This Media Life

The Great Pretender

It oddly follows from this affect-lessness, or willful obtuseness, that Linda Chavez gets the boot ("I can read the tea leaves"). One side, aided by a resolutely literal, procedural press (okay . . . an immigrant in the attic . . . bingo!), attacks the low-hanging fruit of the other side. It helps, too, that this story has already been written once before.

Whereas the newer and surely more interesting story, which is Who are these people and by what right are they here?, is a long way from being told.

I am even starting to think of John Ashcroft with some pity. He will become the issue instead of the other, rawer thing. The elephant in the room isn't a set of unreconstructed southern views but that we have a disputed government.

For stalwarts and would-be players in the Washington business, however, that is not an acceptable topic of conversation. "The healing process" (whatever that is) is what you have to talk about. (Even in private, people talk about the healing process -- only the rude and obsessed talk about the illegitimacy thing.)

Gore himself seems to feel he has to make manful, self-deprecating jokes about having his election stolen. (It's Clinton who's making the pointed digs.)

Obviously, there are reasons Alison Mitchell does not want to appear to be snarky. Everyone in Washington has to work with everyone else -- they are all collaborators (in either sense of the word). That means following your mother's advice and trying to find reasons to like them. I would wager, too, there's an unstated policy at the Times and many other serious papers that goes something like "Let's not go out of our way to cast doubt on the legitimacy of this inauguration." Then I think there is also a strong sense in Washington that polls will shortly confirm a relative degree of sanguineness in the nation. (Last week, USA Today found 60-some-odd percent of the nation feeling good about the transition.) The country, I am assured, is not much bothered by what it sees so far of the Bushes.

But then there is, I think, a further resistance, a deeper difficulty.

Assuming things are really cockeyed, how do you express it? I mean without being a bore or a crank. A crime, an irregularity, any various allegations, if they are manifested through the proper channels, all right. But how do you deal with what you can't quite acknowledge has happened -- even though everyone knows what has happened? Here's an absolutely novel circumstance -- a tainted American presidential election -- and there is no language with which to express it.

The New York Times can't call the president a pretender or usurper -- no more than it could say Bill Clinton fucked Gennifer Flowers, even though every reporter knew he had.

"Do you want us to say he's not the president? He is the president," Mitchell said irritably when I inquired about all this. "There's no other way to look at it."

"But the emperor's new clothes -- "

"That's ridiculous. I'm sorry, that's entirely ridiculous."

"What I'm trying to get at is the situation in which we feel that things are off, that everyone's pretending, that -- "

"Fifty percent of the country voted for Bush for president, so I assume at least 50 percent of the country is happy that he is president."

"But still, people know he might not be president."

"Well, he is president. Or he will be."

"When you wrote about the Cabinet selection, here, too, there's no sense of -- I mean, you seem to be playing this so straight. No shades of the peculiar. I mean, these people -- Powell, Rumsfeld, Norton, Chavez -- they're so . . . been there."

"We've said in other stories that many of these people are from past Republican administrations. So?"

"But, for instance, the ethnic diversity which you emphasize -- "

"They are diverse."

"Well, they're not really diverse."

"I completely disagree. They are. If Bill Clinton got credit for having a diverse administration -- "

"It just seems to me that you are willing to take these people on face value. You take them very seriously."

"Well, yes. I do take them very seriously. They'll be running the country."

"They won't be running the country, actually. They'll be involved with various administration functions with regard to running the government."

"Whatever."

"What I'm trying to get at -- just the strangeness of it all, of being able to communicate that this is different. The cognitive dissonance. That we've never had something like this, never had such an awkward situation. Don't you feel that this is a weird moment?"

"Not particularly."

"Is there a possibility you have a Washington-centric point of view?"

"Well, you have a New York point of view. Listen, I would like to help you, but . . ."

You could start to think that Alison Mitchell sounds perfectly reasonable.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com