Op-Ed

The reeling Bush campaign is pulling out all the stops to show that George W. is not only a true leader of men, but a warm soul. "He's had to sit in the chair," cries Gov. Carroll Campbell of South Carolina, whose state faces a Feb. 19 primary now touted as crucial for Bush. "He's had to make life-and-death decisions." "He has a human touch, a personal touch that most candidates don't have," an aide whispers to the New York Times. But it's hard to reinvent George W. at this late hour, when most Americans access his warmth through bulletins of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, announcing executions in the months ahead.

It'll be a busy time in the Huntsville Death House. Feb. 23 sees Cornelius Goss strapped down for his last shot, followed the very next day by 64-year old Betty Beets. March will bid adieu to Odell Barnes, Timothy Gribble and Dennis Bagwell, and Super April will be crueler yet, with lethal injections for Orien Joiner, Victor Saldona, Robert Carter, Robert Neville and Ricky McGinn. Carruthers Alexander goes to his maker on May 3. Such, at least, is the present execution calendar.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Best lead paragraph of the New Hampshire primary: "I expect to live long enough to hear a woman running for president asked what she would do if she found herself pregnant" -- Ellen Goodman. This is the year that the abortion issue was supposed to disappear from the political radar screen.

"Divisive issue," "find common ground," "an issue on which reasonable people can disagree." George W. Bush, leading contender for the Republican nomination, has made a specialty out of not saying much on the issue -- or, more specifically, not reminding the general audience that he wants a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion.

But since the rhetorical firepower on the Republican side is strongly pro-life -- Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer double-teaming the wishy-washy pro-lifers, and Steve Forbes swooping down in Iowa to take advantage of the zealous pro-life voters there -- it's b-a-a-ack.

Still, there has been rather more significant political news lately than what television pundits invariably describe as "New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary."

Andrew Jackson won the White House in 1828 with a fresh approach to oratory. "Jackson was the first president to master the liberal rhetoric," wrote historian Howard Zinn, who called it "the new politics of ambiguity -- speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil." Today, Al Gore and Bill Bradley are running down a similar kind of rhetorical trail.

Major presidential candidates -- especially Democrats -- are fond of claiming to represent the interests of Americans far from the top of the economic ladder. But a new book compiled by the Center for Public Integrity, "The Buying of the President 2000," sheds bright light on the big money sources that have propelled the political careers of high-profile contenders -- two Democrats, eight Republicans and Reform Party hopeful Patrick Buchanan.

None of those candidates is closer to Wall Street, or more indebted to it, than Bill Bradley. And yet, "the politics of ambiguity" generates so much fog on the media landscape that quite a few people view him as a progressive alternative.

AUSTIN, Texas -- You must admit, the Iowa caucuses gave us a trove of delights.

First there is the incomprehensible second-place finish of Steve Forbes, a man with the charisma of former guv Dolph Briscoe. Now your cynics would argue that Forbes proves that with enough money, you can elect a can of Alpo president of this country.

What could be more mysterious than why voters would respond to Steve Forbes? Is he cuddly? Does he seem like a statesman? Do you think he feels our pain? Does he have a distinguished record? Do we actually think the most crucial problem facing America today is that rich people need more money?

My long-held theory that Steve Forbes is an extraterrestrial (no belly button on that one) may be relevant here. Forbes proposes to completely scrap our current tax system -- always a satisfying notion in and of itself -- and replace it with a flat tax instead. Why would anyone except those in Forbes' tax bracket favor a move like that? And why would even rich Americans, who Lord knows are making out like bandits in this two-tier economy, feel entitled to even more?

AUSTIN, Texas -- You know how refreshing it is when someone in politics just up and tells the flat truth? I hope she doesn't get fired for it, but Mindy Tucker, a spokeswoman for the Bush campaign, did so after George W. got "off-message" and was forced to talk about the abortion issue for the Iowa caucuses.

He doesn't like to talk about the abortion issue.

"We have a message a day," said Ms. Tucker, "and we want to stick to it. We are not going to have one big, fat news conference on our schedule where everyone can come ask questions about what you think is the news of the day."

