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These days, it's all just talk
By Richard Ben Cramer
Page 2 columnist

These days, I am all talk, all the time. I hit a couple of media markets each week, thumping the tub for a book I wrote about Joe DiMaggio.

Some days, I visit a dozen cities by phone, flinging my voice into cars and bars, kitchens and card shops via sports radio. Often, those strings are punctuated with a live lip-flap on TV (Good Morning, Cleveland!) or a friendly web-chat with some keyboard jockeys who were talking in type before I logged on and will be clacking away when I'm long gone.

This offers a strange perspective on the country, which after a while seems less like a land mass and more like a bubbling soup pot of talk. A bunch of pots, actually, all steaming on a multi-burner stove -- the sports chowder next to the rich bisque of stock tips and finance factoids, which is next to a fat-free minestrone of health chat, which mingles its aroma with malodorous shrink-advice on life and love ... and then, too, nowadays, there is the towering corrosion-pocked cauldron of political potage.

Every day and night, the nation is glistening under a coat of congealed vapor from these broths aboil -- the moisture, of course, necessary to fill the pots for the next day's soup. It's our real renewable resource, maybe our greatest growth industry. And as a patriotic American, I'm naturally proud to do my part.

But it did occur to me with some force last week -- on election night, and the day after, and the day after, and the day after -- that maybe the continuous steam-stream of talk was getting in the way of some other national niceties. Like, for instance, the constitutional requirement to elect a president every four years.

It seemed to me that without eight networks that had to be ababble with continuous blat, then Florida might not have been talked Gore-blue in the face ... and then, with apology, talked to blushing Bush-red ... and then, at last, bled white by talk, while the nation tumbled into a crisis of chatter. It was the talk -- the continuous, competitive talk -- that made each man president, and then an also-ran ... and made all of their supporters ("We wuz robbed!") into victims.

What we got in the end was no winner, no loser, and no president elect -- not to mention a couple more weeks of bitter jawing. What we got was nothing but all talk, all the time.

At least on sports radio, we let 'em play the game before we turn up the heat under the soup again.

As a matter of fact, it might be better if Jennings, Rather, Russert and the rest turned this matter over to the boys who can handle this sort of work. Here's a story that needs a winner and loser -- that has regional rivalries, point spreads, strategies, statistics -- truth in the numbers and a finish in overtime ... a story, in other words, that's made for sports radio. Hey, where are Mike and the Mad Dog when we need 'em?

Richard Ben Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of several books, including the recently published Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, is a contributing columnist to Page 2.

	it's all talk