Culture Vultures: The GOP Barely Manages
Steyn, Mark
: U L T U R E V U L T U RI by Mark Steyn The GOP Barely Manages If it didn't have bad press, it would settle for none at all. ~ have an announcement to make: Effective ilnmediately, I'm going...
...On the floor of the Los Angeles convention, the lame speeches of Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg were received with an impressively heartless indifference by delegates...
...But this is the only political confab I have attended an}~vhere in the Western world where, on most days, the coffee station in Media Tent Number Two was invariably out of (a) coffee or (b) milk...
...The GOP'S problem isn't that too many reporters want to stampede the party and buttonhole Republicans, but that too few do...
...But the way she put it made me sound like some sort of homosexual agent provocateur, and, by the time they'd pulled me out of the line and satisfied themselves that I wasn't, the last balloons had long since fallen...
...You'd never know from the thousands of different bylines that most of the fellows are covering the convention by sitting in the same tent watching the same cable network...
...Even without being shackled and constrained by the GOP security zealots, the media exist in their own self-imposed prison of the mind, from which the Republicans should be doing all they can to release them...
...So, if you make it a physically exhausting challenge iust to penetrate Media Tent Number Three, the chances are that, once in, the average journalist will be disinclined to venture out and try getting onto the convention floor itself just to get a sense of what, say, the Utah delegation is thinking...
...I just don't like the way it treats me...
...Hey," she told the Secret Service guy as they scanned my distinguishing characteristics, "if he'd wanted to assassinate the governor he could have done it at the Belknap Gounty Lincoln Day 48 0 c t o b e r 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator dinner in New Hampshire when Dubya couldn't keep his hands offhim...
...The only wonder is that the proDem vote isn't unanimous...
...What's going on...
...Dubya's a fine fellow with a solid conservative agenda who'll make a great president...
...Not gourmet coffee, mind you...
...have an announcement to make: Effective ilnmediately, I'm going over to the "liberal mainstream media...
...The accreditations for both conventions--who gels how many passes-- are handled by the congressional press office, a show of scrupulous bipartisanism that would make sense if we had a bipartisan press but which, as things stand, just means the GOP contracts out its media relations to the ultimate Beltway establishment...
...I think this was reflected in the coverage: At Philadelphia, the object seemed to be to make it as difficult as possible for the media to interact with any real live flesh-and-blood Republicans...
...For Democrats, American journalists behave as reliably as the Fleet Street version observed by Hillaire Bel]oc: You cannot hope to bribe or twisf, Thank God, the British journalist But seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there's no occasion to...
...I'm not making that figure up, alas: The ethics bores in American newsrooms are fully committed to diversib, in respect of race, gender, sexual orientation, you name it, but not in respect of political opinion...
...Every little booth in the tent has its own TV set, so it's much easier to get your sense of how things are going on the floor by switching on CNN and seeing what's their sense of how things are going on the floor...
...senator can't get into his own party's convention...
...You could, of course, take one of the convention buses from the hotel, which were relatively swift and efficient, at least until they reached the perimeter, at which point a Secret Service agent would board the vehicle and inspect it, while his colleagues swept the exterior and undercarriage for bombs...
...The center itself was in file center of a sealed area bigger than many congressional districts...
...That way they might at least get a few more pieces like the one Andrew Sullivan wrote a year or so back, about taking a fellow gay along to a gathering of the religious right and being surprised at how nice they all were...
...Just regular coffee...
...A few minutes after we'd talked, the lady from the New York Times came up to me and my assistant and said: "Could any of you point out which one Bob Smith is...
...It's time for the GOP to take back press management of its own convention...
...But you didn't read much of that in all those op-ed columns and network reports on the "GOP's illusion of diversity...
...Republicans, though, are in a different position, and one can only marvel at their willingness to make the situation worse...
...I couldn't get in," he said...
...I said to the officer, making chitchat during yet another dismantling of my laptop...
...Don't get me wrong...
...Now I could understand the Democrats treating the media badly...
...Midway through the convention at a pro-life event in downtown Philadelphia, I bumped into New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith and asked him whether he was enjoying the convention...
...Bush is a very tactile chap, throws his arm round your shoulder, gives you a friendly poke in the ribs, relaxed, at ease, the very opposite of his convention security team...
...A sitting U.S...