I like that. There it is, as they used to say during an unfortunate war.

I can see where campaign strategists would assume the media have no function other than to relay a candidate's message of the day, like a giant bullhorn. ("Message: I care," Big George Bush once said, cutting right to the chase.) But this does raise, once more, the delicate matter of W. Bush's ability to function outside "the bubble" so carefully created by Karl Rove & Co.

And so, early in the year 2000, it came to pass that visions of a seamless media web enraptured the keepers of pecuniary faith as never before. A grand new structure, AOL Time Warner, emerged while a few men proclaimed themselves trustees of a holy endeavor. They told the people about a wondrous New Media world to come.

Lo, they explained, changes of celestial magnitude were not far off. A miraculous future, swiftly approaching, would bring cornucopias of bandwidth and market share. A pair of prominent clerics named Steve Case and Gerald Levin gained ascendancy. Under bright lights, how majestic they looked!

And how they could preach! Announcing unification, they seemed to make the media world stand still. Reporters and editors gasped. Some were fearful, their smiles of fascination tight. Others bowed and scraped without hesitation.

In keeping with the dominant creeds of the era, believers in the divine right of capital asserted that separation of corporate church and state was an anachronism. A torch had been passed to a new veneration. Media monarchs would rule with unabashed fervor, while taking care to help regulate mere governments.

Have you noticed that the system of justice in this country is shutting down, piece by piece by piece? We have long noted the deleterious effects of "tort reform" here in Texas, where insurance companies are ever bolder, and injured workers and consumers have fewer and fewer rights. But there is a shutdown in criminal justice, as well.

A "Frontline" documentary on PBS, "The Case for Innocence," gives the most chilling case histories in a stupid and tragic trend in criminal justice.

DNA identification, which has become more sophisticated by the year, is the greatest advance in criminal detection since the fingerprint. It has enabled the system to put away criminals who otherwise would have gotten off scot-free and to find perps years after the crime when their DNA shows up after an unrelated arrest. Short of a truth serum, this is the best thing that could happen for the criminal justice system.

The problem is, DNA evidence sometimes shows that the system messed up and nailed the wrong person for a crime. In fact, it happens depressingly often.

On Jan. 15, the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ninth anniversary of the Gulf war, 10 people will begin a month-long fast on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. They're members of Voices in the Wilderness, the Chicago-based group that has been trying to marshal public opinion here against the sanctions (instigated by the United States through the United Nations) against Iraq. The group won't eat, and will spend each day lobbing politicians, human rights groups, government officials and the press.

There are plenty of awful U.S. policies that have survived the turnover into this new millennium, but few of them can be as malignant as the sanctions that have been killing Iraqis at a steady rate since they were imposed in 1990. The United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) and other U.N. agencies in Iraq reckon that more than 1 million civilians, mostly children, have died from malnutrition and disease as a result of the embargo. Despite the United Nations oil-for-food program, UNICEF estimates that more than 4,000 children under the age of 5 die each month as a consequence of this same embargo.

So here we are in the Year Aught, the millennium's over, the Christmas tree is down, we're in debt, and here comes January, February, Ry-Krisp and cottage cheese. Now is the winter of our discontent, so I think we ought to coordinate our paranoias.

I've been worried about our paranoias lately -- we don't have them in order.

Some of us got all paranoid about the Y2K bug, while the media enjoyed a late-year terrorist boomlet. Traditionalists are sticking with the Russians and still want to build Star Wars. I couldn't figure out why, at this late date, the Strategic Defense Initiative still has legs, unless it's because the Republicans haven't had a new idea since the Reagan administration, so they're stuck with it.

But then I happened to pick up one of those old techno-thrillers, a vintage late-Cold War gem, that had the Soviets hiding astonishing technological capabilities, all the better to eat us with, my dear. How fiendishly cunning were those Soviets in the thrillers -- and I realized you can't have an entire genre of literature loose in a society for years and years without repercussions.

A few numbers tell a dramatic story about extreme changes in media fascination with the Internet.

After the 1990s ended, I set out to gauge how news coverage of cyberspace shifted during the last half of the decade. The comprehensive Nexis database yielded some revealing statistics: