Losing the Plot
SCHULMAN, SAM
Losing the Plot Suffering the consequences of the Narrative bacillus. BY SAM SCHULMAN I have always wanted to go to Crete. And in two weeks, I shall carry my wife there—much as Zeus did the...
...Identity politics for every identity...
...Now we all suffer the consequences...
...Sirs, ye should have hearkened unto me, and not have loosed from Crete, and to have gained this harm and loss...
...Now, so invested are journalists in narratives that new facts and new personalities make them anxious and unhappy, instead of eager and interesting...
...Mike Huckabee’s unexpected charm and Mitt’s unexpected charmlessness...
...Two weeks ago, late on a Monday night, I watched Hillary Clinton, wearing a pants suit in a pastel shade which would have startled even Degas, stride unrecognized through an almost empty LaGuardia terminal dragging the burden of a heavy roller bag as if it were her shroud toward the D.C...
...Our boredom with the campaign this year is a refl ection of the press’s unhappiness, not of the campaign itself...
...Gwen Ifi ll narrates fi rst and moderates actual debates later...
...And in two weeks, I shall carry my wife there—much as Zeus did the fair princess Europa...
...Cornog’s subtitle reveals all: “How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush...
...I dream about how glorious it will be to avoid the last two weeks of the presidential campaign...
...In 2004, he published a book called The Power and the Story...
...With narrative in hand, for the six long months after Iowa, the press tried to persuade Hillary to quit in the face of an Obama campaign it perceived as an invincible juggernaut...
...So instead of journalism— even biased, self-blinded, incompetent, selective reporting and ill-informed, self-interested commentary— the media, from top to bottom, craft narratives...
...I don’t think about the wild ravines and the mountains tumbling into the still-warm water...
...New facts the press once upon a time called “news,” which sold newspapers and grew audiences...
...The excitement will be when I return...
...Someone has betrayed your cause or made you realize that you are not even liked, much less well liked...
...And all the while, going on beneath, the nail-biting duels-to-theend between Hillary and Obama...
...We should be leaving this show humming its tunes...
...So it is extraordinary that so many agree with me that, despite its objective delights, the 2008 campaign has been an overlong and joyless ordeal...
...Cornog, innocently, thought candidates and campaign strategists crafted the presidential narrative...
...Apostles who went home on Good Friday, the media didn’t bother to stay for Easter...
...As a result, it failed to share with us the fun of an Obama campaign that only barely eked out the victories necessary to win...
...No wonder the audience for newspapers and television news has been dwindling so quickly...
...The modern audience, despite radical technological change, remains no different from any audience ever: It craves novelty, reversals of fortune, drama—it craves news...
...I wonder then if I will agree with Saint Paul...
...Naturally, it fi nds itself dismayed, not excited, by new events in the actual world and changes in opinion among the real-life voters...
...Accompanied though she was by four homely bodyguards, I’ve never seen anyone—offstage— more alone...
...A different narrative in hand, just three months earlier, the media had declared Hillary the predestined Democratic nominee and prematurely interred its former darling, John McCain...
...Elections are bitter things to the losers...
...It was a guileless act with dreadful consequences...
...BY SAM SCHULMAN I have always wanted to go to Crete...
...If you’ve ever been part of a losing campaign you know how she felt...
...It is not that there is anything unusually nasty or tedious about this election...
...Joe and Sarah...
...They believe their job is to construct the presidential narrative themselves...
...The news industry, which has thrived for centuries as a chorus reporting what it sees, now has seized the author’s job and invents the plot...
...Reporters have developed an interest in producing outcomes that conform to a necessarily predictable plot...
...But as the day approaches, I fi nd that I am longing not so much for the island ringed with the wine-dark sea, but simply to be outta here...
...We must look to the media to understand why...
...Syndicated columnists, glamorous and grizzled alike, do narratives...
...Bush...
...But not many of us are Askew bitter-enders or Hillary loyalists, heroes transformed by fi ckle voters into forgotten minor characters...
...With a little help from James Carville—who used Cornog’s concept, uncredited, to explain in myriad interviews how John Kerry lost an unloseable election—Cornog unwittingly infected the bloodstream of journalism with the Narrative bacillus...
...Only a celestial collaboration between Balanchine, Feydeau, and Henry Fielding could have devised one so intricate and surprising, fi lled with changes of fortune, unexpected peril, family secrets, glorious oratory (and even more glorious gaffes), unhappy endings, and last-minute rescues...
...Journalists misunderstood...
...Nearly anonymous wire service cubs do narratives...
...As for me, it is not to fl ee the candidates that I’m striking for the Cretan isle, but to avoid even one more narrative...
...Instead we’ve had an abundance of attractive, bizarre, and original candidates—someone for everyone...
...This year no gray fi gures drone at us: no Bob Dole, no Mike Dukakis, no Phil Gramm, no Paul Tsongas, no George H.W...
...The divine Sarah...
...shuttle gate...
...And the plot...
...A newspaper and television establishment that was on the ball would be having a ball...
...Remember Judi Giuliani’s cell phone call to Rudy...
...The man to blame for the media’s misery—and by extension, everyone’s—is Evan Cornog, the associate dean of the Columbia Journalism School, a friend and a fi ne historian...
...As a candidate for delegate for Frank Church in 1976, for Reuben Askew in 1984, and for the then-slender Al Gore in 1988, I know Hillary’s pain...
...And that anxiety they communicate to us—fewer and fewer of us—daily...
...John Edwards’s deathdefying love affair...
...In the campaign that takes place in real life, not narrative, new facts emerge constantly...
...If you force yourself to think about it, quite the opposite is true...
...Even now, in search of a narrative, the press constantly seeks to reveal the ending and name the hero before the story has reached its climax...
...Sam Schulman, a writer in Virginia, is publishing director of the American...
...And it’s not...
...Neither the journey nor the arrival matters to me—it’s the departure from this election cycle...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 5
