The Wall Street Journal-20080111-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Review - Television- The Battle Begins
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Review / Television: The Battle Begins
In the presidential primaries, perhaps the richest drama to hit television screens this season, there is no order, no intermission: no way to know where best to look in the chaos of crowds and candidates' events covered on cable news networks and C-SPAN, or when some impossible-to-forget image may leap out from one of them. No way to know, either, when some confrontation may incite the most intense on- air reaction by journalists and pundits, for reasons never quite clear to most of the rest of the national audience.
Take that now well-known debate moment last weekend, when a newly girlish Sen. Hillary Clinton playfully allowed that she was hurt at the suggestion that Sen. Barack Obama was better liked than she was -- which response caused Sen. Obama to look up from his note writing and murmur "You're likeable enough, Hillary." Sen. Clinton had the sense to be amused. But the comment -- a refreshing departure from the great weight of earnestness the boyish Sen. Obama lugs around on the campaign trail -- sufficed to rouse commentators to a chorus of disapproval, even shock.
"That was a bad moment for Barack Obama" and "Barack Obama did not acquit himself well there at all" roughly sums up the range of those responses. These were repeated regularly in the next days, in one form or another, along with the replayed scene: Sen. Clinton's supplicating smile and Sen. Obama's response with its faint whiff of acid -- a touch of adult male irony that was, in fact, one of his more attractive public moments.
Noncandidates for the presidency -- a category to which Sen. Clinton's husband, just plain Bill, still belongs so far as we know -- also came in for their share of castigation for bad behavior, none more than Mr. Clinton for his accusations of unfair media coverage and, especially, for his having scoffed publicly at Sen. Obama's claims as "the biggest fairy tale." In response, CNN's ever smoldering Jack Cafferty fished up the former president's answer on the Monica Lewinsky affair: "'I did not have sex with that woman,'" Mr. Cafferty fumed, "that's a fairy tale."
Still, for all of the excitement just preceding the New Hampshire vote, the fevered reports on Hillary Clinton's likely double-digit loss, the incessantly replayed clip showing her near tears, for all the campaign-shakeup bulletins, the reports of the great and shining triumph to come of her rival, of his adoring crowds that had moved him past the mere status of a candidate -- he was now said to be a Movement -- one could feel the power of other scenes played out days earlier. These were the moments unforgettable for their evidence of the raw hunger for victory that drives contenders in this race.
They were to be found in the filming, by C-SPAN, of last Sunday's meeting organized by John and Elizabeth Edwards, an eerie, awkward and highly emotional affair with the combined atmosphere of a prayer vigil and a street demonstration. Here the Edwardses had gathered a group of sorely afflicted citizens who lacked health insurance and been failed by their government -- as they and the Edwardses in turn informed us. Each individual was ushered to the microphone to give testimony, among them a man unable to speak most of his life because of his cleft palate. There were others. Hovering around them, Elizabeth Edwards (who is herself a breast-cancer sufferer) raced back and forth holding a microphone. And, flanking her, was John Edwards, who has thrown all his dice on the appeal of this single theme -- that the government has failed its people, that corporations have prospered, while ordinary Americans died for lack of health care. His oratory on the subject, so tireless and unchanging, reflected its roots: those, that is, of his past as a successful trial lawyer hammering the key points home to the jury -- selling them, again and again. It is what he knows best. He may also know that in his race for the presidency the raw hunger for victory is as much his wife's as his own.
Tuesday, after her husband came in a distant third, the exhausted, still evidently dauntless Elizabeth Edwards introduced him by reciting that now universally known fact of John Edwards's biography -- her husband's father had worked in a mill. On and on the story rolled out, in detail as though it had never before been told. Candidate Edwards, eyes shadowed, leaped onstage with his customary vigor and a smile only faintly less dazzling than customary to promise that his campaign would be going forward, that it had only just begun.
It has also only just begun for Mitt Romney, who, in New Hampshire, cited the great prospects still ahead. Which caused one guest political expert being interviewed on Mr. Romney's chances to warn, merrily: "This guy can't keep talking about getting the silver. Enough!"
It's true, nonetheless, as Mr. Romney said, that the contest for the nomination is far from over. For John McCain, though, and those who'd slugged it out alongside him, the victory in New Hampshire must have seemed, in itself, a glorious climax -- as Hillary Clinton's was. His victory celebration was telling. Every candidate gets the crowd that reflects its sense of him. What that was, in Sen. McCain's case, came through loud and clear in the booming chorus that rose from the throngs at his victory party: "USA! USA! USA!" No other candidate facing supporters this night in New Hampshire would have elicited that particular sentiment.
That atmosphere may have been too much for the gaggle of commentators assembled at MSNBC, led by Joe Scarborough, who responded to Sen. McCain's victory speech -- which the candidate had made the mistake of reading -- with sustained jibes, and wit of the kind served up at undergraduate dorm parties after a night of beer swilling. The commentators prattled on this way at remarkable length in the aftermath of the McCain victory. An interesting glimpse in itself, perhaps -- the film clip would be worth seeing -- of the incisive political commentary we can expect from the MSNBC luminaries in the election year to come.
