The Campaign Spectator / Game Show Politics
Gold, Victor
THE CAMPAIGN SPECTATOR GAME SHOW POLITICS IOWA, OR THE SMOKE-FILLED ROOM? The Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary—they're part of a much better way . . . —Headline and excerpt, New York...
...By the time he arrived at the Democratic national convention—having passed through, in addition to the primaries, several smoke-filled rooms—he had been fairly well dissected, his positions drawn out on foreign and domestic policy, as well as separation of church and state...
...That's it, a game show format...
...Wheel of Crisis...
...Only Spring of this presidential election year and the games have grown tiresome...
...The candidate, to Rather's vexation, refused to play by network rules...
...Bush, Mr...
...True, the public didn't know all there was to know about his sex life or his study habits in college...
...Frankly, I wasn't much of a Dewey admirer until read that line in Richard Norton Smith's biography of the man...
...Michigan, the ultimate in political game show states, where, in order to Beat the Clock in the competition for national media coverage, the start of the 1988 presidential delegate process was advanced to August 1986—two full years before the national convention...
...How would you handle it, Mr...
...Consider: in late spring 1987—give or take a Nielsen survey—it occurred to one of the resident hypemeisters at ABC television that the presidential debate had pretty much run its course as an entertainment format...
...Better still, a nuclear eye-blinker between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...a fading political discipline in the 1940s, and an all-but-lost political discipline in the 1980s...
...Let the Times choose Iowa...
...Kennedy won them all...
...Dukakis, Mr...
...He was the consummate "modern" Republican, an Eastern Establishment nemesis to conservatives who, after winning his party's nomination and losing the election to Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, managed to do it again by somehow losing to Harry Truman in 1948...
...I'll take the smoke-filled room...
...That a television network would advance such a format isn't surprising...
...Dewey sneered, as only Tom Dewey could sneer...
...But the worst is yet to come...
...Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, CBS's Dan Rather tried to engage George Bush in a game of Jeopardy...
...Why not South Dakota...
...How arrogant can a working politician—even a governor of New York—get...
...Find the candidate who can slip his presidential aspirations past the Scylla of Ames—then, two weeks later, the Charybdis of Concord—and you may have a winner...
...Simply by changing the way their state chooses its convention delegates, from a party function to a TV game show—Kingmakers for a Day—they can experience the ego-gratification that comes with being asked to shake hands across a breakfast table, not simply with one but with all their party's presidential candidates...
...Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...Gephardt...
...Why should New Hampshire and Iowa have a monopoly on the political tourist trade...
...It was at the Republican national convention in Chicago four years later that Everett Dirksen, booed by Eisenhower supporters during a credentials fight, leaned into the microphone, then pointed directly at Dewey, who was orchestrating the Eisenhower campaign, and said (no, intoned: Everett Dirksen never merely said anything): "We followed you before and you took us down the path to defeat...
...Maybe a hostage crunch...
...Something like, say, a game...
...The game...
...Clare Boothe Luce once called him "this little chap who looks like the bridegroom on the wedding cake...
...Do not take us down that path again...
...Let's bring all the candidates for President into a studio, live and on-camera, then throw a hypothetical foreign policy crisis on the table...
...The Upper Michigan peninsula...
...He failed...
...And yet . . . yet . . . give the arrogant Eastern Establishment sonofabitch his due: he knew how to say no to a man with a camera...
...Translated: in Iowa, a candidate who promises to keep farm prices up, to hell with the consumer...
...provided, of course, he has the vision to navigate his campaign past the reefs of Super Tuesday in the South, then the shoals of Oregon, Ohio, New Jersey, California . . . by Victor Gold When John F. Kennedy ran for President twenty-eight years ago (yes, Arthur, it really has been that long), there were little more than a dozen primaries...
...Why not...
...One does not shake hands across a breakfast table...
...Not necessarily a leader, as that term was defined in the bad old smoke-filled days, but a winner...
...A "much better way...
...Good God...
...in New Hampshire, a candidate committed to keep food prices down, to hell with the producer...
...What has happened, you see, is that since that campaign, quadrennial-by-quadrennial, the small-gauge politicians of the country—those who run state and local party affairs—have discovered that they, too, can attract the cameras...
...Dewey: there was the trim mustache, the tight smile, the prim, stuffy manner...
...ABC still hasn't given up on producing the Wheel of Crisis...
...But 1960 was the seminal campaign of the television era, and the practitioners of media-event politics were just learning the game...
...The Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary—they're part of a much better way . . . —Headline and excerpt, New York Times editorial, January 21, 1988 4,0 ne does not shake hands across a breakfast table," said Thomas E. Dewey, thumbing down a pushy cameraman's request that he stage a photo op with his running mate during the 1944 presidential campaign...
...Now, in prime-time...
...He was the only man alive, said one critic, who could strut while sitting down...
...You have thirty seconds...
...Something new was needed...
...Ask the caucus-goers of Iowa or the primary-voters of New Hampshire what they're looking for in a President...
...Tell the American people (at least, that portion not watching a colorized Bogart movie on cable) exactly what you, as President, would do...
...they'll say, a leader-with-guts...
...52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988...
...A h, leadership, second only to vision as the political nonsense word of the 1988 presidential campaign...
...though one way to measure the trivialization of our presidential selection process, from the smoke-filled room to the hair-blown studio, is to imagine what might have happened to a radio or TV executive who suggested it to Thomas E. Dewey (or Dwight Eisenhower, or John F Kennedy, or Richard Nixon...
...A little cayenne to flavor the dry meatloaf of presidential campaign coverage...
...Dole, Mr...
...all the while rapping euphonies on the need for leadership in a troubled time...
...But this is 1988, the era of Iowa and New Hampshire, when American presidential candidates will not only shake hands but, if asked, soft-shoe across breakfast tables to accommodate the cameras...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
