Noah’s Archive: Old and Improved

A friend of mine heard Al Gore speak at a symposium recently and expressed his surprise at the former vice-president’s commanding presence. Having found Gore’s presence during his Presidential campaign to be about as commanding as an absence, I was astonished myself. But others who had been there confirmed that Gore’s presentation was erudite, humble, and engaging. Where was that Gore when we needed him? I grumbled.

A few weeks later my wife, watching General Wesley Clark on CNN, remarked: “He is much more impressive than he ever was as a candidate.” “Almost anyone is more impressive than Clark was as a candidate,”

I retorted churlishly, having felt betrayed by his looking so strong before he entered the race and so ineffectual once he started running. She was right; but the Clark she was watching was not a new Clark. If anything, he was an old Clark, the pre-debate Clark. If you didn’t know what time it was, you might wish he’d run for President.

The day Howard Dean finally endorsed John Kerry as the nominee of the Democratic party, Dean was interviewed on the PBS News Hour. Speaking with a candor unusual in such colloquies, he was calm, unabrasive, and wise, betokening a man who ought to be a candidate himself and raising the question, why didn’t he come across that way when he was?

What’s going on here? Why do people who were good when they came in, suspend their excellence, to be restored only after they get out?

The grueling work and pressure of campaigning take a terrible toll, of course, but a lot of the damage is inflicted by the televised debates themselves. When, during the Republican primary debates of 2000, a moderator innocently asked candidates to identify their favorite political philosopher, it was George W. Bush’s turn to go first. Apparently unable to name a political philosopher (could he name one now?), Bush answered, “Jesus Christ.” The job description might have offended Mel Gibson but went unchallenged by the competing candidates.

That exchange reminds us, as if we could forget, that the debates are not debates, and can be called that only because so few voters have ever seen, heard, or read a genuine debate. They are reality shows, no more faithful to reality than others of the genre. As with their more entertaining counterparts, the stakes are high and the chance of accident suspenseful—there is always the possibility of a threat, or a threatening question.

As a spoiler, television has a longer record than Ralph Nader. Look at what it did to boxing. Brutal and corrupt, professional boxing is almost history now, and should be, but the sport’s decline began long ago, with the TV-driven decline of small fight clubs, like the one where the Italian Stallion battled other third raters in Rocky.

Boxing is being ruined, because boxers don’t have any place to be bad anymore,” was the lament. Gyms were raided for telegenic novices who worked their trade before a living room audience that knew nothing about boxing but knew what they liked. Often as not, what they liked was wrestling or Liberace. The strong survived for later exploitation, but many promising athletes were over-matched into oblivion before they could learn to defend themselves.

Television, it was once feared, would destroy comedy in the same way. “Comics no longer have anyplace to be bad,” the complaint went. “The voracious medium eats material faster than jokes can be crafted, and it eats talent just as fast. Young comedians are burning out before they have a chance to mature.” Like the despair over boxing, this was a valid concern, but the historical circumstances were different. Writing for television was a new school for comedians. And the traditional training grounds for stand-up comics were not clubs, as they were in boxing, but vaudeville and burlesque. Only after they were gone did the clubs emerge and multiply. Comedy clubs today supply practitioners with more places to be bad than was ever dreamed of at the Palace or the Princess Theatre in Pocatello, Idaho.

When Lou Dorfsman was design czar at CBS, he kept coming across exemplary work by designers who had once been on his staff. “He”—or, in at least one case, “she”—“is good,” Dorfsman would say, shaking his head with mock resentment. “He got good as soon as he left us.” Once, at a retrospective show of a designer’s work, Lou called my attention to a particularly striking poster. “Look at that,” he said. “It’s great.”

“I know what comes next,” I said. “He got good as soon as he left you.” “He was never at CBS,” Lou said seriously, then caught himself, laughed and said, “Well, if he had worked at CBS, he wouldn’t have been this good until he left.”

There probably was a certain truth to this. Dorfsman has a sharp eye for promise, and he hired talented people who developed under his direction. They were undoubtedly better when they left than they had been when they came, in some cases better than they would otherwise have become.

That is not an uncommon pattern in design, where established offices have always functioned as places for young designers to hone their skills and develop their voices. That is not primarily why design offices are in business, but it is necessary and inevitable. Talent needs time and space to mature. Instructive mistakes need someplace to be made. Before getting good, designers, like comics and welterweights, need a time and place to be bad. As for politicians...