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BITES AND BLIPS 119

premise, which is, after all, deference. Their stance is an insouciant
subservience. They have imposed upon themselves a code that they call
objectivity but that is more properly understood as a mixture of
obsequiousness and fatalism—it is not ‘their business’ in general to
affront the authorities, not ‘their place’ to declare who is lying, who is
more right than whom, and how all the candidates fall short. Starting
from the premise that they haven’t the right to raise issues the
candidates don’t raise, or explore records the candidates don’t explore,
they can at least ask a question they feel entitled to answer: ‘Who’s
ahead?’ How can racing addicts be chased away from the track?
By 1988, the fact that the horse-race had become the principal ‘story’
was itself ‘old news’. Many in the news media had finally figured out
one thing they could do differently. They could take the audience
backstage, behind the horse-race, into the paddocks, the stables, the
clubhouse and the bookie joints. Not that the horse-race vanished: when
the numbers are crunched, they will probably show quite a lot of horse-
racing, probably as much as ever. But this time horse-race coverage was
joined by handicapping coverage—stories about campaign tactics, what
the handlers were up to, how the reporters felt about being handled: in
short, how are the candidates trying to do it to us, and how are they
doing at it? Anxiety lay behind this new style—anxiety that Reagan
really had pulled the Teflon over their eyes, that they had been suckered
by the smoothly whirring machinery of his stagecraft. So handicapping
coverage was a defensive maneuver, and a self-flattering one: the media
could in this way show that they were immune from the ministrations of
campaign professionals.
The result is what many people call a postmodern move, in two
senses: enchantment with the means toward the means, and ingratiation
via a pass at deconstruction. There is a lot of this in American culture
nowadays: the postmodern high culture of the 1960s (paintings calling
attention to their paintedness, novels exposing their novelistic
machinery) has swept into popular culture. An aspirin commercial
dizzyingly toys with itself (‘I’m not a doctor, though I play one on TV,’
says a soap opera actor); an Isuzu commercial bids for trust by using
subtitles to expose the lies of the over-enthusiastic pitchman; actors face
the audience and speak ‘out of character’ about the program in which
they are acting, Moonlighting. Campaign coverage in 1988 reveled in this
mode. Viewers were invited to be cognoscenti of their own
bamboozlement.
This was the campaign that made ‘sound bite’, ‘spin control’, ‘spin
doctor’, ‘handler’ and ‘photo op’ (for ‘opportunity’) into household