep asking what`s inside after all the layers have been peeled away from the onion.