The day my high school declared war on Iraq

Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote this column going on ten days ago and I thought I'd managed to shrug it off, but I guess it's been working away slowly on my mental immune system.  Stupidity is a persistent little microbe.

Here's Fineman's opening:

You knew Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in high school. At least I did. They were candidates in the student senate election. She was the worthy but puffed-up Miss Perfect, all poodle skirts and multicolored binders clutched to her chest. He was the lanky, mysterious transfer student—from Hawaii by way of Indonesia no less—who Knew Things and was way too cool to carry more than one book at a time. Who would be leader of the pack?

Presidential elections are high school writ large...

Yep.  Exactly as I remember it.  Our high school student government had a multi-trillion dollar budget to play around with, a stockpile of nuclear weapons, thousands and thousands of miles of roads to repair and bridges to inspect, and trade treaties with Japan, China, and Great Britain all set to expire.

My junior year the big issue in the class elections was whether or not the incoming student president would continue the war in the Middle East the previous administration had started.  There was a lot of angry debate about redeployment and whether or not what one of the candidates was proposing should be called a surge or escalation.

My God, there is so much stupidity packed into Fineman's paragraph that I have no idea where to start shoveling.

Guess I'll start with the very easiest.

Howard, who are you writing to?  Poodle skirts?  I'm old, Howard, but you must be ancient.  My mother wore poodle skirts.

And guess what, Howard.  Your column was written as a "web exclusive."  Most of the people who read "web exclusives" are younger than my mother.  Think about this.  People born the year Hillary Clinton started high school, 1961, will turn 46 years old this year. They graduated from high school in 1979!  How many poodle skirts flounced through American high schools in 1979?   And people who graduated high school in 1979 are among the senior citizens of Internet users.

By the way, guess what year Barack Obama was born.

So, I ask again, who are you writing to, Howard?

An audience of narcissistic old men and women who haven't gotten around to admitting they're old and the world is now being run by their middle-aged children? (See note below.)

Ok, moving on to the next easiest.

Whatever kinds of skirts Hillary wore in high school, she is now 60 years old.  I don't know what Chelsea Clinton is up to romantically these days, but it isn't beyond the realm of possibility that she could make her mother a grandmother within the next couple of years.  She meets someone nice, they have a whirlwind courtship...it happens.

In other words, Hillary Clinton is not a kid.  She is not even middle-aged anymore.  She is a 60 year old United States Senator who may be the next President of the United States and writing about her as if she is a girl is very strange.

There's a whole post in this, but an awful lot of Beltway Media Insiders don't seem to have realized that time has passed since 1992, and it seemed to me back then that back then they didn't seem to realize that time had passed since 1972.  They treated Bill and Hillary Clinton, a youthful and handsome middle-aged couple approaching 50, as if they were a young and beautiful couple approaching 30.

I think that goes a long way toward explaining the obsession with their sex lives, then and now.  The Media didn't look at the Clintons and see the President of the United States and his accomplished wife.  They saw a Baby Boomer Ideal of Their Generation, and this is a generation that collectively has taken an unconscionably long time to get their heads around the fact that they are not Forever Young.

They covered the Clintons like movie stars and what use are movie stars if they can't fuel our erotic daydreams?

The hysteria that overwhelmed the Beltway Media during the Impeachment Crisis, when as one an entire industry of mostly middle-aged mostly men who previously prided themselves on their cynicism and worldliness gasped, reeled, reached for the smelling salts, and started scolding like a gaggle of spinster aunts in a story by PG Wodehouse, only makes sense as the acting out of a pack of hypocrites who had suddenly seen their own sexual fantasies revealed on the nightly news.

The Broderites have announced that they plan to revisit the Impeachment Crisis for as long as Hillary is in the race.  By the Impeachment Crisis they do not mean the Republican Right's attempt to use the Constitution to overthrow the legitimate government.  They mean Monica dancing with her cigar.

They mean they are going to cover Hillary as if she and Bill are what the Media treated them as 15 years ago!

Which means they are going to continue to write about Hillary Clinton as if she was young enough to be played by Hilary Swank in the movie version.  They are going to write about her as if she is Hillary Swank in the movie version.

There's junk in Fineman's column about the girls all flocking around Barack Obama so I guess he'll be played by Terrence Howard in the Media coverage of his Presidential campaign.

Now, to the more complicated stuff, the thing that makes my head swim.

Fineman is no Joe Klein but he is still one of the more insider-y of the Beltway Insider types and, as TBogg shows, prone to drivelling like this.

Beltway Insiders prefer to see politics as high school, which is to say as a constant struggle for status and popularity among the cool kids.

The questions of who will be the next President, which political party will run Congress, what direction the country will head, questions those of us living outside Washington think of as being about matters life and death, they see as purely personal, social matters---who gets invited to what parties, who gets to join which clubs, who's in and who's out, who's up and who's down.

Fineman's column internalizes and exemplifies that trivial and self-serving and self-aggrandizing---if the question of who is in the White House is merely a matter of who gets invited where, then the people like Sally Quinn who run the social scene in DC are more important than the people who actually run the country---and useful---it makes your job so much easier if you can cover a debate over policy as if it's a football game or a movie or a high school musical---mindset.

(Shakes, this is your insight, as far as I'm concerned,  and you need to come up for a catchy brand name for it, like Yglesias did with his Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics.)

But there's more going on.

Fineman is making Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama responsible for Fineman's own literary conceit.  He's the one calling the Democratic campaign for President a replay of high school but he's writing as if this is the Democrats' fault, as if they're the ones who don't take what they do seriously.

This is something Somerby, Atrios, digby, Alterman, Boehlert, and many others have written about again and again.  Members of the Media Elite write about what they do as if they aren't doing it.  They cover politics as if the Media aren't part of the process and as if reporters, pundits, editors, publishers, producers, and anchors have no influence on anything---not on the way stories are covered, not on what stories are covered, not on what people think about the stories.

They court the access and want the influence that comes with the access, but they refuse to accept any responsibility for their influence.

They refuse to look at the ways their desire and need for access affect the ways they do their jobs.

A bunch of Insider journalists get together for drinks, somebody makes a joke about how Hillary reminds him of a girl he knew in high school, this leads to a bull session about how life is just high school all over again, how politicians they don't like are just like the kids they didn't like in high school---Fineman is using his high school election conceit to insult as well as diminish Clinton and Obama---and then a few days later, lazily casting around for something to write about or to say on TV, they repeat their dumb conversation as if it's a profound insight.

There is a truth in the observation that adult life often seems to be a constant repeat of high school, because people's characters are, to a near final degree, formed in high school and too many of us stop right there, never growing mentally, emotionally, or spiritually beyond the age of 18, and the rest of us who manage to fake our way to a kind of maturity are all too likely to revert when we let our guards down.

Character is destiny, and it can be useful to try to understand what's going on in the world by looking at the characters of the characters involved.  Biography is an important part of history.

This is one of the points Robert D.Kaplan was making in his Atlantic article, A Historian for Our Times.  You can learn something about what a politician is up to by looking at his past.

George W. Bush is a fascinating case study because of the way he was given a pass on his own past by the Media Insiders.  Somehow the Media, who love to play amateur psychologists when the subject on the couch is a Democrat, were persuaded that the story of Bush's life up until the day he decided to run for President not only didn't matter, it practically hadn't even happened.  Recently, they've taken some tentative steps towards discovering what a destructive role Bush's twisted, love-hate relationship with his father has had on his Presidency.

But biography is a precision tool.  It requires not just insight into the subject but insight into the biographer.   To understand someone else's motives, you first have to understand your own.  A good biographer is a demanding self-critic.

The ability to criticize themselves is not common among DC journalists.  And one of my points here is that Fineman's column is a product of his profession's rejection of self-examination.

But even if it wasn't, there's a big difference between comparing a public figure to what she was like when she was a young woman and writing about her as if she still is that young woman, which isn't even what Fineman's done, blockheaded as that would be.  He's written about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as if they are kids that Fineman claims he used to know in high school.  But he didn't know such kids.  Nobody did, because he's describing stereotypes, caricatures of types he might have encountered in high school, but which he more likely knows from the same places we all know those stereotypes from, TV and movies.

But even if he had written with more wit and insight about Clinton and Obama as character types, even if he had them pegged, he would still be missing the point.

A person might be so immature and unformed that at 50 or 60 they are emotionally and intellectually indistinguishable from high school students, but the fact that their votes in the Senate may provide the difference between whether soldiers will live or die, old men and women will be able to buy their medicines, and children will get to go to good schools or even get to eat tonight makes them creatures an entire universe away from the prom queens, football heroes, geeks, freaks, hoods, goths, stoners, slackers, teachers' pets, or rebels without a cause they might have been 35 and 45 years ago.

To those of us outside DC who have managed some degree of an adult's appreciation of how the world works, what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and George Bush, were like when they were 16 is interesting only because what they do every day in the here and now affects the world in life and death ways.

Inside the Beltway, apparently, what they do every day is interesting only to the degree that it allows journalists and pundits to write about them as if they are characters on Saved by the Bell.

Couple weeks back I wrote about some new piece of nitwittery perpetrated by Joe Klein.  One of my regular readers dropped a comment dismissing Klein as not worth attention.  Klein's a jerk and a dope,  he more or less agreed, but the real problem is the foolishness of the American people who keep buying the obvious garbage that Klein and his ilk are peddling.

Now, I've felt that way myself, but the evidence is that the American people aren't buying it anymore, not in bulk anyway.  But if they are, or---I should say---when they do, why wouldn't they?  It's what's on TV.  It's what's in the newspapers and magazines.  We want and depend upon an informed citizenry and it's from the likes of Joe Klein and Howard Fineman that the people get their information.

(Blogs and the Internet in general are wonderful, but most people who read blogs read them at work, and those most people are not most people.  Most people do not work at jobs that plant them at computers out of sight of their bosses for hours on end.  Nobody reads a blog while standing at a cash register or wielding a blow torch or driving a delivery truck or pushing a broom.  And nobody who does those things all day has a lot of energy, mental or physical, left to boot up the computer and start following all Atrios' and Avedon's links when they get home.  Newsweek and TIME, NBC and ABC, traditional outlets that write guys like Fineman and Klein their paychecks, are what most people have to depend on.)

Joe Klein is the devil, and he's the devil because he's a celebrity.  His stupid book set the tone and made him famous.  It put him on the Sunday talk shows where he's become the standard.  Lots of people have contributed, but Klein led the way.

Without the influence of Joe Klein, I doubt Howard Fineman would be writing about two people who might be the President who has to deal with the hell George Bush has made out of Iraq---the hell he seems intent on making out of the entire Middle East---as if the most important outcome of the next election is who gets on the decorating committee for the Senior Ball.

Related: Jon Swift tries to save Joe Klein's career by saving him from the evil influence of Liberals.

My post on Kaplan's Atlantic essay on Herodotus with the same offer repeated: drop me a note at [email protected] if you're not an Atlantic subscriber and would like me to email you the article.
______________________

I don't know exactly how old Fineman is himself.  From his Newsweek biography I'm guessing he graduated from college in the early 1970s, which would put him in high school in the late 1960s when I'm betting he knew a lot more girls who wore miniskirts and granny dresses than he did Miss Perfects in poodle skirts.  Why Fineman thought he needed to make himself out to be older than he is, I can't imagine, unless he was just afraid he couldn't bring up the fashions of his high school days without dragging the whole counterculture movement into it.  But it's probably more likely that the reason is that Fineman was confusing his high school days with Wally Cleaver's.

Comments

[Mike Schilling]

[Obama] was the lanky, mysterious transfer student[who] was way too cool to carry more than one book at a time. Who would be leader of the pack?

Obama's *written* more than one book. Having rejected "inane", "hallucinatory", and "moronic", I cannot find a word to express how divorced Fineman's column is from reality or sense of any sort.

[Jennifer]

Maybe we should impeach the media as well.

[Brian]

Klein's a jerk and a dope, but the real problem is the foolishness of the American people who keep buying the obvious garbage that Klein and his ilk are peddling.

Actually, we're not buying them, we're buying the publications they work for. Problem is, they're bundled with the product that people actually value. Can you imagine how fast Joe Klein would fade away if his writing were sold seperately?

[charlie]

lance, great points, although if I remember you had a post several months ago about other high school analogies.

A couple things:

1. Brian has a very interesting point about bundling.

2. Certain politicans (see HRC) are more exposed to this sort of characterization. I think you're right that a lot of it is baby boomer's playing with their tummy buttons, but I never saw that comparsion with Reagan, Carter or Bush I.

3. I think Republians do a better job of aligning their candidates to fit these media steretypes than Democrats -- the democratic response is, well, Obama wrote a bunch of books so this is sily. Picking a candidate is a lot like buying a box of ceral -- red box or blue box, and the sooner you admit that the better. Bush/Gore, Bush/Kerry were all about high school popularity contests.

4. It says something for the socialization of journalists that they resort to high school analogies. They must have been such losers in college that they didn't get invited to a lot of parties. A very wise high school teacher told me that your friends/collegues will end up at the LAST place you went to school -- either high school, college, or grad school, and that is largely true for me.

[Dugas]

Dude,

You are on fire lately.

[Jennifer]

You are indeed on a roll... I found myself holding a lighter up to my computer screen while reading this today. :)

[The Heretik]

Oy dat.

[Mike Schilling]

reached for the smelling salts like a gaggle of spinster aunts in a story by PG Wodehouse

Eh? Wodehouse aunts are tough cookies. In fact, the climax of the book you link to (The Mating Season) shows Esmond Haddock, a sort of Greek God who looks like a cross between a poet and an all-in wrestler, winning the love of Corky Pirbright by finally standing up to his.

I don't know if you've seen this, but Dick Cheney has nothing on Aunt Agatha.

[BOSSY]

All Bossy knows is that in high school George Bush was the ass in the cafeteria who'd pull some kid's chair out from under him scattering peas everywhere. Good job Lance.

[Chris the Cop]

It does sound like a silly column, but keep in mind that dozens of newspapers-rightly or wrongly--came out for President Clinton to resign during the Lewinsky affair, including the San Jose Mercury News, the Des Moines Register, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, all of which have their main offices outside the Beltway.

Not to openly fawn, but the point you make about the Media writing as if they are NOT part of the process is absolutely brilliant, articulating in a simple, crsytal-clear way something I've thought about for years. It really is amazing how bi-partisan the Elite Media outlets are when doing this.

[Bill Altreuter]

The high school simile was amusing when it was coined, sometime in the mid-70's (I think) to describe Hollywood ("High school with money"). It lost its descriptive power pretty quickly, but that hasn't prevented the intellectually lazy from trotting it out steadily. It seems to me that doing so amounts to an admission that the person is still emotionally trapped in adolescence. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people like that. I'm not sure why so many of them seem to be journalists-- with national audiences-- but writing is like any other entertainment, I suppose.

Interestingly, tripe like Fineman's piece may be a dying form. He is a Serious Journalist, and although he is trying to be funny, the fact is that more and more people are getting their news from people who are actually funny. This is bad news for hacks like Fineman, or Maureen Dowd, but may be good news for us. In order to be funny about something-- really funny-- it is necessary to understand it. I'd say that The Colbert Report is much more informative than watching Tim Russert licking Dick Cheney's ear.

Where does this take us? What does it mean when The Onion is more thoughtful than the New York Times' OpEd? I'm not sure I know, but one of the places a world like that leaves us is where we are now, with an electorate that couldn't tell the difference between Bush and Gore-- and, in a coin toss, called it wrong.

[marianne19]

Lance,
I'm Hilary's age and probably Fineman's by your estimate. In the 6th grade I wore a yellow skirt with a gray felt poodle appliqued on it, with a crinoline under the skirt, and a matching blouse. I'm 60 and that outfit is one of maybe ten from my childhood that I remember clearly. We wanted to look like the high-school kids and I felt very "mature."

So, the girls Fineman grew up wore poodle skirts as children, not in high school.

Also, in Hilary's college pictures, she doesn't look like Mrs. Perfect--she was quite the rebel, not too into fashion; perhaps she was leaning that way in high school, too?

As usual, once you start thinking about what HF is writing, you wonder, "Can he get anything right?"

[Elayne Riggs]

Lance, I'm pretty sure Fineman was referring to the atmosphere of the movie Grease, rather than any real high school. He was trying to evoke a common experience, and pretty much everyone has seen that movie at the cinema or on TV. Sure, stereotypes and pop culture references can be lazy shorthand, but they're not necessarily indicative of a writer being out of touch.

[ajay]

Ah, that's better.

[Tom D.]

There are two obvious ironies inherent in the metaphor that Fineman uses. One: take a look at the picture of Fineman on the Newsweek page. His face is oddly unmarked by adulthood; the touches of gray at the temples looks almost artificial. He looks like the deadly-earnest kid who read The Fountainhead as a sophomore and campaigned hard for the editor-in-chief position of the school newspaper, only to lose out to that girl in the poodle skirt. And, of course, he never quite got over that.

