PEGGY NOONAN
Stop Spinning
Contrarian thoughts on Hillary, flag-burning, the Times and "The View."
Thursday, June 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Today I would like to depart from what I perceive as the common wisdom on several people and issues.
Hillary Clinton. Media people keep saying, as Hillary gears up for her presidential bid, that her big challenge in 2008 will be to prove that she is as tough as a man. That she could order troops to war. That she's not girly and soft.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. Hillary doesn't have to prove her guy chops. She doesn't have to prove she's a man, she has to prove she's a woman. No one in America thinks she's a woman. They think she's a tough little termagant in a pantsuit. They think she's something between an android and a female impersonator. She is not perceived as a big warm mommy trying to resist her constant impulse to sneak you candy. They think she has to resist her constant impulse to hit you with a bat. She lacks a deep (as opposed to quick) warmth, a genuine and almost phenomenological sense of rightness in her own skin. She seems like someone who might calculatedly go to war, or not, based on how she wanted to be perceived and look and do. She does not seem like someone who would anguish and weep over sending men into harm's way.
And in this, as president, she would be deeply unusual. LBJ felt anguish; there are pictures of him, head in hands, suffering. Maybe a lifetime in politics has bled some of the human element out of her. Maybe there wasn't that much to begin with. Maybe she thinks that if she wept, the wires that hold her together would short.
The flag burning amendment is a bad idea, and will not prove, in the end, politically wise or fruitful to any significant degree. Three reasons. One is that the American people can sense, whether they support a constitutional ban or not, that they're being manipulated. They know supporters are playing with their essential patriotism for political profit. They know opponents are, by and large, taking their stand for equally political reasons. They can sense when everyone's posturing. It's not good, in the long term, when people sense you're playing with their deepest emotions, such as their love of country.
Second, nobody thinks America is overrun with people burning flags, so the amendment does not seem even to be an exotic response to a real problem. There are a lot of pressing issues before the Congress, and no one thinks this is one of them. Voters know it's hard to do a risky thing like define marriage as a legal entity that can take place only between an adult human male and an adult human female. That actually would take some guts. It's easy--almost embarrassingly so--to make speeches about how much you love the flag.
Third, Americans don't always say this or even notice it, but they love their Constitution. They revere it. They don't want it used as a plaything. They want the Constitution treated as a hallowed document that is amended rarely, and only for deep reasons of societal or governmental need. A flag burning amendment is too small bore for such a big thing. I don't think it will come up as a big issue every even numbered year. I think it's going to go away. There's too much else that's really needed.
Once the New York Times was extremely important, and often destructive. Now it is less important, and often destructive. This is not a change for the worse.
The Times is important still because of its influence on other parts of the media: Other journalists, knowing the great resources of the Times, respecting its air of professionalism (which is sometimes not an air but the thing itself), key their own decisions on news coverage to the front and opinion pages. If you're a blogger or a talk-show lion, you key some of the things you talk about to the Times. It's still important.
But it's not what it was. Once it was such a force that it controlled the intellectual climate. Now it's just part of it. Seventy years ago its depiction of Stalin's benignity left a generation confused, or confounded. Fifty years ago, when the Times became enamored of a romantic young revolutionary named Fidel, the American decision-making establishment believed what it read and observed in comfort as an angry communist dictatorship was established 90 miles off our shore. The Times' wrongheadedness had huge implications for American statecraft.
The Times is still in many respects an extraordinary daily achievement. The sheer size and scope of its efforts is impressive--the Sunday paper is big as a book every week, and costs a lot less.
But it is not what it was and will never be again. It was hurt by its own limits--a paper of and from an island off the continent, awkward in its relationship with and understanding of the continent. It was and is hurt by its longtime and predictable liberalism. Predictable isn't fun. It doesn't make you want to get up in the morning, tear the paper off the mat and open it with a hungry snap. It was hurt by technology--it lost its share of what was, essentially, a monopoly. And it's been hurt by its own scandals and misjudgments. The Times rarely seems driven by an agenda to get the news first, fast and clear; to get the story and let the chips fall. It often seems driven by a search for information that might support its suppositions. Which, again, gets boring. The Times never knows what's becoming a huge national issue. It's always surprised by what Americans are thinking.
In a way the modern Times is playing to a base, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and the redoubts of the Upper West Side throughout America: affluent urban neighborhoods and suburbs. The paper plays not to a region but a class.
But one senses the people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They're locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power. Frank Rich is running around with his antiwar screeds as if it's 1968 and he's an idealist with a beard, as opposed to what he is, a guy who if he pierced his ears gravy would come out.
This is the imagery that comes to you when you ponder the Times. It's the imagery that comes unbidden when you ponder the national security stories they've been doing. They're all re-enacting. They're acting out their own private drama in which they bravely stand up to a secretive and all-powerful American government.
I think it's personal drama in part because there's no common sense in it. Common sense tells you that when the actual physical safety of Americans is threatened by extremists who've declared a holy war, and when those extremists have, or can get, terrible weapons that can kill thousands or tens of thousands or more, and when the American government is trying to keep them from doing what they'd like to do, which, again, is kill--then you'd think twice, thrice, 10 times before you tell the world exactly how the government is trying, in its own bumbling way, which is how governments do things, to keep innocent people safe and bad guys on the run.
It is kind of crazy that the Times would do two stories that expose, and presumably hinder, the government's efforts. But then it strikes me as crazy that every paper that has reported the latest story--that would include The Wall Street Journal--would do so. Based on the evidence that has become public so far, the Journal, like the Times, and the Los Angeles Times, seems to me to have made the wrong call. But to me it is the New York Times, of all papers involved, that has most forgotten the mission. The mission is to get the story, break through the forest to get to a clear space called news, and also be a citizen. It's not to be a certain kind of citizen, and insist everyone else be that kind of citizen, and also now and then break a story.
Forgetting the mission is a problem endemic in newsrooms now. It's why a lot of them do less journalism than politics. When you've forgotten the mission you spend your days talking about, say, diversity in the newsroom. You become distracted by tertiary issues. (Too bad. The news doesn't care the color or sex of the person who finds it and reports it.) You become not journalistic and now and then political, but political and now and then journalistic.
It's sad. Though I guess if you're the Times you take comfort in the fact that even though you're not as important as you used to be, you're just as destructive as ever.
I am fascinated by Barbara Walters's opening statement on "The View" yesterday, regarding the departure of Star Jones. I am fascinated not because it was open to being read between the lines, but begged to be read between the lines. As in:
"If you were watching the program yesterday, you would have heard Star announce that she's leaving THE VIEW and will not be on the program next fall. She gave us no warning. And we were taken by surprise."
She tried to get control of the story. That was a mistake. I am Barbara Walters and I control the story.
"But the truth is that Star has known for months that ABC did not want to renew her contract and that she would not be asked back in the fall. The network made this decision based on a variety of reasons which I won't go into now."
When she lost weight, her face got scary.
"But we were never going to say this. We wanted to protect Star. And so we told her that she could say whatever she wanted about why she was leaving and that we would back her up. We worked closely with her representatives and we gave her time to look for another job. We hope she would announce it on the program and leave with dignity."
We told her to come up with a lie and promised to spin it with her. This is how you show loyalty in modern America. Some thanks!
" 'The View' helped make Star a star and Star helped make 'The View' the success that it is."
Good luck on "The E! True Hollywood Story" with Debbie Metapopolis or whatever her name was.
Everyone should stop spinning. Because America is now a country composed of people who know better than anything how to deconstruct spin. It's our great national talent.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.
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