Wimblehack: The Winner

By Matt Taibbi, New York Press. Posted November 19, 2004.

The kids still loved him. You were sure that Spot could live for another year at least. But those clouds over his eyes just got too big, and he was walking into the refrigerator and the brick edge of the fireplace just a little too often.

Then there were those wheezing fits, the ones that kept waking you and the wife up in the middle of the night and throwing the both of you into a tiresome panic. Do you call the vet? Is there even a vet to call at 3 a.m.? What moral calculus applies, in the middle of the night, to the adult owners of a dying Shar-pei with glowing green pus in his eyes?

The time comes when you and the wife have to send the kids off to school and take an unscheduled trip to that little one-story clinic downtown. Make that one last handshake with Dr. Bernstein, and stroke Spot's head as he cheerfully lies down on the table and waits for the needle...

Such is the situation with Wimblehack, which comes to an end this week in highly unsatisfactory fashion. The much-hyped prize to the winner is going to have to be put off, for now, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the Press had felt quite confident that the winner would ultimately prove to be Newsweek's Howard Fineman, and had staked much of its prize plans (which failed, hilariously, anyway) in that direction.

But Fineman never filed an election post-mortem for Newsweek, and aside from a few cautiously irritating exchanges with Joe Scarborough in which he disingenuously defended Maureen Dowd as his "favorite high-brow hussy," Fineman kept a very low profile after the election. There was no rationally defensible way to declare him the winner, except on the basis of his cumulative record. And that would have been a cop-out even worse than the already egregious cop-out this final round is going to represent.

That leaves as the winner Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, who did file a number of grossly objectionable pieces after the election, and so wins the contest, if not yet the prize. And though this contest fails in its stated objective of delivering a just reward, we can say with a clear conscience that Bumiller deserves her hollow victory, for consistently representing almost everything that made this campaign the Monumental Bummer it was.

On November 7, reverting to her pre-campaign state as a Times White House correspondent, Bumiller filed her first large post-election article. Entitled "President Feels Emboldened, Not Accidental, After Victory," the piece was pleased to draw a number of conclusions about the sunny state of the reelected executive's mind. She writes:

One trademark of President Bush's first term was his aversion to news conferences, which his staff says he often treated like trips to the dentist. So on the morning after Mr. Bush's re-election, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, was taken aback when the president told him he was ready to hold a news conference that Mr. Bartlett had suggested, win or lose, the week before.

"I didn't have to convince him or anything," Mr. Bartlett said. "Without me prompting him, he brought it up."

It was a small but telling change for a president whose re-election has already had a powerful effect on his psyche, his friends and advisers say.

This habit of taking at face value the unconfirmable assertions about the personal feelings of officials – assertions hand-delivered to the journalist by a paid mouthpiece whose very job is to deadpan preposterous pieces of mythmaking to the media – is nothing new to most political reporters. But almost no one consumes this stuff more eagerly than Bumiller.

Take her piece from March 2 of this year, "Gay issue leaves Bush ill at ease," in which Bumiller gives off-the-record spokesmen a chance to allow Bush to split the difference on the gay-marriage issue:

When President George W. Bush announced his support last week for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, his body language in the Roosevelt Room did not seem to match his words. Bush may have forcefully defended the union of a man and a woman as "the most fundamental institution of civilization," but even some White House officials said he appeared uncomfortable.

This kind of thing is standard in the business – it is how we are delivered such seemingly unknowable facts as the "remarkably close friendship" we are told exists between Bush and Vladimir Putin – but what's striking about Bumiller is that this is apparently her conscious response to an administration whose excessive secrecy she has complained about in public.

On December 3 of last year, Bumiller gave a talk at Yale University nauseatingly entitled "Shock, Awe, and Battle Fatigue," in which she complained about the lack of access in the Bush White House.

Matt Taibbi lives in New York. He covers politics for Rolling Stone and the New York Press.

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