The narrative imperative.

Not that one wishes to minimize the importance of political bias in the media, but it cannot be said often enough--certainly, I have said it more than once--that there is something even more determinative of the direction to be taken by the media's political coverage than the well-documented tendency of media-folk to vote Democratic. This is the need to find, particularly in election years, congenial and compelling stories. News coverage of election campaigns eschews the substantive and concentrates on the trivial, as I noted in these pages last month, not only because it is easier and more fun and more attuned to the essentially trivial political interests of the mass audience, but also because it is out of trivialities that the media culture builds the stories on which it is intellectually dependent.

For an illustration of how this narrative-imperative tends to override even strong political biases, take The Hunting of the President, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, a most valuable guide to and documentation of the swirl of scandal that followed Bill and Hillary Clinton from Arkansas to Washington in 1993 and subsequently. Conason and Lyons are, it should be said, Clinton partisans of a near Carvillian degree of fervency. Accordingly, their book is marred by their short-sighted insistence on giving the president and the first lady the benefit of every doubt--and there are a great many more doubts than they would have us think. Moreover, since their book went to press, there have been further revelations of the administration's skullduggery in the suppression of e-mail evidence and of politically motivated decisions by the Justice Department with respect to the 1996 campaign finance scandals.

But even supposing that the Clintons were guilty of a lot, even supposing they were guilty of actual criminal offenses in one or two cases, we cannot but be impressed by how much they were pretty obviously not guilty of that the mainstream media were eager to believe they were. The willingness of seasoned reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others, to believe the tales of plea-bargaining crooks and sleaze merchants nearly always got the better of the overwhelming tendency of journalists in general and the editorial culture at all these papers to be Democrats and Clinton supporters.

There are, I believe, two reasons for this strange state of affairs. One is what amounts to an institutional bias of journalism since Watergate in favor of "investigative" assumptions. Some of these are that allegations of wrongdoing by public officials are more likely to be true or to contain an element of truth than they are to be untrue, that anything hidden from the public is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing and, most importantly, that journalistic and popular honor will accrue to those who uncover and publicize such wrongdoing. As it is the job of the best and most celebrated journalists to penetrate official "cover-ups," we should expect the supply of cover-ups, or anything that can be sold as a cover-up, to rise to meet the demand.

This is clearly what happened in the mid-1990s when an extraordinary collection of Arkansas charlatans and grotesques came to national prominence by promising evidence of the Clintons' wrongdoing which was not subsequently forthcoming. A great many eminent news organizations were suckered into believing things they should not have believed by the hope of scoops and the professional kudos that their proving true would produce. The incentives were obviously even greater for fringe figures, such as Matt Drudge, whose whole career could be made (and was made) by getting to a story some hours or days ahead of these prestigious organizations.

But the second reason that scandal reporting proliferated during the Clinton years in spite of the media's broad political sympathy with him was the narrative imperative. The "Story" about Bill Clinton was always, from his first appearances before a mass audience in 1992, that of the "Comeback Kid." He was the Comeback Kid before he even had anything to come back from. Then the Gennifer Flowers story, the defeat in the New Hampshire primary, the letter to Colonel Holmes and the draft evasion story, an admission of marijuana use and, much more damaging, the absurd claim that he had not inhaled, were all said by the media to be things that would kill his candidacy with the media (and thus with the public) and then did not.

In other words, the media pretty much invented the Comeback Kid by giving him things to come back from--and then allowing him to come back. But once you've got a Comeback Kid, what are you going to do with him but keep giving him things to come back from? Two things thus became necessary for the media culture that had bought into this story: more career-threatening scandals and more resiliency and ingenuity on the part of the president and his family and his professional apologists in continuing to keep coming back from them. It may not be too far-fetched to suggest that the potency of the myth of the Comeback Kid made itself felt even among the handful of Republican senators whose votes saved him from being removed from office, the one thing he could not have come back from.

What lay behind this myth and the Story which had given rise to it was partly Clinton's background. The fatherless child of rather a ne'er-do-well of a rural Arkansan mother, he had to stand up to an alcoholic stepfather before going on to Georgetown, Oxford, Yale, and a successful political career--this was the late twentieth-century equivalent of the log-cabin story of the previous century. Clinton's overcoming of early disadvantages set up the "comeback" story, but there had to be a twist to it. For the postwar meritocracy had not demanded of the future president any very considerable virtues in return for the rewards of his academic and professional careers. No reading by firelight and learning to write with chalk on the back of a shovel for him! It was enough that he was bright, ambitious, and personable.

Clinton's baby-boom contemporaries who are now in positions of power in the media knew this because most of them had comparable histories. Even if they came from poor backgrounds, and all the more so if they came from relatively privileged ones, they knew that they had done little to deserve the good fortune that the general prosperity, an easy ride through an easy educational system, and the journalistic profession had conferred on them. This consciousness of undesert, if not actual guilt, tended to reinforce what would in any case have been a powerful natural skepticism about one of their own in the White House on the part of post-Watergate journalists.

