THE FALLBACK GUY

But then his eyes fall on the New York Times. A four-column hed! A new angle! The mid-level pundit snaps into action. “I’ll wear the blue shirt!” This could be another five-channel day.

He drives to the think tank where he allegedly works and waves at the garage attendant (who once said he saw him on Hardball with Chris Matthews). His voicemail is empty, so he phones one of the cable news stations just to let them know he’s available. Everything is up in the air, the young producer says. She suggests he come over and hang around in the ” green room” in case they need him. He tries not to look at himself in the mirror as he heads off to their building.

At the station, production assistants have organized the pundits in groups of three and are taking them into the studio for 10-minute segments in wave after wave. It’s like changing lines in a hockey game. They’ve brought four make-up ladies out of retirement just to keep up with the demand for powder puffers. Pundits who were skedded to talk about the “Is oral sex adultery?” issue are being pressed into service to explicate the New York Times exclusive. Media navel gazers who came here on the understanding that they would flagellate their fellow reporters for hyping the story are now going on the air to flagellate the reporters for not digging hard enough. In the control room there’s a bank of TVs showing the other stations, and Newsweek’s Howard Fineman has apparently been cloned because he’s on all of them. Our pundit notices that the analysts are moving on and off the set so fast the techies don’t have time to clean the earpieces between groups. As he sits down for one of his spots he wonders whether Ann Coulter uses Q-tips. Probably, he concludes — with steel spikes at the end.

They put him on the air and he’s enjoying himself. At its best, punditry has all the emotional rewards he used to experience when he served in the White House — adrenaline, fame, influence — with none of the work. Our pundit has modeled his on-air demeanor after the PBS historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. That is to say, his aim is to look like he’s having more fun than he has ever had in his life. While the hosts are asking him a question, he wears a beaming smile. When he pauses in between his sentences, he puts on the beam. When he finishes, he beams again. He also tries to use his hands a lot, which the people in the control room seem to like, and if he’s comfortable, he will first-name the host. “Sue, I’ve been talking to a lot of people around town, and the message I’m getting is that the voters made a tacit deal with Clinton back in ’92 . . .” the pundit declares into the camera, launching into a thought nugget he hopes will make it into Hotline, the Washington dope sheet, the next day.

The producer hopes so too. Just as a lot of movers and shakers need to be validated with TV success, the TV producers crave acknowledgment in print. They want some newspaper to pick a quote off their show — to give corporeal permanence to the cloud of ether that flows through their equipment and out into the void. In search of that newsbreak, the producers at the cable station are going around the green room asking the milling pundits whether they’ve got any new information that can go on the air. Of course they don’t, they’ve spent all morning in the green room. And besides, Michael Isikoff of Newsweek spent a year working this story. Reporting takes patience. You can’t just call up a few of the standard sources and expect little scoops to fall into your lap. Some TV producers don’t seem to understand this.

Our pundit used to remember why he did TV. He used to tell himself that being on TV would advance his career, get him in line for future administration posts, keep those panel-discussion invitations coming. He also liked meeting the other pundits and star journalists, palling around with Haynes Johnson and David Gergen, Bill Satire and Dee Dee Myers. But in the middle of his pundit career, something changed. His interest in TV became obsessional. It all started when many of the pundits in his peer group, and even some who were younger, rose into the A league. Now, a youngster like Elizabeth Arnold does that Friday night PBS show where they sit at that indented table and look at each other with nerdy earnestness. Howard Kurtz was just on a prime-time special with Peter Jennings (looking a bit like Jamie Fart). Don’t even talk to him about Laura Ingraham.

Our pundit has been left behind. He’s the guy the producers of the weekend shows call early in the week just in case they can’t lock in one of the really big names. But when the producers get a bigfoot pundit they call him back and cancel: “Uh, we’ve decided to take the show in a different direction, so we won’t be needing you this week. But we want to thank you for being available.” Just once he’d like to tell the canceling producer to go to hell. But he never will. It’s not his role. He’s the Fallback Guy.

He knows that the 27-year-old TV producers think he’s second tier, and this makes him feel inadequate. He doesn’t respect them, but still he longs for their approval. He wouldn’t ever watch their shows, yet he goes home miserable at night because there is some quality they prize that he doesn’t seem to have. It’s more than just polished jokes or confrontational zingers or even good looks that he apparently lacks. It’s something ineffable. The Fallback Guy can’t get his mind around what it is. Shields and Gigot seem to have it. Hunt and Novak seem to have it. It’s like high school, when some kids were just popular and others, for no clear reason, were not. And in Washington the people who have it are treated like royalty, and the people like him who don’t are treated like furniture.

Now he’ll do anything to make it in the TV world. He never takes vacations in August, because that’s when the bookers for the Sunday talk shows are desperate for analysts and he can get good slots. He’ll never say no to a national TV gig, even if it means appearing on CNN’s daytime puker, Talk Back Live. He’ll fly up to Fort Lee, N.J., to do Charles Grodin. And when he gets a call from a producer at one of the big shows — Meet, Face, Week, Fox, the Group, or the Gang — he answers the phone in his deep TV pundit voice, praying that this is the time he won’t be bumped.

