The Washington Post is being roundly ragged by its journalistic counterparts this week for producing a special section headlined “Election 2000,” a mistake made by production staff who used an old template to create the new section.
But a more egregious misuse of a 4-year-old template hit the newsstands this week yet received little notice.
Four years ago, Newsweek's Evan Thomas produced a profile of Al Gore headlined “The Precarious Prince,” in which readers learned that the candidate had few friends in high school (where he was mocked for being serious), that he remained a “stiff,” that he appeared to be a big phony, and that he was regarded as “remote” by voters.
In this week's Newsweek, Thomas gave readers the lowdown on John Kerry. Guess what? The candidate had few friends in high school (where he was mocked for being serious), he remains a “stiff,” he appears to be a big phony, and he is regarded as “remote” by voters.
In 2000, Thomas dug up some of Gore's high-school classmates and concluded, “Gore was decent and upright but had few close friends at St. Albans.”
It worked so well that he used the same tactic in 2004.
“John Kerry has never fit in easily,” Thomas writes this week. “When Newsweek asked about 30 of his 90-odd classmates at St. Paul's School to name his friends, they were stumped.”
What's more, neither of the candidates had the good sense in high school to act like Holden Caulfield. (A pose George W. Bush, however, apparently had the wisdom to adopt at Andover.) Unbelievably, they actually wanted people to like them.
Of Gore, Thomas wrote, “He was regarded by some as an Eddie Haskell figure, a little too unctuous with the grown-ups. … In an era when most prep-schoolers wanted to sound like Holden Caulfield, sarcastic and subversive (a style perfected at Andover by George W. Bush), Gore's roommate, Geoff Kuhn, described Gore with a line from a children's story: ‘controlled and cleanly, night and day.'”
Writing about Kerry, Thomas again invokes J.D. Salinger's teenage misanthrope. “Holden Caulfield probably would have called the prep-school Kerry a ‘phony,'” he writes.
And later, he adds, “Prep-school boys of that era dealt with their lofty status (and the burden of staying there) by affecting a sarcastic languor. ‘He wanted to be liked,' says his classmate John Rousmaniere. ‘But he was too eager to please. John was a little clumsy in the way he approached people, a little too aggressive in trying to make friends. That's why people thought he was calculating.'”
Just in case there was any doubt about what a misfit Gore really was, Thomas made sure to point out that the other kids made fun of him. (In high school? Good heavens.)
“His yearbook entry shows a cartoon of Gore as a statue on a pedestal, with a football, basketball and discus tucked under his arm,” Thomas wrote. “Gore is being made fun of, and not very subtly. The caption beneath his portrait quotes Anatole France: ‘People with no weaknesses are terrible.'”
And John Kerry? Well, the kids at school made fun of him, too.
“Kerry took a strong interest in politics and world events,” writes Thomas, “and was inevitably mocked for being too serious. He never ran for student office, in part because he didn't have the votes … .”
Gore, Thomas wrote, spent his adult life fighting a losing battle against the affliction of stiffness.
“Gore knows that he has been a stiff ever since he was a little boy, and he admits he has labored mightily to loosen up,” Thomas wrote in 2000.
At this point, you know what's coming, right? Kerry's a stiff, too!
“In the tribal world of Massachusetts pols, Kerry was routinely called a ‘preppy stiff … ,'” Thomas writes.
And, like Gore, he can't get over it, Thomas reminds us: “At times, Kerry comes off as a little too sure of himself. He has been working on his political persona: smile more (but not too much!); don't ramble; go easy on the JFK Redux routine.”
Back in 2000, Thomas was one of many journalists who constantly reminded us that there was something phony, something, well, not quite human about Al Gore.
“Watching Gore try to methodically dismember George W. Bush this fall with carefully preprogrammed assaults,” Thomas wrote, “voters may feel they're looking at a robot, or a tank.”
Wouldn't you know it? Kerry's the same way.
“Still, there is a posed, wooden quality about the public Kerry -- and sometimes, the private one, too,” Thomas writes. “At times he looks like a stage set; an elegant facade concealing workmen who are still furiously toiling at some unseen project. Some of his closest friends say they don't know what he's really thinking. His distance and opaqueness can make voters uneasy.”
In his dissection of Gore, Thomas reluctantly concluded there was no hope for the vice president in his quest to be seen as a normal guy:
“No matter how many earth-tone, open-neck shirts he wears, no matter how often he tells of toiling in the fields as a youth, no matter how much hominy he drips into his voice, no matter how glowing the reviews of his bold choice of Joseph Lieberman as his running mate, he still comes across to many voters as remote and condescending -- like a man in a navy blue suit, the senator's son, the Harvard preppie, the vice presidential heir apparent, waiting for his preordained turn at the top.”
Sadly, things don't look so good for Kerry, either.
“In a recent interview with Newsweek,” Thomas writes, “Kerry protested that he's not really distant or remote. ‘There's nobody who travels with me on the bus or in this campaign who thinks that,' he said. But then, in an earnest and slightly imploring manner, he went on to explain why he may have given off the impression of ‘brashness.'”
Just as Thomas opened both of his profiles with unflattering descriptions of the candidates' school days, he closes both with speculation about what drives them in their political careers. Brace yourself … it's the same thing!
Gore was constantly trying to define himself in terms of his distant, demanding father. In his concluding paragraph on Gore, Thomas wrote, “Albert Gore Sr. seems to live on in his son's imagination as a caution and a goad, a constant reminder of the drive to succeed and the cost of failure, of the dangers, global and personal, that always lurk around the corner. It is a heavy burden to carry.”
In the final paragraph of his Kerry profile, Thomas explains why Kerry stayed on his campaign plane one night to watch the last 15 minutes of Field of Dreams: “The movie is a story of a man whose dreams come true in Iowa, who was distanced from his father and who embarks on a fantastical road trip to find himself. It may be that the restless Kerry is still moving, still searching.”
Thomas, however, isn't doing much moving or searching these days. He found his story four years ago, and he's sticking to it.
Rob Garver is a freelance journalist living in Springfield, Virginia, and is currently studying at Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
