Telling the Hearings to Shut Up

            Wall Street came in third,
surprisingly, on the weekend talk shows, which dwelt primarily on Campaigngate
and China--the same topics they chewed over last week. Why? Oh, partly because
the stock market was a Monday-Tuesday story--a mountain that, from the
foreshortened perspective of TV producers, loomed smaller at week's end than
nearby hills; and partly because the Washington commentariat will always prefer
political stories to financial ones (perhaps sensing that their views on the
latter are especially baseless). Also, TV producers--even of talk shows--prefer
stories with good visuals (such as Jiang Zemin in a colonial hat). How often
can you play tape of that damned bell at the New York Stock Exchange?

            
Congressional hearings delight the commentariat as a reliable source of grist,
and the pundits did not care for Sen. Fred Thompson's announcement that his
campaign-finance investigation is closing shop. Both conservative Brit Hume
( Fox News Sunday ) and liberal Clarence Page (ABC's This Week )
berated Thompson for failing to put a better "focus" on the hearings. Thompson
himself insisted on CNN's Late Edition that his hearings had revealed a
"pattern of illegal foreign money" as well as "money laundering." But Hume
delivered the consensus line that Thompson had doomed the hearings from the
get-go with his overly ambitious opening argument that the Chinese government
had engaged in a "broad-based conspiracy" to buy the 1996 presidential
election.

            Democrats like Sen. Tom Daschle, appearing on NBC's Meet
the Press , found the hearings insufficiently bipartisan. NewsHour With
Jim Lehrer 's Paul Gigot said Republicans had shuttered the hearings because
Thompson was "too bipartisan." Having portrayed Thompson as a political
incompetent, the pundits weren't completely ungrateful. They lauded him for
presenting a "picture" of (Gloria Borger on Face the Nation ) and a
"window" on (Tom Oliphant on NewsHour and Juan Williams on Fox News
Sunday ) standard-issue Washington corruption. It's a "government for rent,
if not for sale," said Borger.

            Bowing to
Congress' prerogative to shape the news, the shows feigned interest in Sen.
Trent Lott's public promise--reprised in person on Meet the Press-- to
allow a vote on new campaign-finance legislation in March. By contrast, genuine
enthusiasm greeted the unfolding Bruce Babbitt story, as Gigot and Bob
Schieffer (CBS's Face the Nation ) both predicted that Babbitt's Supreme
Court ambitions would be ruined by accusations that he had blocked a casino
license for an Indian tribe at the behest of another tribe that had given money
to the Democrats.

            
The consensus on Jiang's state visit was that
it was a "win-win," in the words of Eleanor Clift of The McLaughlin
Group . Al Hunt (CNN's Capital Gang ) declared that "Clinton got it
right" by simultaneously criticizing China's human-rights violations and
toasting the dictator. Clinton's centrist approach produced a "domestic
consumption summit" for both leaders, said The McLaughlin Group ie Morton
Kondracke, and the talk-show chorus agreed that Jiang benefited from the summit
because he emerged a co-equal of Clinton's and didn't really give up anything.
Likewise, Clinton benefited because he engaged Jiang and didn't really give up
anything. Pat Buchanan ( The McLaughlin Group ) and George Will ( This
Week ) were lonely dissenters, taking the view that warm relations with a
hideous human-rights violator are not especially praiseworthy. But the New
York Times ' Thomas Friedman expressed the pundits' consensus on
Face : The business of American foreign policy is business, and "[w]hen
it comes to business, we engage."

            Alan Greenspan's blessing of
the Monday crash attracted only buyers. Everybody urged investors to buy stocks
for the long term. The United States remains "the envy of the Japanese and
Europeans," said Hunt.

            
               Emerging: Ross Perot
gave identical performances on Meet the Press and Late Edition ,
sounding off about his usual themes. He did introduce one new subject: the
impending rewrite of the patent laws that (he says) will allow foreigners to
steal U.S. inventions. The topic went nowhere because his hosts had no idea
what he was talking about. On This Week , George Will, Sam Donaldson, and
Cokie Roberts all but cheered when Bill Richardson drew a line in the sand over
Saddam Hussein's ouster of three U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq. Donaldson
seemed ready to suit up for Gulf War II as he enthusiastically summarized
Richardson's position. "There is no negotiation, Saddam Hussein is in
non-compliance, and he must comply."

            

               --Jack
Shafer