From Easy Rider to Dirty Harry

Joan Didion, in a needle-sharp piece in the New York Review of Books, describes Michael Dukakis outside his campaign plane on a broiling day, playing catch with a baseball. Every reporter and every television crew participant knows the action is a set-up, yet every one of them will feel compelled to cover it, to analyze it. After all, this is the way Dukakis wants to show himself. The U.S. News and World Report quotes Dukakis explaining, “What it means is that I’m tough.” David Broder in the Washington Post reports the ball-tossing straight on as good-humored exercise.

Day after day, Dukakis played catch, and one more television analyst, one more columnist, gave a version of what he was trying to ac...