"Something Very Like a Club"
Oh dear.
"It used to be" -- here we go --"that news outlets had space to report or comment on only a fraction of any day's events. The pace of events has picked up, sure, but the capacity to assert, allege, and comment is now infinite, and subject to little responsible control."
The capacity to comment is no longer contained by responsible control. This lament takes up roughly 9,999 of Purdum's 10,000 words. No one is in charge of communication, now. People can just...say things, and look closely at what this amazing human specimen just actually said in print:
Obama's senior adviser Valerie Jarrett looks back wistfully to a time when credible people could put a stamp of reliability on information and opinion:"Walter Cronkite would get on and say the truth, and people would believe the media," she says. Today, no single media figure or outlet has that power to end debate, and in pursuit of"objectivity," most honest news outlets draw the line at saying flatly that something or other is untrue, even when it plainly is.
I can't think of many statements more revealing than the lament that no single figure has the power to end debate, anymore. I laughed so hard at this paragraph that it sounded like shouting, and my wife rolled over in bed to shoot me a nasty look. The world where Walter Cronkite silenced America with his Holy Word -- it never existed. But how telling to invent it, and then to mourn its loss. I only agree with parts of this article, but I agree with the most important part: the American ruling class is locked in a cultural crisis of its own making.
On the same page, Purdum purses his mouth into a pucker to note that reporters at White House press briefings now casually ask questions about things they saw on the Drudge Report, an act that once"was enough to make Mike McCurry ask if the offending reporter was sure -- really sure -- that he or she wanted to sully the august precincts of the West Wing with a question based on such a source."
Try as I might, I can't imagine what would have to happen in my head to make it possible for me to type the phrase"sully the august precincts" -- about a building full of politicians, for crying out loud -- without bursting into an uncontrollable fit of nervous giggling. It happened just now, as I typed Purdum's phrase here. I think Vanity Fair should pay for trumpeters in velvet robes to come to my house and play a flourish every time I see references to the West Wing, the White House, or the Sacred Body of the Emperor (whose Name I dare not speak) on the page. ("You're gonna read the Purdum thing now? Hold on, give us a second to clear our spit valves.") The august precincts, citizens! Sully them not!
Purdum's sense of American political history is just as strong as his sense of American cultural history. Did you know that, once upon a time, everyone in Congress liked each other?"Fifty years ago, Congress met for only about nine months a year. During those months, though, the spouses and children of most members lived full-time in Washington. Members formed not just a legislature but something very like a club, with bipartisan twilight softball games on the Capitol grounds, weekend cocktail parties in one another's houses, and long end-of-session car-pool trips back to their home states."
Also, my friends, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. Bipartisan twilight softball games on the Capitol grounds, and oh, friends, everyone was PLU and had the most rollicking stories about the antics of their supper clubs at Princeton, such sporting fine lads they were. You may now vomit. Oh, for the days when Congress was"very like a club," and the members all liked each other. No.
Finally, I absolutely cannot help but throw down another block quote, because this may just be the funniest thing ever written in the English language:
In 1993, at the start of the Clinton administration, The New York Times's White House team consisted of Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Gwen Ifill, Richard Berke, and the late Michael Kelly, each of whom had covered politics or foreign policy at high levels for years, and each of whom went on to be either an op-ed columnist or top editor at one outlet or another. Today the briefing room is filled with correspondents for whom the White House is their first big assignment. The life experiences -- and thus the sense of perspective, history, and balance -- of today's Washington reporters are qualitatively different from those of their predecessors. An entire generation of Beltway journalists has come of age being taught that the way to succeed is to be a smart -- if not smart-alecky -- young thing.
Ohhhhhh, for the days when White House reporters were giants, my friends, giants! Worldly and wise, they had traveled the world, and they knew it well, with depth and care. Men and women of extraordinary intellectual gifts, they were not the sort to rely on mere cleverness, this smart-alecky show-off stuff. The White House press room may never again see the kind of exceptional sense of perspective and history brought to the job by sober journalists like...Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman.
Today, with the coarseness of Washington news media culture, you could easily imagine the nation's media elites descending into a mad pile-on over some insane presidential sex scandal or something. Thank god something like that could never have happened during the Clinton era, when Maureen Dowd brought her extensive life experience to the table.
I only wish I had a Walter Cronkite to tell me what to think of all this.