It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  To illustrate this point, Mike took me to watch a scene being filmed. The scene was one of dozens in the made-for-TV movie that the company with which Mike was working, Imani Pictures, was shooting for BET, Black Entertainment Television. The scene involved only two actors, yet the set was jammed with more than 60 people. I wasn’t able to take notes fast enough to keep up with him as Mike, whispering, identified all the people, but those present included the director, the first assistant director, the second assistant director, the executive producer, the supervising producer, three or four production assistants, the script supervisor, the director of photography, several camera assistants, three electricians, a gaffer, several grips, a sound mixer, a boom man, a prop master, an assistant prop master, a wardrobe supervisor, and three or four makeup artists and hairdressers. Every one of them belonged to a union.

  Back in his office, Mike explained that he himself had had to join the Directors Guild of America, and that he now acted as the liaison between the production company and half a dozen unions, including the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the Directors Guild. “Hollywood may be full of thin, articulate, beautiful people,” Mike said. “But unions are just as important to folks in this town as they are to the big burly guys who work in factories in Detroit.”

  Mike’s telephone rang. After he picked it up, Mike covered the mouthpiece. “Sorry. I have to take this one. It’s Joe

  over at the Teamsters.”

  * * *

  Union membership, easy money, and lots of sex. I’m not sure those add up to a complete explanation of why Hollywood is Democratic, but they certainly set Hollywood apart from any Republican town that comes to mind.

  Every so often French intellectuals denounce American films and television programs, claiming that Hollywood is undermining their culture. It is hard to imagine that Republicans have much in common with people who chain-smoke Gitanes cigarettes and read Camus, but members of the GOP know how the French intellectuals feel. Sex, violence, foul language, mocking portrayals of figures, such as businessmen or clergy, that Republicans respect—all of it can seem as much of an intrusion to members of the GOP in Kansas or Alabama as depictions of the Wild West must seem to intellectuals in Paris.

  What do Republicans intend to do about Hollywood? What can they do? Whenever a Bob Dole or a Dan Quayle attacks Hollywood, he looks stuffy and old-fashioned, even to Republicans themselves. Hollywood is cool. Republicans are un-cool. Some in the GOP believe that new technologies will eventually loosen Hollywood’s grip on popular culture. The recent movie The Blair Witch Project was produced outside Hollywood for less than one hundred thousand dollars. When it became a hit, I got a flurry of e-mails from Republicans, gleefully advancing the theory that a decade or two from now Hollywood will find itself forced to compete with studios throughout the heartland. Perhaps. In the meantime just about all Republicans can do is watch reruns of The Andy Griffith Show and The Brady Bunch, nurturing memories of an earlier time, like the Irish singing old ballads during the English occupation.

  THE EXPERIMENT

  As much as Hollywood irks them, when Republicans complain about the media, what they keep coming back to is the press.

  Tony Dolan, President Reagan’s chief speechwriter and the author of the phrase “evil empire,” always told the speech-writers in the Reagan White House not to worry about the press. “If the American people really believed all they read in the newspapers,” Tony would say, “the country would be Communist by now.” What Tony was talking about, of course, was the long term, the period over which the good judgment and common sense of the American people will always prevail. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The trouble is, that still leaves the short term. This is the period over which even Tony worried about the press. As above the fray as Tony liked to appear, if you had walked into his office one evening after the president had given a speech, you would have seen Tony scrambling to get into the fray. He would have been on the telephone, dialing again and again to get through to Lou Cannon of the Washington Post and Jerry Boyd of the New York Times before their deadlines. When he reached them, Tony would have pleaded, wheedled, cajoled, and begged—anything to dissuade them from reporting the president’s remarks in a negative light. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and Republicans are convinced that whenever it can, the press does just that.

  Of course Republicans are seldom able to prove this proposition. How could they? Would the election of 1992 have been different if the press had reported on the economic recovery when it began, midway through the year, instead of continuing to report on factory closings and unemployed workers even after the recession had ended? Would George Bush have been reelected president? Would the GOP have picked up seats in Congress? Republicans think so. They think they know so. But they are hardly able to experiment with history, holding other elements of the campaign constant while they change the press.

  Every so often, however, history provides an experiment of its own. Consider the 1984 vice presidential debate between George Bush and Geraldine Ferraro.

  I helped prepare Bush for the encounter, sitting in on the mock debates that were held to give him some practice. The mock debates took place in the third-floor auditorium of the Old Executive Office Building, the ornate granite structure across West Executive Avenue from the White House itself. Bush stood behind a lectern on one side of the stage while Lynn Martin stood behind a lectern on the other. A Republican member of Congress and a friend of Bush’s, Lynn Martin impersonated Geraldine Ferraro. It proved a tough assignment. Not that Martin lacked the talent. She was at least as combative and funny as Ferraro herself. But the vice president had no idea how to confront a woman. First he would prove gentlemanly to the point of passivity, as if the code of chivalry required him to lose the debate. Then he would shift to the attack, appearing, well, ungentlemanly. When Bush was passive, Martin had to goad him. When he grew aggressive, she had to scold him, telling him to settle down. Goad, scold. Throughout the mock debates Martin kept at it, striving to even out the vice president’s performance.

