Knock-dead Coverage

Since this is a piece of campaign analysis, let's get right to the sports metaphors. As we know, every campaign writer has a designated quota of tired analogies to fill in each story, and I'm going to try to take care of mine right off the bat. I figure I get to rest my starters in the fourth quarter that way – assuming I build a big lead in the meat of the piece.

So here goes.

You know how sportswriters talk about this or that record not being broken, but smashed or obliterated? Well, that's exactly what we have on our hands after the first presidential debate. This Bush-Kerry ordeal is on the way to obliterating, if you will, a whole slew of records, each of them an all-time low. Even counting the 2000 presidential contest that made history by going into overtime, this election is already the most over-covered news phenomenon in history.

This sad fact became depressingly clear last week, when the national press corps' post-debate analysis became the second man-made object, after the Great Wall, to become visible from space.

How bad was it? At least one newspaper, the New York Times, put so many different people on the debate story that the resultant editorial confusion has likely willed into being a whole new job title in the journalistic profession – perhaps a newsroom pharmacist to make sure the contrary prescriptions of the various writers don't jeopardize the mental health of the unwary reader.

Here is Times political analyst Adam Clymer in his debate preview on Sept. 27: "Sometime in the 1980's political coverage began to confuse itself with drama criticism. The word 'performance' started showing up frequently in debate analyses, and reporters started citing Samuel Beckett in their front-page articles."

Beckett, of all things. Imagine!

Ah, but what does the Times offer us this Sunday in exactly the same slot on the Times editorial page: Stephen Greenblatt playing drama critic in a piece titled "Friends, Americans, Countrymen," comparing Kerry and Bush to Brutus and Mark Antony, respectively.

Greenblatt's piece was a marvel, the clear jewel of the debate post-mortems. Pretentious beyond even George Will's wildest dreams, its desperation to keep its preposterous thesis superficially plausible was, at times, breathtaking. Consider this brazen attempt to cram the "flip-flop" theme into Shakespearean design:

In the heat of the moment this is a lot for anyone to process: how could Brutus have shifted from friend to foe? Are his deeds the mark of inconsistency or thoughtfulness? How could he be for and against the same man?

What if the crowd had glimpsed something in Antony's face when he did not know he was being observed that gave away his cynical scheme? The course of history – the collapse of order, years of bloodshed, wasted lives and treasure, the loss of liberty – would have been startlingly different.

Take, for example, the Washington Post, which over the weekend filed two full-length stories about the Bush scowl alone. Both Post writers, Dana Milbank and E.J. Dionne, spent about 700 words saying exactly the same thing. "The Bush Scowl is destined take its place with the Gore Sigh," concluded Dionne on Saturday.