Giving the U.S. presidency to "everyone except Kathie Lee" (bgoodday's Helping Hands write-off)
Written: Jul 16 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: insightful analysis combined with humor
Cons: no serious ones
The Bottom Line: Greenfield's overview of the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign and its tortured aftermath is an engaging read that could interest even those who think they're sick of the subject.
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| eplovejoy's Full Review: Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow: Inside the Stranges... |
A stunningly attractive woman wearing only high heels, a garter belt and a fur coat presents herself at his hotel room and says she finds him "oddly and compellingly attractive." It's a fantasy that CNN political correspondent Jeff Greenfield entertains early in Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!, his amusing recap of the electoral mess and the television networks' misjudgments surrounding the 2001 U.S. presidential election. But he savors the possibility only fleetingly. "At this point in my life," Greenfield writes, "my late-night hotel room thoughts in Iowa or New Hampshire drift more toward fantasies of late-night room service."
That self-deprecation characterizes Greenfield's insightful analysis of what his book's subtitle calls "the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History." Greenfield treats with irreverent wit all the people and institutions involved in last year's balloting debacle, from himself to past and present presidents and from the courts to the television networks. "Given what happened with and to the television networks on Election Night, this may sound silly -- but in the first hour or so of reporting, before the polls in any of the states had closed, there was a lot of first-rate reporting and analysis going on that gave viewers a remarkably good picture of what to watch for. It's just that it kind of got washed away in the later hours, when we began awarding Florida to everyone except Kathie Lee Gifford."
Greenfield provides illuminating analysis of the most important elements of the United States' recent presidential history. His insights put his book solidly in the tradition of such serious works as Theodore White's pioneering Making of the President, 1960. But Greenfield brings to his chronicle a light tone that likely would have been denounced as "disrespectful" in the era before Watergate, Vietnam, Iran-Contra and the Monica & Bill Show. White, for instance, did not commit to paper any mention of any erotic images he might have conjured. But White didn't have to mention a presidential sex scandal involving a young intern and a cigar.
Greenfield's comic but serious approach mirrors the attitudes of most Americans that the controversies surrounding the 2000 election were of great import, but not of any immediate consequence. Greenfield captures that mood when he imagines the electorate saying, "You know, it was pretty much a tie, we'll never really figure out who won, and it doesn't make a whole lot of difference anyway, so please figure it out before Christmas, okay?"
Most of the territory Greenfield covers is familiar to anyone who is interested in politics in the United States. Polling techniques that had enabled the networks to predict accurately the outcomes in past elections failed because the models on which they were based did not factor in unusually effective voter-turnout efforts or a growing number of voters who cast absentee ballots. The networks first called the decisive state of Florida in favor of Vice-President Al Gore, and then reversed themselves much later and gave it to Texas Governor George W. Bush. This sparked heated exchanges among loyalists in both camps on everything from whether the early call affected voter turnout in other parts of the country to whether network analysts were pursuing their own partisan agendas. And lawyers for the Democrats pursued legal arguments that sounded hypocritical while lawyers for the Republicans chimed in with their own self-serving inconsistencies.
But Greenfield guides his readers through the thickets of information and theories about the election with ease. He cuts away the weeds that were fertilized by saturation media coverage and leaves behind the foliage that is likely to be of lasting significance. Along the way, he points out interesting features of the political landscape without ever failing to put them in their contexts.
Especially keen are his observations about the characters of some of the election's most important figures. Bill Clinton, for example, exuded a magnetism that attracted legions of ardent admirers.
Indeed, almost every woman I know who has been in Clinton's presence -- all right, we exempt Mother Teresa -- has said after meeting him, "You know, I think he was coming on to me." Given his track record, they might have all been right. On the other hand, most of the men I know who have been in his presence have felt that same force, that overwhelming sense that they were being courted, seduced, attended to, by someone who was determined to win them over by any means necessary. Clinton was that rare figure who could recount the history of health-care reform state by state, while draping a large, inquisitive hand on your thigh -- figuratively or literally.
Gore, by contrast, could recite that same history -- emphasizing his own indispensible role in it -- with a manner that seemed so calculated it could set your teeth on edge.
Greenfield's take on U.S. Senator John McCain is as incisive as any yet published about the popular Republican who was a serious presidential contender, and who might be again.
While many of his contemporaries were home reaping the harvest of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, [McCain] was in a Hanoi prison being tortured almost to death. What made McCain so striking was that he seemed to bear those contemporaries no ill will. He became very close to at least one antiwar leader, and comforted him as he died young. He stood with President Clinton, providing him badly needed cover to normalize relations with Vietnam. He repeatedly (almost too deliberately) denied that he was a hero, speaking instead of his (nonexistent) weakness under torture. There was in him, despite a sometimes fearsome temper, a sense of grace, of a link to something more substantial than baby-boomer self-indulgence. In this sense, he was not only the anti-Clinton -- he was the the anti-Bush and the anti-Gore.
Through his more than 300 pages of thoughtful, easy reading, Greenfield uses analogies with deftness and clarity. The polls on which the media have relied are like a satellite navigation system that has been so reliable it encourages an unwise reliance on auto-pilot. The election was a fascinating show, like a wedding that looks perfect if you can just overlook the drunken brother's making a spectacle of himself. And the moments that used to spark political conventions before the parties turned their nominating conclaves into tightly scripted commercials "are much like those late-night TV Greatest Hits compilations, packaged bits of nostalgia designed to stir memories rather than expectations. Watching them just before descending into the modern conventions was something like watching one-hundred-year-old newsreels of small-town America, and then finding yourself on the faux Main Street of Walt Disney World."
Journalism is often said to be history's first draft. Reporters' first-hand accounts, their investigations and their interviews with others provide the foundations on which historians build when they sift through the initial accounts to determine what is of lasting importance and what merits further research and interpretation.
Greenfield has written history's second draft. His Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow! goes beyond reporting to provide a lively distillation of what happened on Election Night 2000 and of what happened before and after that night as well. His engaging analysis of the campaign that led to chaos could provide the framework for historians' definitive chronicles in years to come. Fortunately, we don't have to wait that long.
The 2000 presidential election might turn out to transform U.S. history. Or it might become only an interesting anomaly. But Greenfield refuses to speculate. Predictions, he writes, are dangerous. He learned that on Election Day.
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For the second year, Epinions member bgoodday has organized a Helping Hands Write-Off. Participants donate the proceeds from their reviews to organizations that help make the world a better place.
The Web page for the write-off is at: http://63.200.217.166
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Recommended:
Yes
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eplovejoy
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Member: Peter William Warn
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