THE GAME OF “GOTCHA,” as we practitioners of gotcha journalism call our craft (we call it a “craft” too), is getting way out of hand, people now tend to agree. The turn in the road seems to have come with George W. Bush’s famous interview several weeks ago with Andy Hiller, a “television journalist” (as they call themselves) from a TV station in Boston. As the world knows, Hiller asked Bush to name a number of international personages — the premier of Absurdistan, the president of Fredonia — and predictably enough the governor, having spent most of his political life in Texas, failed to fetch their identities from a memory bank already choked with the names of the Atascosa county commissioners, the fire marshal in Nocogdoches, and the deputy finance director of Jim Hogg county.
It is of course a cheap trick, this gotcha stuff, an exercise in smugness and condescension to which there is, by definition, no acceptable retort. Bush discovered this when he tried to disarm Hiller in mid-gotcha. Hiller asked him to name the new prime minister of India.
“The new prime minister of India is — no,” Bush said. “Can you name the foreign minister of Mexico?”
“No, sir,” Hiller replied. “But I would say I’m not running for president and I don’t write foreign policy.”
Upon hearing this weaselly dodge, which is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of gotcha, Bush should have switched fields, to Hiller’s own area of expertise. “You’re in television,” Bush might have said. “Who played the professor on Gilligan’s Island?” But this is hindsight. And besides, beating a gotcha journalist at his own game never makes any difference. The game remains in play.
Even for John McCain. As a former POW and bona fide hero, McCain is generally inoculated against the journalistic heel-snapping that bedevils other presidential candidates. But two weekends ago, as he was campaigning across New Hampshire, a team of comics with a camera crew from the cable network Comedy Central clambered aboard his campaign bus to enlist him in their own little game of gotcha.
Who’s your favorite poet? they asked McCain.
According to the cosmology of the sophisticates at Comedy Central, politicians are not supposed to have favorite poets.
McCain hesitated, and then said, “Robert Service, I guess.”
Okay, the comedians pressed as the cameras rolled, then recite some of his poetry.
Gotcha? Here again, the Comedy Central team revealed their own provincialism. They were apparently ignorant of one of the ironclad rules of modern poetry: Anyone who likes Robert Service can recite Robert Service. By the yard.
And that’s what McCain did. After a bumpy push-off, by one witness’s account, he ran through all 14 stanzas of “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” Service’s great ballad that deathlessly begins
There are strange things done in the
midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run
cold . . .
Service is best known for his narrative poems set in gold rush-era Yukon, where the poet himself lived for many years at the turn of the century. “Sam McGee,” like his other great ballad, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” is a celebration of men in extremity, leavened by a black-humor joke at the end. With their march-beat rhythms and simple rhyme schemes, his poems were written to be memorized and recited, and as a result Service was second only to Kipling as the poet of choice for at least two generations of American boys.
In his autobiography, Ronald Reagan recalls discovering a book of Service poems during his boyhood. “I reread ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ so many times that years later, on the occasional nights when I had trouble falling asleep [Reagan? Insomnia?], I’d remember every word and recite it silently to myself until I bore myself into slumber. If I still couldn’t sleep, I’d switch to ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee,’ and that usually did it.”
Manly, sentimental, easily digestible, Service might be considered a poet of the Reaganite school — not the most crowded school in the world of poetry. Reagan was noted among his friends for his tendency to let fly with Service at odd moments. In his book he describes a state dinner with the Queen Mother on one side of him and Pierre Trudeau, the insufferable pseud who served interminably as premier of Canada, on the other. Trudeau said he’d heard that Reagan could recite “Dan McGrew” from memory and challenged him to do so. The Queen Mother urged him on, saying she was a great fan of the poem’s central character, “the lady that’s known as Lou.” Reagan obliged, unburdening himself of all 11 stanzas, with the Queen Mother chiming in at each mention of Lou. When they were finished, according to Reagan’s account anyway, the table erupted in applause — probably excepting Trudeau, that snot. Royal-watchers, by the way, will be pleased to know that the Queen Mother’s favorite, the lady that’s known as Lou, is a homicidal slut.
The injection into presidential politics of a robust, popular poet — especially an all-but-forgotten poet like Robert Service — can only be a salutary development, notwithstanding that it came through the shenanigans of the poetasters from Comedy Central. In fact, the injection of any poetry at all, short of Neil Diamond lyrics, would be salutary for a campaign so otherwise lacking in rhetorical zip. THE WEEKLY STANDARD therefore canvassed the various presidential campaigns to discover the favorite poet and poem of each of the eight other major candidates: Bush, Gore, Bradley, Buchanan, Forbes, Hatch, Bauer, and Keyes. THE WEEKLY STANDARD defines “major candidate” generously.
At best our survey was slo-mo gotcha. Real gotcha requires the sudden intensity of an ambush, with rolling cameras pushed forward for pore-penetrating close-ups while the subject’s facial muscles go spastic. But an ambush would require us to leave the office. Our survey was undertaken by phone, and the candidates had plenty of time to respond. Not that it made any difference. By deadline, only three had chosen to do so.
Pat Buchanan had a tie for his favorite poet, between W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, and through a spokesman he said (impishly?) that his favorite poem was Auden’s “September 1, 1939” — a lamentation on the outbreak of World War II, which Buchanan thinks was unnecessary (the war, not the poem). Gary Bauer chose Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and the St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V. And Orrin Hatch, who as a hobby writes words for country music songs, selected a lyric by his favorite poet, Sara Teasdale. “The restless rumble of the train / The drowsy people in the car / Steel blue twilight in the world / And in my heart a timid star.” Sara Teasdale, not surprisingly, committed suicide.
Voters can weigh these selections as they wish. A taste for poetry is surely no prerequisite for high office — indeed, too great a fondness for it could suggest a temperament ill-suited to politics, as the experience of Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy, both of them published poets, shows. Jimmy Carter too is a poet, though readers of Always a Reckoning, his book of poems published in 1995, may disagree. But the question of how one acquires a poetic taste can be instructive.
On the bus in New Hampshire, the wise-asses from Comedy Central were apparently impressed with McCain’s performance. As they were breaking down their camera equipment, McCain mentioned offhandedly how he had come to memorize “Sam McGee.”
“The guy in the cell next to me,” he said, “it was his favorite poem. He used to tap it to me on the wall, in Morse Code. That’s how I memorized it.”
He gotcha.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
