This Media Life

Wasps or Wonks

Many impossible-to-read books will become best-sellers.

There will be lots of public symposia (no one will admit to feelings of intense boredom).

Gore will reconcile Deepak Chopra with incredibly conventional wisdom.

New Agey New Economy talk, which has largely been a foreign language in Washington, will be very current (just as it is going out of style in many other parts of the country).

Al's facility with a PC (which Clinton doesn't much use, and which, bet on it, W. isn't hacking) will be much discussed. Here's the picture: a laptop in the Oval Office. (Who will be the new president's first e-mail recipient?)

Harvard will be very big. The entire Ivy League Eastern Establishment will be back in business.

A generation of ambitious academic types will descend on Washington. The New Republic's Marty Peretz will be their Felix Frankfurter.

The public intellectual will come back into vogue in a way that he hasn't been in vogue since the age of JFK -- although, count on it, no one is pushing anyone into swimming pools in a Gore administration.

These are not frivolous intellectuals; there's nobody having fun in a Gore administration (except Karenna).

It's a righteous, slightly grim, precise, white-board sort of place -- all the more so when the economy starts slowing.

An emblematic face of the new administration will be the pained and gloomy David Halberstam, one of Gore's formative influences (and, as Gore always adds, a friend of the family); he's already turning up with lugubrious frequency on Larry King.

Gore is a moralist. And a literalist. Soon we will be shaking our heads and talking about the excesses of the Clinton years.

We will hear a great deal about Gore's perfectionism and his discipline.

Gore's own disconnection and depressed air (and certainly we haven't heard the last about Tipper's depression) will be presented as a kind of stoicism. Not that he feels our pain, but that he feels his own pain and is strong in the face of it. Gore is not about pleasure. Pleasure is not serious. And seriousness will be the highest order of the day. Governing and leadership are not fun. They are intellectual burdens. It's a weighty, self-conscious, self-doubting time.

Under either Bush or Gore, we'll change . . . big-time. Not because of who is or who is not covered under this or that approach to Medicare but because through each guy, we imbibe new notions of behavior and style and taste. It's not politics but aesthetics that guides the subtle shift in emphasis that reprograms everything.

At the moment, each of these opposing swings of the Zeitgeist seems painful in its own way. I've eaten at both dinner tables, the country-club type and the determined-to-take-ideas-seriously-even-if-it-kills-you kind. They're both deadly.

Indeed: Whom would you want your daughter to marry? That is a version of the question being weighed by undecided voters everywhere. Which guy can I stand to have in my face?

That the Gore Zeitgeist seems, at least to me, more hopeful and less wrenching is only a relative thing.

This is the root of the deep ambivalence in this campaign. There is no sense that the change is going to be for the better, that excitement is in the offing. That the coming party is fraught with possibilities. Even that the bull market will keep going. Sensing this, both Bush and Gore have tried to hide behind their detailed and yet fuzzy agendas any hint of how their personalities, habits, reflexes, media selves will change the spirit of the times.

The suspicion that the past eight years were molded by Bill Clinton, and that they have been the best years of our lives, is no doubt not true in countless ways.

But many suspect, and share a terrible sinking sensation, that we are now tempting fate.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com