1/25/01 12:35 p.m.
McCain, Glorious Pain
The media’s holed up in the “Straight Talk Express.”

By Tim Graham, director of media analysis, Media Research Center

here he was again all over the network morning shows today, presented as the most powerful and prestigious member of the U.S. Senate. The majority leader? The minority leader? No, silly, John McCain. President Bush met McCain at the White House yesterday, and the media elite was predictably perky and promotional.

If the Bushies worried that reporters would have a hard time accepting Al Gore's loss, they ought to wonder when they will accept McCain's. As of this morning, Katie Couric is still referring to McCain as "Bush's Republican rival," as if the primaries were next week. ABC's Good Morning America is reverting to primary mode, having McCain on for the second time in a week. If Paul Tsongas was still in the Senate when he ran against Bill Clinton, would the media have promoted Tsongas as Clinton's rival, and insist on whatever non-"Pander Bear" tax hikes Tsongas wanted? Actually, Bill Clinton threw out his anti-Tsongas tax cut promises anyway, but the media would have no doubt calculated that with Clinton's 43 percent "mandate for change" (Time magazine), aiding and abetting Democratic fratricide wasn't the right way to play ball.

McCain, ever playing the party-splitting media sweetheart, made the rounds of the TV networks touting his plan to force his campaign-finance utopia on Bush on the night Al Gore conceded. Asked about Bush camp complaints, McCain declared, "I campaigned on it, and I promised millions of Americans." Yes, and Al Gore promised millions of Americans he would avoid "risky tax schemes," but he was not elected. The same media that was so anxious to "move on" from Clinton's impeachment still cling with icy white fingers to the folding chairs at New Hampshire town meetings, pretending the campaign isn't over. We'll just stay holed up on the "Straight Talk Express" until we get this bill passed!

Last week, Time magazine gave McCain an entire page boosting his perpetual-loser legislation, with reporter John Dickerson and Douglas Waller beginning with the picture of President Bush finding "at least one skunk will be hiding in the gift bin, a present from Bush's former GOP presidential rival. Arizona senator John McCain wants to force the new president to sign a campaign-finance-reform bill that Bush hates — and make him do it before he deals with any other legislation, including education, taxes and all the other items on Bush's wish list. McCain plans to launch the campaign-finance debate just two days after the Inauguration." If this were a Democrat promoting a conservative bill (or a Republican forcing partial-birth abortion onto the agenda), Time would present them as an uncooperative crank who clearly is trying to ruin their own career — or they would be utterly ignored.

Reporters nod their head when McCain preposterously declares a "mandate," and exclaims that "there's one thing the American people are unanimous about. They want their government back." (NBC's David Gregory wholeheartedly agreed with the "mandate" on the Imus show yesterday.) It may be that every poll of the voters' policy priorities puts "campaign reform" down at the Interstate-Commerce-Commission level of obscurity. It may be that McCain and his liberal ally Russ Feingold of Wisconsin have failed to pass their censorship bill in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000. But the media insist that it is they who wield the right to declare what is politically feasible, and the bill is not dead until they decide it is. When it dies again, the anchormen will repeat their routine: Wail and beat their breasts about how some people in Washington give not one whit for the way our democracy works.

Time's reporters were finding massive momentum with new support from Republican Sen. Thad Cochran: "Bagging Cochran 'shook the earth' for GOP senators, says Nebraska Republican senator Chuck Hagel, who has written his own campaign-finance legislation. 'We're going to have to deal with campaign-finance legislation this year whether the President-elect likes it or not.'" They also promoted Sen. John Warner, another "hardliner" who now worries about "unregulated attack ads that anonymous groups run against candidates. 'In 1978 I knew who I was running against. Now I don't.'" These bravehearts are clearly looking for an Incumbent Protection Act, but the media still see them as budding idealists.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball contained their boosterism to one paragraph, declaring their preference for the next main event in politics: "At least one Capitol Hill sideshow could quickly become the main event. John McCain, the maverick Republican who gave Bush fits during the GOP primaries last winter, declared that he would force Congress to take up campaign-finance reform as soon as Bush was inaugurated. McCain may or may not have the votes to back up the threat, but the Bush forces are already meeting with Senate Republican leader Trent Lott to figure out ways of heading off a full-fledged floor battle."

On CNN's Reliable Sources, USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro spoke for the media mass in declaring that Bush's honeymoon would depend on how quickly he kissed McCain's toes. "When John McCain and Russ Feingold and now Thad Cochran hold their McCain-Feingold-Cochran press conference on Monday, what's going to be the response from Ari Fleischer speaking from the White House? These are the questions. And if Bush is more accommodating than he seems to have been in his Cabinet appointments, I think he will get a bit of a honeymoon... If he is as unyielding, 'I have a mandate and I'm going to do it my way,' no McCain-Feingold-Cochran, and we are going to have vouchers and no education bill, I think things are going to disintegrate fairly fast."

The White House may be Republican. The House may be Republican. The Senate may be nominally Republican. But the back-seat drivers in the fourth branch of government see in McCain an ally, an unelected elite charging up the hill with an unelected presidential loser and insisting that it's their way or the highway. Who is having trouble accepting the way democracy has worked?