Hence, the Comeback Kid. It was necessary simultaneously to emphasize a moral sloppiness and insouciance about personal behavior that Clinton shared with many of his contemporaries and the relative unimportance of such shortcomings in the light of Clinton's political idealism--which he also shared with many of his generation. The immense power of this narrative framework had Clinton confronting new allegations of scandalous behavior and avoiding their potentially lethal consequences throughout his entire time in office. Hardly anyone bothered to look closely at anything which would have damaged this framework, whether it was the flimsiness of the allegations against him or that of his claims to political idealism, which were based on nothing more than Dick Morris's list of trivial, cosmetic, or merely symbolic measures designed to show that he "cared."

Of course, as the Clintonites always say, this is an old Story now. Now the media are going to have to work to produce a new narrative framework for either Al Gore or George W. Bush, who are conveniently enough alike that one Story may do for both or either, since both are children of privilege and, more important, of overshadowing political ancestors. Each has to establish himself as "his own man" by repudiating in some way satisfactory to the press his mentor/father, Bill Clinton in the case of Al Gore and George Bush in the case of George W. Bush. The Story for both of them is in essence that of Oedipus. Whichever of the two murders daddy the more ruthlessly and expeditiously will likely reap a considerable short-term benefit in terms of media willingness to revise the image that both candidates have had, at one time or another, fixed upon them of over-rehearsed automatons who look upon high office as a kind of entitlement.

But the story of Oedipus is a tragedy, and so it proved for Bush's father, the last Oedipal candidate. Having done away with his own predecessor by promising a "kinder, gentler" America in his inaugural address, he found as he ran for re-election that the press had turned upon him as one who was "out of touch" with the sufferings of his people. Having pandered to the media by promising more of the "compassion" that they believed Ronald Reagan lacked, he had made himself the prisoner of his own symbolism and laid himself open to the charge of not being compassionate enough. To the media, his pretense of "caring" was far less convincing than Clinton's, whose political career had been built upon it.

It was doubtless perfidious of the press first to have egged on Bush Senior to turn on Reagan by proclaiming his own tender feelings and then, having congratulated him for it, to turn on him for not being tender enough, but that is often how these things work. We may want the old king killed, but we do not like for long the man by whose hand the deed is done. This reflection ought to give pause to both of the prospective Oedipodes who will be their party's candidates. It seems likely that whoever wins this year will be another one-term president unless he can turn his Story into something a little more upbeat. Americans, lacking "the tragic sense of life," are likely to be as unsentimental as the ancient Thebans about turning Oedipus out to find his way to Colonus.

But candidates, particularly Republican candidates, are clearly limited in what they can do to change the Story that the media culture has decided best fits them. That's why Dan Quayle has had to retire to the golf course prematurely--a victim, like Clinton, of baby-boomer self-loathing but without the saving grace of the Comeback. The Story of John McCain was perhaps the only Republican story that could have spared us this year from the looming but rather unpromising celebrity death match between Oedipus I and Oedipus II. McCain's story was so compelling that the media fell in love, perhaps even more than they did with Clinton in 1992--so that even when they knew that they were being exploited by the flattery of unprecedented and almost unlimited access to the candidate, they clearly didn't care.

Here let me pause and note that, in this, I think the media were right thus to celebrate their places on the Straight Talk Express--not because they deserve access to everything but because they have for so long been shut out from access to everything except prepackaged and predigested fare. Irrespective of the Story that first drew them to the senator, the media's rewarding of McCain-like access with fawning coverage and a willingness to overlook faults, whether of a personal or of a political nature, must encourage emulators and do something to ameliorate the tendency of the political culture to consume itself in scandal-mongering, cant, and trivialities. These things can only continue to predominate so long as the pundits and the handlers and the spin-doctors continue to be to the media the real heroes of American politics and politicians only their poor dumb show-animals.

To the media's credit, the McCain Story briefly suggested that they were willing to revert to the old days when politicians were the heroes, at least when there was a Story heroic enough. For it was not only the story of the gallant aviator, the ex-prisoner-of-war who endured five-and-a-half years of ill-treatment by his captors before returning home to be elected to the senate as that great American icon, the "maverick." It was also the story of the romantic and spontaneous lover who romanced the swooning media by speaking plainly and directly instead of through intermediaries and according to worn-out and meaningless rhetorical conventions. Here is one version of the Story as outlined by Peggy Noonan, a Bush supporter. McCain, she writes,

 has captured your imagination. This may get serious. He seems such a relief
 from--from that other man in your life, Georgc W., the Boss's Son....
 You've been dating him for a year, and everyone thought marriage was in the
 cards, but now--now there's Flyboy. And suddenly you realize one of the
 biggest reasons you couldn't get serious about the Boss's Son is that your
 parents wanted you to! Mom and pop--let's call them "the Republican
 establishment"--kept telling you he's a catch. They kept pushing you, for
 your own good. Well, heck--let them marry him!

