Jodi Wilgoren : Howard Dean :: Congrats to David Halbfinger on his ascendancy, via John Kerry, to the top of the Times snark-heap. Just as Jodi announced that it was open season on Dean with her article on his weird wife, Halbfinger began a new work-the-perception campaign on Sunday when he wrote about Kerry's "X Factor" spouse ("Blunt and Influential, Kerry's Wife Is an X Factor"). (I couldn't post about it at the time; the thing just filled me with ennui. Anyway, Bob Somerby was taking care of business—and Tom at IMproPRieTies had a good post on the article, too, with a nice quote: "This is not news, it's a form of mongering. The purpose is not to convey information, but to broker viral foreboding.")

Having worked Sunday from the recently successful Wilgoren playbook, Halbfinger today runs the old phony-patrician play ("Kerry Is Borrowing Edwards's Common Touch") that performed so reliably for the Al Gore press pack in 2000. Halbfinger appears astonished that Kerry is actually using, God help us, techniques to attempt to connect with his audiences over their concerns:

To bolster his credibility with the working class, Mr. Kerry is trying everything: touring deserted mills and still-bustling ones, talking about the plight of struggling mill and factory workers, campaigning with them at his side, exchanging hugs with tearful laborers, and assuring the countless union members whose bosses are now backing him that he will fight to keep their jobs from disappearing overseas. On Thursday he campaigned at the side of striking California grocery workers.

Four paragraphs of Halbfinger's piece are devoted to making Kerry look ridiculous because he once said "man" (as in, "That's tough, man") when he offered sympathy to a locked-out steelworker.

To be fair, Halbfinger does take some pains to honor the workers Kerry is speaking to and for by giving space to their stories. Much of the piece reads like a fair summary of Kerry's current campaign direction and the tactics behind it, and Halbfinger ends with what does seem a real question for Kerry as his campaign rolls on, shrewdly (if a bit incoherently) put by Tony Coelho:

Many challenges are ahead for Mr. Kerry should he capture the Democratic nomination. He was assigned Secret Service protection last week, and has already disappeared to a degree into the protective bubble that insulates him from the up-close interaction he found so valuable in Iowa and New Hampshire.

"Now that he's in the cocoon, can he let it come out?" Mr. Coelho, the Gore campaign chairman, said. "If it's not real, it'll flip right back to where it was before, and he'll be in trouble."

But there are rules, it appears, about what will and won't play on A1: and the rule in evidence today is, you gotta Gore somebody. So even though the piece isn't really a hatchet job, Halbfinger has to sell it as if it were, no matter the insult to reason or seriousness that might result. So we get an accusatory lead and a fake controversy:

Senator John Kerry, who is not the son of a mill worker, is borrowing heavily from the message and manner of Senator John Edwards, who is.

Mr. Kerry is talking nonstop about job losses, about the "haves and have-nots," about hardship and heartache in the industrial heartland. He is even surrounding himself with mill workers to prove his point — and retelling their stories about as often as Mr. Edwards mentions that he grew up in a textile town and saw the broken spirits of those whom global trade left behind.

This is an "accusation" that neither requires nor even permits factual support; all you have to do is notice a similarity: mills! about as often! Halbfinger's so uninterested in the charge, such as it is, that he contradicts it in the very next sentence, noting that this "transformation" in Kerry's style "began months ago," when his campaign was down, and at a time when Edwards wasn't even on Kerry's radar. Clearly, as far as the A1 treatment goes, substance isn't crucial: it's enough that Halbfinger respect the form.

Technique bad! Look, we've found him out—Kerry's acting like a campaigner!

posted by michael  2:39:15 PM  
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