Enough Election Nit-Picking to Keep a News Junkie Smiling

What more is there to say about the presidential election?

Shouldn’t the media quiet down now, let Bush retire with dignity and Clinton plan his Administration in peace?

Ha!

Even after a week of “Election Special Issues,” and a year of endless campaign coverage, magazinedom keeps churning out presidential pontification. News junkies will savor all the nit-picking and second-guessing of the race and minutely detailed discussion of the next Administration.

But a few features break out of the usual post-mortem:

Hillary Clinton looks kinda goofy in that cover shot, but inside, the Nov. 16 People Weekly comes through with an impressive array of tangential post-election puff.

The profile of Clinton’s mom, 69-year-old Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley, is interesting. “Hello Elvis, Goodbye Timberwolf,” a look at what’s in and what’s out, is amusing. But the gossipy profile of the officially postponed, and finally reinstated romance between Clinton campaign guru James Carville, and Mary Matalin, the Bush campaign’s political director, is great fun. And probably cathartic for other bipartisan couples.

The prize for post-election giddiness goes to the Nov. 23 New Republic for an ebullient editorial that reads, in part: “Good riddance to George Bush, to his negligence, recklessness, and cynicism. Good riddance to his incompetent excuse for a foreign policy, to his ignorance and avoidance of the social ills of our country, to his failed economic agenda, and to his incoherent verbiage that sensible people had to accept as public discourse for four long years. . . . “

TNR also labels Perot’s 19% showing the most alarming aspect of the election.

Newsweek, meanwhile, boasts a nifty map pinpointing how each part of the country voted and identifying the 30 (yes 30!) states where Perot got more than 20% of the vote.

(Newsweek’s “Perspectives” says a reporter asked Perot if he cost Bush the election. “No,” Perot replied, “Did you?”)

Reason magazine’s December issue offers the President a pre-inauguration reading list. Two dozen people each got to pick three books, only one of which could be more than 10 years old.

The usual libertarian standards are represented, naturally, and few paeans to self-reliance go unnoted.

Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground” and “In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government,” get lots of mentions--including one by Murray--who also names Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie.”

“What comes home most forcibly to the modern reader,” Murray says of the book, “is how much we once took for granted that people and neighbors could do, and would do, for themselves. . . . “

P. J. O’Rourke’s “A Parliament of Whores” is a favorite, and Alan Paton’s “Cry, the Beloved Country” gets recommended, for “bringing home to the reader . . . the evil of abdicating individual responsibility and the human dignity of those who willingly live, and die, as a result of their actions.”

“The Little Red Hen” is also on one list. With her reap-only-what-you-sow message, says the nominator, “Ms. Hen, (is) one of the great feminist heroes in popular literature.”

Finally, for now, the November Mirabella presented 18 women with the scenario that she had just been elected President. What’s her agenda?

Predictably, most use this stump to pitch their interest group’s position. Sarah Brady pushes gun control; playwright Wendy Wasserstein, arts funding; Dr. Mary Lake Polan, an ob-gyn, encourages a birth-to-death health care continuum for women.

Only the politicians make more general, presidential, points.

Representative-elect Eva Clayton (D-N. C.): “Families are the unit where democracy is first taught. And it can’t be taught if the family is not united. And how can a family be united if it doesn’t have a sense of shared love and purpose? I would want to bring an understanding that America is no finer than the poorest of us.”

Kentucky state representative Susan Stokes: “Beyond our front-door peepholes each of us has a community that needs us desperately. Good intentions aside, government cannot do everything. . . . “

REQUIRED READING

* By now most everyone has heard about Lawrence Otis Graham, the black lawyer who posed as a busboy at an exclusive Connecticut Country Club. No sooner had his story of racism appeared in New York magazine than Hollywood’s studios were shoveling money at him for the rights.

The Nov. 2 Magazine Week takes a long look at the sometimes lucrative link between magazines and movies and concludes: “Like a marriage between co-dependents, it brings out the worst in everybody.”

* The sight of a mother-daughter team polishing Barry Manilow’s Hollywood Boulevard star is moving. But the photograph of workers creating special-effect replicas of human bodies, is eerily riveting. It’s featured in the Nov. 13, Entertainment Weekly, in a package of preview shots from the book “A Day in the Life of Hollywood.”

* There’s something suspicious here: Isn’t it Time-Life that’s always hawking those Greatest Hits of rock ‘n’ roll CDs on late-night television?

Still, the December Life’s “40 Years of Rock & Roll” is loaded with classic photographs, and some fine writing on the subject. Also, there’s much to be said for Tony Kornheiser naming “Stairway to Heaven” the first, fourth and fifth worst piece of music of the ‘70s. (Disco, generically, is second, and “I Honestly Love You,” “You Light up My Life,” and “Muskrat Love” tie for third.)

* Playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer is like that endlessly angry comic-strip dog in L.A. Reader. Year after year he strains against the bonds of civility, relentlessly snarling, growling and snapping with rage.

With good reason, of course: He’s HIV positive and the world sometimes seems to dawdle while there’s no cure in sight. Next week’s Advocate features the first of a two-part interview in which Kramer offends widely, naming names as he goes.

When the interviewer tries to calm him, Kramer lashes out: “You are making me very mad . . . you are showing your cowardly stripe. You are showing the self-editing that goes on in the minds of timid people.”

Whatever readers think of Kramer, they’re likely to find themselves asking: “Why aren’t more Q & A’s this stimulating?”

SHREDDER FODDER

* In a “Few Good Women,” Vanity Fair lines up some of this Year of the Woman’s usual suspects for Annie Leibovitz to shoot: Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Gail Devers, Elizabeth Glaser, Ann Richards, Susan Faludi, Paula Coughlin, Anita Hill, Gloria Steinem, Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton.

The art is terrific. And the male-chiding introduction--”perhaps the Gulf War depleted the testosterone layer . . . “--is witty.

But does Tina Brown’s ego really need her alma matter to cloy: “Here at Vanity Fair, where there will always be Talk of the Brown, we watch with admiring and respectful attention as she refurbishes a grand old house.”

Yuck.