He loves Monica Lewinsky because she’s brought the thrill back into his life. The TV shows — even if it’s only the second-tier ones — want him again. He’s feeling delicious self-imposed pressure to come up with new opinions and witty formulations. It’s just like those days when he worked in the White House: He goes around in a little cloud of frenetic self-importance. Maybe this will be his breakthrough scandal.

Back at the cable station, the pundits are hanging around the make-up room, which has the bustle of a kitchen during a dinner party. Things are so exciting the make-up people aren’t even telling their usual facelift and toupee stories, they’re talking about Bill Clinton. Among the pundit set, nobody believes Clinton, though a few think Americans are childish for caring about all this business. The Fallback Guy enjoys these moments. The members of the commentariat are extremely nice; that’s how they got to be on-air talent in the first place. Moreover, the iron rule of green room etiquette is that the more contentious and grave things are on air, the more you engage in happy talk off. You should never try to launch a serious discussion in the green room, unless it is about media gossip or somebody else’s career prospects. You should never steal anybody’s off-air ideas unless the person happens to be less famous than you. And a third of your remarks should be self-deprecatory, just to demonstrate that you are superior to the farcical punditry you engage in.

It’s also important to call your office every five minutes and look serious while on the phone. The Fallback Guy listens to his few messages over and over again, pretending to take notes. German TV is looking for a commentator. Canadian Broadcasting wants someone this evening (they allegedly pay, but sometimes the check doesn’t arrive). The other 24-hour news channels have also left messages for their nighttime shows. And Swedish TV is doing a piece today on the American child-care system.

The Fallback Guy decides to go over and try one of the other cable channels. He pretends to his fellow klieg-light jockeys that he’s got somewhere important to go, so he’s embarrassed a half hour later when some of them walk into the other cable station’s green room and find him sitting there. The Einsteins at this station decide they’re going to do something different. They’re going to bring in diverse voices, so the Fallback Guy will be appearing with a rap musician in New York and a starlet in L.A. who couldn’t find Washington on a map if her life depended on it. The floor producer sticks the Fallback Guy in a small windowless room with a dented photo of the White House on the wall behind him. A robotically controlled television camera pivots five feet in front of him.

A voice in his ear asks him to count to ten, and the starlet, who doesn’t know her mike is open, informs the entire network staff about her sexual tastes. Suddenly the Fallback Guy is experiencing the greatest wave of self- loathing he has felt since the last time he was in that studio, debating the implications of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. He looks around him. The chair he’s sitting on is scratched and wobbly. The floor has residue from a thousand masking-tape jobs. There’s tattered black crepe paper hanging from the ceiling. And the Fallback Guy sits in the middle of all this supposed glamour and realizes it couldn’t get any worse. But then there’s a voice in his ear proving that it can: “Eric Alterman is going to be joining us from New York.”

Alterman is one of those pundits who create a mood imbalance wherever they appear. Most people are genial on the air, regardless of their views, but Alterman comes from the Dark Side of the Force; he’s always angry. And people appearing with him have to be angry too, or else get stomped. The Fallback Guy’s only hope is that the starlet’s stupidity will overwhelm Alterman’s bile.

The intro music blares, and the host’s deep voice emerges from the flatlands of New Jersey and blares in his ear. The Fallback Guy feels suddenly disoriented, and some make-up powder falls into his eye. He realizes that they’re all waiting for him to speak, so he does what all pundits do when they have nothing left to say. He uses the word “endgame.” He pauses dramatically and says, “I don’t think the president and his staff have thought through to the endgame, Jim.”

What happens next is kind of a blur. The statler says something about Monica Lewinsky’s highschool-yearbook picture. Alterman says something about right-wing philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife, and the rap musician tries to rhyme philanthropist with philanderer, but it doesn’t really work.

The pundit realizes something is happening to him that used to happen all the time during TV appearances but is less common now. He is having an out-of- body experience. His soul is hovering up near the ceiling looking down on him. When this used to happen, his soul would whisper naughty thoughts into his brain: “If you said something really offensive, you could destroy your entire career. You could commit auto-pundicide.”

But this out-of-body experience is different. It’s a fantasy. This time he’s imagining himself not in this cheesy discussion, but about to go on Meet the Press. He’s sitting on the blue couch in the Meet waiting room. He’s surrounded by big-name pundits who actually know what they’re talking about. And they are nice to him. “Welcome to Nirvana. Would you like a melon ball?” the imaginary David Broder asks him. Then a solicitous waiter offers him a scone. He decides to lay off the food so he can save room for the brunch they have alter the show. The big-name guests and the pundits hang around shooting the breeze like the offthe-record demigods they are. The Fallback Guy imagines himself getting a slap on the back from Russert, as they walk out onto the HDTV-ready Meet the Press set. But then the fantasy turns darker. A producer walks up to him just as he’s about to sit down in his chair. “We’ve decided to take the show in a different direction,” she says. “But I wanted to thank you for being avail . . .” The Fallback Guy sees Andrea Mitchell approaching.

Suddenly he wakes up from his fantasy. He’s not on Meet The Press. He’s alone in a ratty studio and suddenly he realizes everything is silent. Then there’s the voice of the host asking him a question: “And how would you respond to Mr. Alterman’s very serious charges?”

David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.