This Media Life

Citizen Wolff

What is not Gore is what is interesting.

Or what is not politics is what is interesting.

Pundits now speak of the Clinton phenomenon as deriving from a secret language, how he uses his body -- the bitten lip, the stepping forward, the teariness -- to communicate outside the bureaucratic-ese envelope. But how much better would it be if you didn't have to communicate secretly, if you were up front about how uninteresting, mind-bogglingly remote, and impersonal all this is? And, indeed, W seems close to admitting this. So W's difficulties in having a policy discussion become a substantial virtue, while Gore's ease with the issues and intricacies of government get him nothing but spitballs.

I wished suddenly I had been more of a class cutup.

Arguably, not since the election of JFK have the allure and power of personality been so much more important than any political or ideological issues. This is obviously not a coincidence. Nineteen fifty-nine was the last most equanimous moment in postwar political history, and now, with a rocket-ship Dow and amazing new technologies (think of the Internet and e-commerce as similar to the household-appliance revolution of the fifties), we have trumped that.

Still, it is noteworthy that in the search for new and compelling personalities on the political scene, no one uses the word charisma. Charisma indicates a person set too far apart; charisma is too class-minded. It suggests Kennedy coolness, which is remoteness by any other name. (Kennedy would never have had a good cry with the American people.) Indeed, Gore is the kind of guy who, a generation ago, people would surely have said had charisma.

"Warmth" and "likability" are the postmodern versions of charisma, born out of the Reagan era and refined into something near druglike during the Clinton years. But the warmth-and-likability measure seems to have become more than a little suspect. We seem to have a growing understanding that the ability to project warmth to millions of people is sociopathic.

The standard is changing. We don't want suaveness, we don't want seduction. We don't necessarily want a leading man. Rather, we seem to want to counterprogram. To consciously do the opposite of what makes sense. I think it's possible that what we are seeing is the development of a political inclination or even movement that is largely about throwing a wrench into the works.

Hillary's résumé, for instance, is to die for. What else could we want? What else do they do in the Senate but wonk around and trade off who's done what for whom before? Hillary's got all the wonk and favor-bank credentials you could ever dream of. But that's the point. The predictable is painful. It is not really that we think Hillary's putting on a baseball hat is manipulative -- we just think it's unoriginal.

Rudy, on the other hand, gets stranger and stranger every day. But the very lack of conventional strategy is, if nothing else, more interesting than the conventional. Obviously, he should not become a United States senator. On the other hand, as a piece of counterprogramming, why not? It's eccentric. Novel. Ironic. Rudy will make a noise -- however dissonant.

There is some willful subversion going on. It is partly a political point -- a vote against business as usual -- but I think it would be wrong to underestimate the inclination to cast a vote for pure entertainment value. He (or she) is entertaining to me, amuses me, quickens my pulse, makes me stop and pay attention -- that is motivation, perhaps powerful motivation.

Trump, obviously, is pushing this further still. He is entertaining himself and the media and the electorate (and even making a certain sort of sophisticated political point, which is that an entrepreneur and public figure is larger than politics and politicians). This is performance art. The suggestion the other day by Roger Stone, the venerable Republican consultant now advising the Trump campaign, that Trump's base was his database of 6.5 million gamblers and hotel guests was, well, witty -- and yet who could say that a portion of those gamblers and guests wouldn't also be amused enough to actually vote for him? In a way, it is actually all about getting the joke.

It is Beatty who, with the waning of his film career, has most attentively considered the possibilities for using a madcap figure to make a political statement. Where Beatty (the recipient, last week, of the Americans for Democratic Action's Eleanor Roosevelt Award) seems to get bogged down is that both he and his alter egos are relatively conventional -- and strangely earnest -- in their politics. That is why he is not being taken more seriously than he is. He doesn't acknowledge the joke and is, therefore, something of a bore.

The state of the art is very clearly in Minnesota. It's bizarrely reasonable to see Jesse the Body moving politics -- political style as well as thinking -- as much as, say, George Wallace did. It will be not racial politics but non-politics, anti-politics, cable-TV politics that the Minnesota governor defines. Indeed, Larry King, probably the single most important person in any political campaign, has been telling people that to him Jesse is the most interesting political figure in the country today.

"I really don't think," said my literal-minded wife, "that a media columnist is in the same league as a professional wrestler."

"You're wrong there," I said.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com