Campaign 2000: On Her Trail

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At times this generational mixing makes the world look smaller now. Black-and-white pictures and yellowed news clippings always make people look weightier than they were. But when I think about what drew Mom away from Wauwatosa, Wis., to Washington in 1952, I realize it was the sense that the nation's capital was the center of the world--a place where decisions were made to rebuild Europe, battle the reds and grow a pretty smart economy. Great Men seemed to be doing Great Things, and she wanted that life at the center. The microphone was her passport there.

The stakes are just as high now, but seem so only to a narrow band of us who feel like we're shouting to reach the public over the e-mail chime and PlayStation 2. Our next President may preside over the first catastrophic terrorist attack and will appoint Supreme Court Justices who may completely reshape the social landscape. But these questions seldom come up in the national political conversation. Today's ambitious girl from the sticks might think Silicon Valley a more happening place.

The candidates look smaller now too. Johnson, whom Nancy Hanschman (her maiden name) covered in her first campaign in 1960, was a bigger personality running for Vice President than George W. Bush is today running for the top job. Perhaps L.B.J. was more mysterious--even if he did show off his surgical scar--because the cameras weren't always there. He and his friend House Speaker Sam Rayburn complained that television was killing the old back-room ways. Viewers thought Rayburn a lout when they saw him stay seated when Mom interviewed him. Editorial writers and voters criticized Johnson for talking to this woman before he spoke to the more "serious" men in the press corps.

Now Queen Latifah is asking Vice President Al Gore whether he prefers his women in leather or lace. And what's more, he answers. (Lace.) Bush has tried to push away the microscope, remembering what happened to his father when reporters got it wrong about the President's understanding of a supermarket scanner. So each day starts at the ramparts, and the candidate glares at photographers who try to catch him with his tie undone or drinking a nonalcoholic beer.

Perhaps Bush senses there's a smallness about newshounds too. Some of us want to get on the air just for the sake of the exposure, not because we have a new fact or idea to report. Mom was the first glamour TV gal--with matching ego--so she would have sympathized with us (if she wasn't stepping on our necks to get to the camera). She loved seeing herself on television, and she loved gossip. She had an undifferentiated hunger for the news, but she had a civics-class feeling about it. She thought all this information was important somehow because times were heavy, so she worked holidays and waited on doorsteps for those who didn't return calls. She thought that to get on air you had to get it right and be fair. That seems quaint now.