  It worked. At least I thought it worked. So did most Americans—at first. And this is my point. Polls taken immediately after the debate showed that George Bush had trounced Geraldine Ferraro—one survey declared Bush the victor by 19 percent.

  Then the press went to work. It harped on a single exchange. Suggesting that Reagan was no tougher on terrorists than Carter had been, Ferraro had compared the 1983 bombing of our embassy in Lebanon with the 1979 taking of hostages in Iran. Replying, Bush had attempted to draw a distinction between the two incidents, beginning his answer, “Let me help you with the difference, Mrs. Ferraro, between Iran and the embassy in Lebanon.” Ferraro had grown indignant, accusing Bush of patronizing her. The television commentators replayed the exchange again and again, describing the vice president’s demeanor toward Ferraro as if he had been a Viking and she a nun. Within an hour the polls began to change. Bush’s margin of victory narrowed. A poll on Night-line showed that Bush had won by only 9 percent. Later polls showed Bush’s margin of victory shrinking still more. By the following morning, the Washington Post was able to report no clear winner.

  As a demonstration of the effect the press has on voters, the incident could hardly have been neater if it had been designed in a laboratory. When they saw the debate for themselves, Americans reached one conclusion. When they saw the debate through the medium of the press, they reached a different conclusion. It was, to use Pete Wilson’s phrase, the goddamdest thing. *

  * * *

  Pondering the relationship between Republicans and the press, I reached two conclusions. The first is that campaign finance reform will never be enacted as long as Republicans can stop it. The second is that even though as I write Senator John McCain is leading in the contest for the Michigan primary, McCain is unlikely to grasp the Republican presidential nomination. Permit me to explain.

  FLAK

  As we have seen, Republ
icans are convinced that the press skews the political contest against them. Consider, for example, John Morgan, the friend who used to work across the hall from me when I was writing speeches for Vice President Bush. John is now a political consultant. Although the GOP has the support of the great mass of ordinary Americans, John believes, the press remains a serious tactical problem. “We’re like a vast army,” John says. “But we have no air coverage because we don’t control the media. The media comes over and sweeps down like dive-bombers, and it scatters us.”

  What flak can Republicans put in the air to combat the media dive-bombers? The answer is simple. Advertising. “If we as Republicans don’t get our message delivered properly through the national media,” Congressman Christopher Cox of California told me, “then we have to make up for that fact with paid advertising.” Republicans believe they have no choice. They must resort to selling themselves the way Coke sells soft drinks or Procter & Gamble sells soap. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich put it this way: “Republicans are on defense for one year and ten-and-a-half months out of every two-year cycle. It’s only when you go to paid advertising in the last six weeks [of campaign season] that Republicans are able to be on offense.”

  There’s just one problem with paid advertising. You have to pay for it. In every election cycle, Republicans thus find themselves in need of a great deal of money. Under the current regime of election laws, they’re able to raise it. But under the reforms now being proposed, they wouldn’t. So? So Republicans block the reforms. There is a second and nobler reason for opposing the reforms than the damage they would do to Republican electoral prospects: As the Supreme Court has held, political money is essential to political speech, so the reforms would pose a direct threat to the First Amendment. Republican officeholders do make this argument. They make it every time they vote to block or water down another campaign finance reform. But even as they’re talking about free speech, it is easy to suspect, they’re thinking about all the money they still need to raise before election day.

  The exception, of course, is presidential candidate Senator John McCain of Arizona. McCain, as everyone knows, is ardent in the cause of campaign finance reform. He has said that “all of us have been corrupted by the process … where big money has bought access which has bought influence.” No doubt McCain believes this assertion. But he cannot adduce any evidence to support it. In study after study, political scientists have found that officeholders vote according to two factors, the views they themselves hold and the views their constituents hold. The sources of their campaign money play no demonstrable role. Perhaps the most famous studies are those that examine the voting patterns of senators and representatives after they announce their intention to retire. No longer in need of campaign money, these officeholders suddenly find themselves in the position of congressional monks, owing allegiance to no one but their maker. Yet none changes his voting patterns. Either the officeholders in these studies go on voting to please special interests for the fun of it, an obviously dubious proposition, or they were never voting to please special interests in the first place. Politicians don’t go looking for contributors to whom they can sell themselves. Contributors go looking for politicians who already hold views they find amenable. Policy comes first. The money follows.

  Since Senator McCain’s home state of Arizona is one of the few places in the country in which the press lacks the usual liberal bias—to this day, for example, the Arizona Republic, once owned by Dan Quayle’s grandfather, Eugene Pulliam, remains moderate to conservative—John McCain might find that he could win elections just as easily after the passage of campaign finance reform as before. Very few other Republicans would fare as well. “I like John,” Pete Wilson said to me about McCain. “But his reform would destroy our party.”

