Dear Marjorie,
It sounds to me like you have deep reasons to be sick of the presidential race. I don’t. I’m just tired and bored. I did my first interview with George W. Bush two and a half years ago. He’s saying roughly the same things now that he was saying then. (And saying them the same way. “He’s not stupid, but he frequently stumbles over his sentences and has trouble pronouncing long words,” I wrote in my journal after our first conversation on May 1, 1998.) Gore is saying somewhat different things than he used to, but he is still the same Gore.
They’re both relatively interesting people–relative to most people, anyway. (If you don’t believe me, try interviewing undecided voters.) But not even a presidential candidate makes good copy after a while. I’m sick of trying to find new angles on these guys.
Now that I’ve revealed myself as essentially shallow, on to Esquire. The Clinton interview was amazing, I agree, but not for the obvious reasons. All that business about what a great president he has been, how he has been hounded by the Radical Right, how the GOP owes him an apology, blah, blah, blah, blah–it was so perfectly Clinton. Too perfectly Clinton. You could have programmed a computer to produce that interview: Input self-pity here, self-aggrandizement there, write the code for self-justification, and–boom–Clinton Interview 5.0.
Nothing new. What was new, and really, really cringe-making, was the interviewer. Did you read his questions? At one point he asked Clinton if it was fair to say he had brought government back to the people. At another point he asked the president if he still has his Mustang. Come on.
I’m not the sort of faux tough-guy journalist who believes the only honest questions are mean questions. There’s a place for softballs. Larry King, for one, asks a lot of how-did-you-feel?-type questions that are easy enough to mock, but that can also be effective and evocative. But there’s a difference between using a soft touch and sucking up. The Esquire guy sucked up. In fact, he slobbered.
No one is slobbering over Rep. Jim Moran at the moment. (Note here my use of Paragraph Transition Helper 5.0.) Yes, he is my congressman, and, yes, I feel a little sorry for him, too. It’s not that I have trouble believing anything unsavory I read about him. I once sat across from Moran at dinner. He struck me as thoroughly 19-century, and I mean that as half a compliment. He’s big and loud and charming and physical. I can imagine him taking shady loans from lobbyist buddies. At least.
What I can’t imagine him doing is racking up huge credit card debts. But apparently he did, which is part of the reason he had such money problems. A man charged with shaping the federal budget is paying the monthly minimums on his Discover card? You don’t have to be a much of a fiscal conservative to find that objectionable somehow.
But that’s not even what really gets me about it. Maxing out on your credit cards is embarrassing. It’s an undignified thing to do, particularly if you’re a member of Congress and even if you’re Jim Moran. But he did it, and now everyone knows about it. Which is why I feel sorry for him.
Best,
Tucker