In the event, however, as Sean Elder wrote in Salon, this old B-movie scenario didn't play out. Instead, "McCain's campaign has been much more like a '60s flick than something from the '40s.... It's like one of those movies McCain's buddy Warren Beatty starred in (Bonnie and Clyde or The Parallax View) in which the good guy gets gunned down in the end, always by the forces of society or the establishment, man."

This seems to me an excellent comparison, because it points up what is the larger problem with heroic narratives in our culture. The Beatty hero--most recently seen in Bulworth, which now seems almost prophetic of the McCain phenomenon--is not of epic or tragic stature but essentially a poseur. The characters in the movies that Elder mentions are unimaginable as anything but victims. We can always imagine Oedipus and Lear as regal and successful kings or Othello and Macbeth as the men of heroic scale that their admirers think them. That is why they are tragic figures. Neither Bulworth nor Clyde Barrow nor Joe Frady, Bcatty's character in The Parallax View, were imaginable as anything but victims of the vast forces they found themselves contending with. This is also true of John McCain, who was never quite believable in the role of president, but makes an excellent bleeding corpse with the knife of the Republican Party establishment sticking out of his back.

He himself seems to have recognized this. At least that is to me the only reasonable interpretation of his suicidal attack on Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on the eve of the Virginia primary. What on earth could have induced him to alienate millions of the most reliable Republican voters, a great many of them, like the reverends themselves, residents of the state he had to carry in a day or two, on the outside chance of picking up a few more votes from Democrats and independents than he was already picking up? It made no sense. If he had attempted to conciliate the reverends, he could have run Bush close among Virginia Republicans; if he couldn't stomach that and had just remained quiet about them he still stood a chance of winning. And he would have got the Democrats and independents who were voting anyway.

Instead, he as much as announced with that speech that he didn't want the Republican primary or the Republican nomination. Instead, he wanted to suffer publicly from the faceless, unreformed Evil Empire of institutional Republicanism. McCain had used the word "evil" half-jokingly, as part of his own favorite story-telling in which he compared himself to Luke Skywalker of Star Wars, until it was taken up by a New York Times reporter who thought he was using it seriously about Robertson and Falwell. Then he had to apologize, just as Virginians and North Dakotans and Washingtonians were going to the polls--and, as it proved, bringing down the McCain starfighter as decisively as a North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile had brought down his A-4 thirty-three years before.

For such a fate was perhaps not surprising given that he owed his national prominence in the first place to his capacity for suffering. His Story was a victim's story, which was one reason why it had a contemporary appeal. At any rate, McCain, if not the media, was more comfortable with the familiar story of his wounded innocence, and during the last week or two of his active campaign had little to say about it apart from complaints about how ill-treated he was by the nasty and "negative" tactics of that awful Mr. Bush. So he was, too, though Bush's shameless demagoguery about the senator's alleged indifference to environmental well-being or reluctance to fund breast-cancer research was hardly more deplorable than the Senator's own demagoguery about the alleged "iron triangle" of media, politicians and "special interests."

This time, too, McCain might have reflected with satisfaction that he was taking his enemy down with him. As Maureen Dowd, ever the bellwether of the media flock, put it,

 by running into the arms of Bob Jones III, Pat Robertson, Strom Thurmond
 and Dan Quayle, by slighting Catholics and blacks, by switching to a low
 Atwater-style campaign, Mr. Bush lost touch with all the things that had
 made him attractive in the first place....

 W'.s problem was analogous to his father's in '92: an establishment
 candidate with a weak message and communication skills outmaneuvered by
 forces he never foresaw and did not know how to react to.

 Down south, the Texas governor simply tried to become the Arizona
 senator. But his backers were not impressed when the rich kid ran through
 $50 million to come up with a slogan as transcendentally dorky as "Reformer
 With Results."

 Meanwhile, Mr. McCain went the other way, becoming the nice guy, taking
 negative ads off the air, and the new hot fund-raiser, scaring up tons of
 money on the Internet. After all W'.s early bragging about garnering a lot
 of the Hispanic and black vote in Texas, and his vow to rally "the armies
 of compassion," it was the challenger who was more open, attracting
 independents and Democrats.

 Mr. Bush could not morph into Mr. McCain, but he did manage to morph
 into Steve Forbes, running a destructive--and self-destructive--campaign
 against a war-hero senator.

This certainly has the makings of The Story about Bush, if Bush is to be cast as loser in the general election. The rival story, if he looks more like a winner, will be that the challenge from McCain toughened and hardened him, made a man of him in fact. Perhaps he will even be allowed to have become "his own man" without having to mug George Sr. and the Republican establishment that he and McCain have hitherto taken it in turn to abuse. If so, the old Flyboy will have performed one last service for his country and for its desperately impoverished political and media culture.

James Bowman is the American editor of the London Times Literary Supplement and the film critic of The American Spectator.