  He will be hard-pressed to win the support of a party in which so many officeholders and activists see him as a threat. I grant that he might prove me wrong. But if he does, study the faces of the delegates to the GOP convention when McCain delivers his acceptance speech. Behind their smiles, many of them will be grinding their teeth.

  Journal entry:

  Today I received a letter from former President Bush.

  I had written him to check my memory of the 1984 vice presidential debate. After making it clear that our memories match—“I think we clearly won that debate… but the spinmeisters went to work”—Bush added a postscript. It describes an incident that had always puzzled me.

  The incident took place the day after the debate. Bush visited the New Jersey docks to shake hands with longshoremen. While there, he said of his encounter with Ferraro that he “kicked a little ass.” The press presented his remark as another instance of Bush’s hopelessly patronizing attitude toward women. It created a furor. Watching the evening news back in Washington, I had been perplexed. The remark sounded so out of character. In public Bush was always as prim in his use of language as the dean of an Episcopal prep school. What had gotten into him?

  “One of the longshoremen,” Bush explained in his letter, “showed his support by holding up a sign. The sign said ‘You Kicked Ass.’ Yes, that patriot followed me all around the dock, his self-written sign proudly displayed whenever a TV camera came into view. As I climbed into my VP limo at the end of the visit to the docks, I did say to him quietly, ‘Yes, we did kick a little ass.’ I had not seen the boom mike held over my shoulder. The national press went crazy—as if none of them had ever heard such a pithy sporting expression before.”

  I should have known. An ambush. By the press.

  Chapter Five

  CONVERTS

  Journal entry:

  Flying back to California after visiting my brother in Seattle, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like. “Don,” I saw myself saying, “I have something important to tell you. After years of wrestling with the issues, I’ve decided to become a Democrat.” My brother responded with a long silence. Then he started laughing.

  That was wrong. My brother wouldn’t see anything funny about it. I tried imagining the scene a different way. “Don,” I saw myself saying this time, “I’ve done something, and I don’t want you to try to talk me out of it. I’ve become a Democrat.”

  My brother responded with the same long silence. Then he got angry. “How could you do that? How could you turn your back on the family?”

  That wasn’t any better. My brother would know that getting angry would only make me stubborn. I tried imagining the scene yet a different way.

  “Don,” I said, “I know this may come as something of a shock to you, but I’ve decided to become a Democrat.” My brother responded with a long silence. Then ...

  It was no use. I couldn’t devise a scene that proved coherent. Me? Become a Democrat? It was literally unimaginable.

  At any given time, political scientists estimate, only about 20 percent of voters belong to a party other than the one in which they grew up. (For the purpose of these statistics, political scientists treat Independents as a party in their own right.) This figure implies that in any given election year—the time when most of those who change their party registration do so—only a tiny proportion of voters, perhaps as little as 3 or 4 percent, turn their backs on the party in which they were raised to join another party instead. Yet tiny as their numbers are, these voters prove crucial to both of the major parties. Now at rough parity—registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans, but fewer Democrats vote, offsetting the Democratic advantage—the Republican and Democratic parties can each achieve the majority status it craves only by winning converts.

  Working on this book, I thought for a moment that I could imagine what it would be like to leave the GOP to join the Democratic Party instead. It would be great. I’d be leaving the uncool for the cool, the dour and straitlaced for the free-spirited, the hard-hearted for the compassionate. Looking into the mirror as I shaved each morning, I’d say to myself, “You see that? That is the face of a man who cares.” Then I recognized
a problem. To keep members of my family from hearing about my switch secondhand, I’d have to tell them about it myself. As my journal entry indicates, I couldn’t imagine doing so. I just couldn’t.

  That made me wonder. If I had been unable to imagine going from the GOP to the Democratic Party, what must it be like to go the other way? From cool to uncool, from free-spirited to dour and straitlaced, from compassionate to hardhearted? Why would anybody do it? Once you found a few who had, could they tell you anything the GOP could learn from?

  I investigated the matter by talking to three converts I happened to know. I had never given their conversion to the Republican Party any thought. Now I saw that each had done something noteworthy, all the more so since each had grown up in an especially Democratic tribe. One was a Jew, one was an African-American, and one was a Catholic.

  HAVE A FULFILLING SABBATH

  As he conducts his radio show, a call-in show that reaches more than a hundred markets, Michael Medved sits at a table, a microphone in front of him, earphones on his head. His eyes remain in constant motion. He glances down at notes and newspaper clippings that lie strewn across the table, left to a computer screen that lists the topics that callers, waiting on hold, want to discuss, then up to a pane of glass, behind which stand his producers, to whom he signals with nods and hand gestures. One of Medved’s legs jitters up and down, as if dispensing opinions for three hours a day represents an insufficient outlet for his energy. I sat in his booth with him for ninety minutes, just half of one of his broadcasts. In that time Medved took up more than a dozen topics.