Time machine it back to April 2001. Where were you? Let's see... I was finishing my junior year of high school, reading the Aeneid and playing lots of Tekken Tag Tournament. Fellow Whyrooter Kate Klonick and I mostly hated each other, though now we mostly don't hate each other. (<3 u, Kate!) In those days maybe you, like I, were still naively clinging to the hope that maybe the Bush presidency wouldn't be so bad. After all, how much damage could the man do in four short years?
Meanwhile, between New Haven and New York City, en route to a professional wrestling event, Barbara Bush, the President's daughter and a freshman at Yale, lost her Secret Service detail when her car took the EZ Pass lane and her detail was left waiting to pay with cash. Rumpus, Yale's storied tabloid and humor magazine, published an account of the shenanigans, which they were forced to remove from their website for security reasons. The Washington Post and Newsweek, among other national outlets, picked up the story.
Coming out of the Clinton years, these were the kinds of Presidential/First Family shenanigans the press was ready and willing to cover. Sexual impropriety, alcohol-fueled bad behavior, Secret Service officers left in the dust -- the national press had developed a taste for the fluffy stuff of the National Enquirer. Obviously, Barbara Bush's Secret Service mix up was mild; it made Rumpus's front page, but no one else's. But the fact that the Post and others picked it up at all demonstrates the degree to which the press -- we all -- had been lulled to complacency by the booming 90s.
Now, we know how badly that cost us. When we first lifted our heads from the trough early on a September morning, we realized we should all start paying closer attention. But we hardly knew where to look. Luckily, we had embedded reporters, we had night-vision cameras on Baghdad rooftops, we had Colin Powell's sterling reputation gilding pounds and pounds of yellow cake. We've finally come to, but it's worth remembering what our collective complacency cost us. I was a naive high school junior; now I know how much damage can be done in a four-year term, and how badly that damage can be compounded by another. The last thing we can allow is the ascendancy of a progressive administration to lull us once again.
-- Nathan Huttner
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