The Bush is up/Gore is down narrative was also found in the news pages of the New York Times. (It should be noted that the Times did endorse Gore, and its lead editorial the day before the election, urging voters -- and perhaps journalists -- not to believe the Bush camp's line that the election was all wrapped up, was positively fire-breathing.) Covering the Gore campaign, reporter Katharine Seelye spent last week squeezing in her last mocking jibes. Describing Gore as "grasping," Seelye spun freely when she reported that the candidate "made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state -- as if a debt were owed in return for his years of service." [Emphasis added.]

Incredibly, just days before votes were cast, Seelye, who had written extensively about Gore's earth-tone suits in the spring, was still wasting space trying to interpret the meaning of the vice president's wardrobe: "Lately, he has been wearing a blue suit, white shirt and red tie."

Meanwhile, Alison Mitchell of the New York Times gushed that an Oct. 30 stump speech by Bush built to a "crescendo," thanks no doubt to the candidate's "aura of confidence." That "confidence" was relayed by nearly every political reporter when Bush campaigned, and spent millions of dollars, in California late in the contest; Gore won the state in a walk. Despite the constant orgy of Gore analysis, at the time there was virtually no second-guessing the Bush strategy. Of course, in hindsight it seems clear if Bush had spent that time in Florida instead of California he probably would have been declared president-elect Tuesday night.

(The press seemed utterly bored with the topic of Bush, with fleshing out his policies or filling in a portrait of the man. More than one year after the governor announced his run for president and one week before Election Day, Broder at the Washington Post casually mentioned to readers "there was little public knowledge of Bush's record and little understanding of his major proposals." Broder saw nothing odd about that.)

Meanwhile, the Times' Frank Bruni wrote grandly on the eve of the election, "Mr. Bush's words made equally clear that he saw himself as the country's best hope for bridging ideological divides, healing partisan wounds and making sure Americans could gaze upon the White House with unfettered respect." (That same day Seelye reported on Gore's day: "During a round of radio interviews, he closed his eyes and seemed to drift off between questions.")

What's so interesting about Mitchell and Bruni's coverage of the Bush campaign is that when Bush's drunk-driving story broke last week, the New York Times stood alone among major newspapers in being utterly uninterested in what one local competitor called an election eve "bombshell."

The story broke Thursday night. In Friday's edition the Times, like many news outlets, played the story conservatively, putting a perfunctory piece on page A25. On Saturday though, most major outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Sacramento Bee and Orlando Sentinel, delivered in-depth, Page 1 stories detailing the story's political implications, including Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater's claim that Bush had lied to him in 1998 when he told Slater he had not been arrested in the last 30 years.

The New York Times didn't think any of that was important. On Saturday the paper ran two drunk-driving-related stories: a brief look at Maine Democratic activist Tom Connolly, who tipped a local reporter to the Bush story, and an overview of how the media treated the revelation. To date, the Times has never told readers about Slater's claim that Bush lied about the arrest, or informed readers that Bush failed to answer questions about previous arrests on a 1996 Texas jury questionnaire, or that Bush, in an effort to win back his driving privileges in Maine, told state officials in 1978 he was simply a "casual drinker" who drank "infrequently," a characterization even Bush backers would today question.

Incredibly, in a 1,400-word piece by the Times' Richard Berke last Sunday examining "a string of missed opportunities and blunders by both candidates," the drunk-driving fiasco, and the Bush camp's refusal to get the story out on its own terms, was not considered one of those blunders.

Its coverage of the DUI story was slim and tepid, but the Times somehow found the time to apologize to Bush. In a correction, the paper stressed, "A headline [Sunday] on the continuation of the front-page article about Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign said in some copies that he had stressed integrity 'Even as Drunken-Driving Arrest Raises Questions of Character.' That phrasing exceeded the facts of the article, and its opinionated tone was unintended."

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