GEORGE W. BUSH finally became the president of Blue America around four in the afternoon on Friday, September 14, standing on rubble in downtown New York, clutching a bullhorn, telling the assembled hordes and heroes around him that the world will shortly be hearing from all of us. But by then, Blue America no longer existed. Neither did Red America, for that peculiar map of our past divisions that had transfixed us since last November no longer mattered. The Red and the Blue are now Red, White, and Blue—except for a few holdouts. Prominent among them is the New York Times. Anyone who believes the New York Times is still a great paper should look closely at the coverage by its metropolitan bureau of George W. Bush’s trip to Manhattan, in the edition of Saturday, September 15. You will find two rather startling stories. The first, by Clyde Haberman, is titled “Heartened by a Visit from Bush”—a headline written by someone who either hadn’t read the text or couldn’t believe it. “Now we know what it takes to get Mr. Bush back, nothing less than the most devastating terrorist attack in American history,” Haberman tells us. “More than a few said they thought that Mr. Bush’s timing was off….‘It’s good that he’s come, but it should have been automatic,’ said…a bus driver….‘He shouldn’t look like he was told or asked to come. Now, it seems like it’s just part of his job.’” And this was just the beginning. “I could care less,” Haberman quotes another citizen. “I don’t feel that he’s the man that should have been there from the start. On TV he looked like a scared mouse. Now he’s four days too late showing up.” Across the page from these graceless notes one finds more, this time under the headline, “Frontline Workers Are Happy to See the Commander in Chief.” Again, the headline writer seems to have ignored the story, which claims the workers are not all that happy. As the lede put it, “For some New Yorkers, the hurt was so deep that no one…could make it feel better….For others, the three days since Tuesday might as well have been an eternity; they were unwilling to make allowances for a commander-in-chief only now assuming his post on what they regarded as the front line. Yet across much of New York City, the visit…was welcomed as a much-needed civic lift, no matter how conflicted many residents said they were about the man himself.” And the story’s first quote from an affected citizen? “He is our leader, and even if some people don’t respect the person, you have to respect the position.” The thing to know about such man-in-the-street stories is that they are often the most revealing of a paper’s intention. If a reporter talks to enough people, he can get them to say just about anything, and then string together the voices he wants to achieve the proper tone. The tone of these stories, then, comes not from the streets of New York but out of the New York Times newsroom. More Haberman: “You may recall that George W. Bush was barely six months into his presidency before he decided that New York City was worth an hour of his time. He arrived in July, not sounding too thrilled….No one would have been surprised if that was the last time we saw this president. Who could really blame him? When you lose the state by about 25 percentage points in the last election, and the city by even more, you are not likely to beg your travel office to book you a return trip.” This spirit afflicts other sections of the Times, unwilling to let minor matters—like World War III or 6,000 dead people—stand in the way of a grudge. Economist Paul Krugman ended his September 14 column with a rant against Republicans as partisan and unpatriotic: “The administration developed its request for emergency funding in consultation with Congressional Republicans—full stop. A Democratic contact says that his party received ‘no consultation, no collaboration, virtually no information.’ I didn’t want to mention this, but now is the time to draw the line….Politicians who wrap themselves in the flag while relentlessly pursuing their usual partisan agenda are not true patriots, and history will not forgive them.” Krugman shouldn’t have mentioned this, since what his “Democratic contact” told him was a lie, as any competent editor was in a position to know by then. For Maureen Dowd, nothing had changed that Tuesday. “The president will have to forgive the mayor for having warm words for John McCain during the New York primary, but desperate times require desperate measures,” she wrote for last Sunday’s paper, hitting the wrong note exactly. She then critiqued Bush’s tax and energy policies. “Can he…Rummy and Condi move past their cold war attitude and Star Wars obsession?” She doubted it: “The young president…often seems trapped in the past.” Trapped in the past? There they are, the best minds of their generation, hunkered down like the Japanese in caves on the Pacific Islands, waiting for news of the Florida recount. Someone should tell them that this show has closed. Of course, not everything in the Times was the work of a moral idiot. There have been many lucid, perceptive, and inspiring stories. Fairer accounts of Bush’s visit were included in Saturday’s edition, two of which ran the same quotes from Charles Schumer: “I would bet this is the first time [the president has] bonded with New York,” said the senator. “That’s going to be good for him, and it’s going to be good for us.” And it will be even better when Texas is finally accepted by the Times. But even as late as Monday, when the editorial page gave in and gave Bush a victory, its words were hedged with what can be described only as geo-suspicion: “His recent attempt to bill his vacation in Texas as a return to the real American values of the heartland seemed a repudiation not only of Washington, D.C., but urbanity in general,” said the paper, adding that “in the past, he reflected the country’s more Manhattan-phobic side.” It is true enough that there has sometimes been an ugly edge to some conservative rhetoric—i.e., the disgraceful remarks of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But it is also true that Manhattan itself has often been phobic about the many different forms of life outside itself. In recent years, there has been an insularity, a prejudice, an intolerance, a suspicion, a palpable snottiness about the Times. A lot of the tangible loathing for Bush among East Coast trendies has had less to do with concrete views and discrete policies than with a whole cluster of social and regional attitudes: a Texan, for crissakes, who likes the outdoors and didn’t care much for their books or their chatter—what use could he be to them? Well, as it turns out, a hell of a lot. What in the name of God was the Times Metro desk thinking, when it let those stories run? Especially when the paper would soon explain in detail exactly what George Bush was doing in those two days before he was able to come to Manhattan: securing the homeland, mapping out the response, synchronizing the agencies, talking to other leaders around the world. All the things that are the responsibility of an American president, and things that mayors and governors, however valiant and stalwart, don’t do. In times of great pressure, some always sink well below the occasion. This time it was the journalists, not the leaders, who failed. Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
