by ....© 2000, Kimit A. Muston
I missed the baseball playoffs but they came out the way I expected them to. The two teams with the biggest television contracts are playing each other in the world series. Get used to it. This is future of baseball until they get a real commissioner.
Instead I watched the Presidential debates, all four and a-half hours of them, surrounded by what felt like nine or ten years worth of political pundit-ry. And I'm sorry I saw any of it. Each debate in its turn ate away at the tattered shreds of my civic's class faith in democracy and my trust in the journalistic integrity of the national media.
In the first debate Al Gore came off about the way I expected him to; dull, intense and sure of his details. And George W. Bush came off worse than I expected: fewer details, fewer facts and some of those were wrong.
But I was the one who was wrong. I was listening to what these guys were saying. And that is not what the Presidential Debates are all about, said the pundit-slash-journalists. Issues? We don't need no stinking issues! We got podiums!
The pundit/journalists reported the debate as if it were the Betty Crocker bake-off; the only issue was who won and what was their recipe. Al Gore, they said, came off like a bully. But didn't that mean that George Bush could be bullied? Well, G.W. got a 2-3 point bump in the polls after the debate, so I guessed people agreed with that view.
The second debate looked like a marriage counseling session. Al and G.W. sat behind a table and any minute I expected a waiter to appear and start reading the specialities of the day.
Bush looked and sounded better but I decided that this was because half of him was hidden. But Gore looked like a guy who had just been yelled at by his wife; no spirit and no faith in himself - even when "Dubya" said he wanted to bring our boys home from Haiti, Gore failed to point out there were only 34 of them still over there.
Gore had been beaten up for a week by the pundit/journal-ists. Their story was that Al had been exaggerating. He said he'd been to Texas with some guy, but in fact he had been to Texas with the guy's assistant. What a whopper! What a big fibber! And he was dull. And he was a bully with all those facts and all that knowledge and all that experience. Gore was the runner being disqulaified from the race because he was too fast.
It seemed pretty silly to me. But the polls still favored Bush. I didn't get it. And then the little light bulb went off over my head. More people saw the pundit/journalists describe the debate than actually saw the debate. The spin was what mattered, not what was being spun.
In the third debate Al Gore came back strong and George Bush's little boy George got shook. When a friendly question about how to beef up the military came his way George began by saying, "If this is a spending contest, I'm going to come in second." What the heck did that mean? It seemed as if "Shrub" had memorized all the right answers. He just got his questions mixed up.
"Gore," said one pundit/journalists, "has only two speeds; all on or all off." Another said, "I thought Bush came off very well." Yeah. And I'm the queen of Sheba.
I don't know who is going to win in November. Thanks to the electorial college system the next President will probably be picked by some farmer in upstate Michigan whose been inhaling pesticides for the last forty years. But I know who won the debates. It wasn't Gore and it wasn't Bush. And it sure wasn't democracy. It was the pundit/journalists.
And to quote the old Brooklyn Dodgers' headline; "We Was Robbed!"
Kimit Muston is a writer living inm Los Angeles. If you have comments about his columns, you can reach him by contacting - editor@inditer.com