Benjamin’s Book Journal

3 minutes

The Long Slide

Thirty Years in American Journalism

By Tucker Carlson

Like takeout Chinese food, journalism is meant to be consumed immediately. The longer it sits around, the less appealing it becomes. You wouldn’t want to reheat the lo mein you bought twenty-five years ago.

(Carlson 2021, pp. 1)

One thing you can say for certain: the crowds at Ron Paul rallies aren’t coming to be entertained. Stylistically, a Paul speech is about as colorful as a tax return. He is the only politician I’ve ever seen who doesn’t draw energy from the audience; his tone is as flat at the conclusion as it was at the beginning. There are no jokes. There’s no warm-up, no shout-out to local luminaries in the room, no inspiring vignettes about ordinary Americans doing their best in the face of this or that bad thing. In fact, there are virtually none of the usual political cliches in a Paul speech. Children may be our future, but Ron Paul isn’t admitting it in public.

(Carlson 2021, pp.61)

There was non firefight at the gas station, but I left feeling as if something important and horrible had just happened. I’d been forced to make a decision about life and death. There were no official guidelines. There was no one around to make the call but me, just as there would have been no one around to judge the consequences. I would have done anything. The only rules were those I imposed on myself. I hated it. It was an instructive experience. For a moment, I felt what it is to be an American civilian contractor in Iraq.

(Carlson 2021, pp.248)

McCain is in town for a few hours to participate by remote in a televised forum with Bush and Alan Keyes. It is the last scheduled debate. McCain knows he must do well. He and half a dozen advisers gather in the conference room of a television station downtown to eat barbecue an prepare. McCain is resigned to appearing tonight with Alan Keyes (“If we tried to keep him out of the debate, he might chain himself to my front door”), but it is clear that the very thought of George W. Bush makes him agitated. McCain is angry at Bush. Very angry.

I happened to be standing next ot the coffeemaker when McCain walks over to pour his ninth cup of the day. He’s thinking about what he needs to do in the debate, and about mistakes he has made in weeks past. “I’ve got to try not to get down into the weeds tonight,” he says, to himself as much as to me. Bush may be a dishonest candidate running a vicious campaign, but in the end … McCain looks up from his coffee. “Nobody gives a shit.”

It’s a good point, and absolutely true. Voters say they dislike attacks ads, but they generally believe them. They may feel sorry for a candidate who is being bashed over the head, but they tend to assume he must have done something wrong. And no matter how they feel about the accuracy of an attack, voters almost always perceive complaints about negative campaigning as whining. McCain knows all this. He also knows that the public doesn’t believe that his campaign has behaved any more honorably than Bush’s – particularly after McCain was caught lying last month about calls his campaign was making to voters in Michigan. Still, he is finding it hard to choke back how he feels. And how he feels is aggrieved.