An early clue to the new direction. I'll say this about Adam Nagourney's A1 article today: the fact of this piece, let alone its placement (running right alongside the A1 column devoted to Shrub's "Meet the Press" farrago of evasions interview), may say something of longer-range importance about how the Times intends to handle the 2004 election. In fact, the more I think about it the more remarkable it seems. I can't recall seeing the paper make anything like this nice to the Democrats at anything like this length, in recent memory or in my memory of 2000: Nagourney lets everybody from Terry McAuliffe to Joe Trippi talk about how much energy there is in the party and how much they like their prospects now that the Dems, against all odds, are coalescing early around the Kerry candidacy. (OK, Trippi doesn't quite say that, but he doesn't quite not, either.) There's not a Republican within hailing distance, nobody at all to rain on the parade.

I'll leave aside Nagourney's evident desire, as signaled in his choice of quote to cap the piece ("The Democrats can show a sign of strength by coalescing around Kerry," says Joe Liberman's pollster), that the coalescing reach its appointed conclusion. (I've noted Nagourney's committment to what I call normative journalism before.) What grabs my attention are these two-plus paragraphs near the end of the article:

Over the past three weeks, at the very time that Democrats were voting in caucuses and primaries, a series of polls, including one released Sunday by Time magazine, showed Mr. Bush as vulnerable to defeat, and Mr. Kerry as being the Democrat best positioned to beat him.

In an election that is so much about unseating Mr. Bush, those kinds of high-profile reports, including magazine cover stories, may have done more for Mr. Kerry than any speech he gave or advertisement he ran, Democrats said.

And an environment where Democrats seem to have a real chance of winning the White House has complicated the task for Mr. Kerry's opponents, who in normal times would want to act aggressively to knock him down.

In an election that is so much about unseating Mr. Bush. I'm flabbergasted by this. Over the last few weeks the press has determined (probably correctly, not that the demands of story require it to be correct) that Democratic voters are more interested in beating Bush in November than in who exactly gets to administer the beating. But Nagourney's language is absolute: the election itself is about whether or not Bush will be unseated. It's as if the electability meme that brought Kerry forward against Dean is mutating before our eyes (and Adam Nagourney is nothing if not an efficient deliverer of the latest conventional wisdom), and the imputation of weakness on the other side of that meme is beginning to attach to Dubya. Bush has been having a rough enough time lately, but if this is what's happening to the CW, he's in for a rougher still: the press is merciless once it gets the stench of failure in its nostrils. If the election turns into a referendum on whether Bush is worthy of being retained—I don't say it's a race he can't win, but certainly it's a race whose narrative is structured against him.

[As support for my idea here: don't by any means miss the implication of Sunday's extraordinarily respectful treatment of Kerry's Senate career by David E. Rosenbaum and Robin Toner ("In Senate, Kerry Focused on Inquiries, Not Bills"). A day after GW announces a patched-up, unindependent "independent investigative panel" intended to whitewash so-called intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq war, the Times produces a gilt-edged treatment of Kerry as—yes—the Great Investigator of the U.S. Senate.]

I'm sure there's something of a honeymoon effect here: you get the impression that the Times is just-so-grateful right now that the Dean bullet has been successfully dodged, not to mention that one of its own Establishment types is comfortably ensconced as the Dem front-runner. But we shouldn't underestimate prospects for the long term in the implicit cravenness of the Nagourney quote: as long as it looks like Kerry could win this thing, says the Times, we're gonna play it respectful.

posted by michael  8:10:14 PM  
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Left hand, meet right. An interesting schizoid quality to A1 today. The left three columns above the fold (under a photo of Prince Charles[!] in military fatigues arriving in Basra) are devoted to two stories from Iraq: an evidently thorough, reasonably tough-minded account ("Iraqi Militias Resisting U.S. Pressure to Disband") by Edward Wong of the prospect of what amounts to creeping warlordism in Iraq, under the pressure of BushCo's accelerated schedule for sovereignty transfer; and a striking if somewhat puzzling article by Dexter Filkins ("U.S. Says Files Seek Qaeda Aid in Iraq Conflict") on a recently recovered document, alleged to have been written by an Al Qaeda operative in Iraq, advocating internal destablization through a program of terror attacks on the Shiite majority. Take the two pieces together (particularly following Saturday's account of the assassination program targeting Iraq's professional elite) and it looks very much like the Times is betting on violent internal struggle as the dominating story out of Iraq in the next several months, and is committed to pursuing it. I suspect they're making a good bet—and given how plausibly an uncomfortable foreign story like this could get swamped or ignored, when its scale alone makes it difficult to manage, I'm glad it looks like the commitment is there.

And down the right-hand two columns, absolutely the dullest, rote-est examples of rote apparatchik writing the Times can dredge up (and that's saying something). Adam Nagourney retails a few inches' worth of establishment Democratic spin about how great it is that we're all lining up behind John Kerry ("Democrats See Unified Party for November"), and Richard W. Stevenson dutifully pretends that the Boy Emperor gave a coherent account of himself and his tenure in office in yesterday's "Meet the Press" thang ("Bush Offers Defense on Iraq and Economy in Interview"). I don't have the energy or the heart to pick through Stevenson's treatment of whatever the hell it was Shrub and Pumpkinhead were doing as they sat within footsie distance of each other (could the setup have been more awkward?)—in a way I feel for him; he drew the worst assignment of the day and produced exactly the colorless and constricted and convictionless piece his editors undoubtedly mandated.

It's the bigger picture mapped by today's front page that seems significant to me. This is the current state of our great national paper: on the foreign-war side, intellectual energy, a sense of responsibility, an intimation that the paper has found a story of real moment and will invest its prestige and resources in developing it. And on the domestic-political side: dry rot. Caution and conformity. The System is good, the System gives us all that we need, we are one with the System, God save the System.

Honestly, if the Times sacked its entire 2004 election lineup, would you miss any of them?

posted by michael  6:33:47 PM  
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