Dear Tucker,
I knew it would be fun to have breakfast with you because my eye fell on just the same story. I confess to having watched Millionaire last week in a hotel room in St. Louis, and I remember actually forming the thought, Why are the contestants on this show always nerdy white guys? One of them was a man who knew all of Gilbert and Sullivan by heart. So I think the show’s nervous re-designers are onto something.
But I’m also convinced that there is a genuine Mars/Venus gap that rules the behavior of men and women on game shows. Have you ever noticed how, on the “Final Jeopardy” question on Jeopardy, men are apt to bet the whole farm whereas women contestants are more likely to offer up just a third or a half of what they’ve already earned–even if it means that they will certainly lose the game? I always despair for my sex when I watch Jeopardy. I think the producers of Millionaire will find themselves stymied by female contestants who decide to bag the whole game and walk away with $3,000.
Yet they have no choice but to try. You must resist the temptation to see this is as a dreadful lesson in affirmative action; this is only about entertainment. And the awful truth is that America doesn’t like knowledgeable, well-educated white guys who preen visibly over their grasp of detail. If it did, Al Gore wouldn’t be fighting for his political life.
I do want to talk about the campaign this morning because I want your thoughts on a mystery. It is plain from this morning’s papers–a subtle matter of body language, choice of adjectives, story play–that the political press corps is very close to writing off Gore’s chances completely. What I want to know is: Do they know something they’re not telling us? The Electoral College still looks genuinely too close to call, especially if you factor in the number of declared Nader voters who are probably likely, at the last minute, to hold their noses and vote for Gore.
Or is this quiet insistence on Gore’s loserness a function of the media’s liberalism? It could be the majority of the political press corps is made up of self-hating Democrats (like me) who are reverting to the pessimistic certainty that under the skin of successful Clintonism, they are inevitably and always the party of Annoying Losers. (And we can’t reject entirely the possibility that this pessimism is all Tipper Gore’s fault. When you have the wife of the nominee cheerily assuring voters, as she did at a rally in Michigan yesterday, that “It’s not The Dating Game. You don’t have to fall in love with Al Gore –I did that,” it may all indeed be over.)
Your thoughts?
Gloomily,
Marjorie