The other is that, even though people like Fineman like to portray the Republicans as the Strong Dads as opposed to the immature Democrats, W is the most obviously immature politician of recent memory at almost any level. He comes off as a kid who got brought to Dad's office on a Take Your Kid To Work day, and inexplicably left there.

[Fledermaus]

I think they are actually regressing. Last Sunday on the Chris Mathews Show (as documented by The Daily Howler Andy Sullivan and Fineman talked about Clinton "having cooties"

These people need to grow the eff up.

[Barry]

Chris the Cop, that's true. However, if the 'insiders' among the press corps weren't heading up the pack, there might not have been such a pack.

[MaryC]

Fineman's "puffed-up Miss Perfect" dig made me think he was trying to evoke the image of Reese Witherspoon's character in "Election" -- the prissy, self-absorbed, eternally perky but ruthlessly manipulative Tracey Flick. Even though the setting of the movie is contemporary, Tracey looks as though she should be wearing a poodle skirt.

[totallynext]

The most interesting to me was he just had to get the "Indonesia" reference in there? Anyone that reference that fact of Mr Obama's life is doing it with the sole purpose of the subliminal message that the right is overtly saying "foreign, muslim, fear".

It is so obvious.

[serge]

Preach on, Brother Lance...Fineman is a tool. I wish very much that Keith Olbermann would just dump him. Besides, while we're going all 'high school' here, what's up with his hair?

[serge]

Preach on, Brother Lance...Fineman is a tool. I wish very much that Keith Olbermann would just dump him. Besides, while we're going all 'high school' here, what's up with his hair?

[serge]

Oh, my serious bad...I was thinking of Dana Milbank, another tool. My question about *his* hair still stands.

[Decal]

Great column that for some reason made me think of the Simpsons episode where Homer went to his high school reunion.

Homer: It'll be great to see the old gang again. Potsie, Ralph Malph, the Fonz.
Marge: That wasn't you, that was "Happy Days"!
Homer: No, they weren't all happy days. Like the time Pinky Tuscadero crashed her motorcycle, or the night I lost all my money to those card sharks and my dad Tom Bosley had to get it back.
Marge: [groan]

[al dole]

This is just another manifestation of the well-established device of depicting the democrats as hopelessly juvenile and naive, while the republicans are the grown-ups who know the real world. Dems are simply products of the entertainment culture, typified by movies like Grease. They never apply this device to Bush, Cheney or other republicans cause they were conceived as grown ups. But your insight about the lack of self consciousness of political writers like Fineman is quite accurate.

[NickM]

@ Elayne: "Lance, I'm pretty sure Fineman was referring to the atmosphere of the movie Grease, rather than any real high school."

Fineman: "You knew Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in high school. At least I did."

I agree with you, he's being lazy. He's also appropriating pop culture as his personal biography, as Lance pointed out.

[Panurge]

It seems to me that "poodle skirts" are essentially a stand-in for all the fashions of times gone by; maybe he thought he had to refer to something so old that everyone would understand what he was apparently trying to evoke. After all, it's easy to imagine that high-school sociology is as old as poodle skirts, even for those who actually wore parachute pants.

For about thirty years (I'm looking at you, Elvis Costello), the language of cultural signification with regard to The Good Old Days has been centered on the period from 1945 to 1965, and poodle skirts fall in that range. Over the past few years I've seen some updating of that, but not much. Not that it justifies Fineman's article, but there you go.

[P.]

Time's Michael Scherer uses the same high school theme.

Keep in mind that these pundits show remarkably little interest in the actual personal character of any politician.

What they do instead is create scripts, storylines, and force every account to adhere to those pre-ordained plots.

Thus in 2000, no matter that Bush lied whenever he managed not to mangle whatever he was saying beyond comprehensibility, and no matter that Gore was stating simple and verifiable facts -- Bush was the "straight shooter" you'd like to have a beer with, and Gore was the prissy "prevaricator", and that's the only theme that got wide coverage. See dailyhowler.com for extensive details.

What you're seeing now are the early script notes for the rest of 2008.

[hoi polloi]

You left out in the lede quote the singular most salient item in Fineman's piece "Presidential elections are high school writ large, of course..."

Of course; needless to say; goes without saying; clear as the log in your eye. Why hadn't I realized it until now? Thanks, Howard. I'm going back to sleep now.

[42Cliff]

how about a class action?

can we sue all these stupid f#(ks for LIBEL?!

they are destroying our country.

[Joe the Dog Lover]

The whole process is frustrating.