...damentalist, homophobic delegates were chafing at having to sit through Dubya's Fiesta Latina, whereas, if you spoke to any of them, as my colleague Wladyslaw Pleszczynski noted last month, you discovered that they were perfectly amiable fellows-and what's more, they mostly enjoyed the non-stop salsa and the guy in the sombrero, or at least recognized the soundness of the strategy...
...Not a decafhazelnut ffappalatte, such as a bigshot columnist would e~cpect to be drinking if he weren't beached in the middle of a sealed MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...Have we all brought in one bomb part apiece and constructed the finished article in the parking lot...
...Tree, the trend towards hermetically sealed news events doesn't just exclude reporters...
...the buses weren't stopped and swept by bomb squads...
...They said I didn't have the right parking permit...
...my hotel was nearer to the Staples Center than the perimeter fence in Philadelphia was to the First Union Center...
...But they do need to meet Republicans, and the party ought to make it as easy for them as possible...
...Even in a national election, Republican control of Congress will rest on a tiny number of mostly obscure House seats where the voters aren't reading the Washington Post and the New York Times...
...Quite so...
...the ancillary events were within easy.reach...
...In Philly, the "convention center" was a converted sports arena equally inconvenient not only to every hotel in the tri-state area but to any of the other convention events...
...the cabs could bring you within a few feet of the front door...
...But that alone doesn't explain why in L.A...
...Is it just for show...
...American journalists don't need to meet Democrats: They are Democrats, and they meet others all the time-- in the newsroom, at the dinner table, in their beds...
...At the outer boundary inspection post, you showed your pass and proceeded through a metal detector...
...N The American Spectator _9 O c t o b e r ~ o o o 49...
...I have no quarrel with the Republican Party on the issues...
...But up in the CNN skybox Judy Woodruff was gushing over the pair in full open-throated Camelot mode...
...It's not much compared to Survivors 50 million, but I wouldn't mind betting most of that 1. 7 million were fellow journalists camped out in the media tent...
...It all depends which side of the fence you look at it from: In Philadelphia, the Republicans thought they'd constructed an elaborate security apparatus to restrict media access, but the reality is that the media have constructed an elaborate security apparatus to restrict Republican access...
...She meant, of course, that Gov...
...Indeed, in many ways the media are more Democrat than the Democrats...
...No taxicab could penetrate the perimeter...
...That may be why in Philadelphia everyone was in agreement that the overwhelmingly white, male, conservative, funOne can only marvel at their willingness to make the situation worse...
...How sick and twisted does a member of the media have to be to vote Republican after being accredited to the Republican Convention...
...Oh, and buy a reliable coffee percolator...
...Ah, the famed expertise of the liberal media...
...Passing through the bottom-of-the-escalator security post on to the top-of-the-escalator security post, my assistant finally snapped...
...Who are those eight percent holdouts...
...What kind of kinky masochists are they...
...area on the edge of town with no taxi stand for miles...
...Now go back and read all those pieces sneering at the bland, phonily inclusive infomercial of the GOP convention and bear in mind that they were written by cranky bastards on deadline who'd been gasping for a shot of caffeine for over an hour...
...I'm not taIking about the relative merits of Philadelphia and Los Angeles as convention cities, or a week ofcheesesteak sandwiches versus restaurants with specials du jour, but the almost insane level of operational roadblocks the working journalist was required to negotiate...
...To get into the convention center itself, you needed another pass and proceeded through another metal detector...
...For some reason, their employers seem to think it worthwhile sending them across the continent and putting them up in hotels to sit in a sealed room watching a station you can get on basic cable anywhere in the country...
...And yet, after a week at the Republican Convention, all I can say is: Who can blaine them...
...But sadly the GOP is so indifferent to its poor press that it doesn't even run its own media relations...
...According to the statistics, 9 z percent of U.S...
...Presumably some of this heavy-handed security is a turf war: If the Philly PD get to pat down your bottom, then the state troopers, the reds, and the Bozos R Us private security firm all want to cop a feel, too...
...That's the point...
...I'm told that during the conventions CNN got a ratings bump pushing them up to L 7 million viewers...
...Convention-wise, the party of big government had a relatively light regulatory touch, whereas the party of small government was a Kafkaesque nightmare...
...God only knows what would happen if you collapsed halfway across: A cell phone is no guarantee 911 would have any way of reaching you in that vast buffer zone...
...Look, I'm the kind ofold-schooI rugged foreign-correspondent type who doesn't mind roughing it: I could handle the fact that the convention portapotties never had any paper towels...
...In fact, the media present the biggest "illusion of diversity" of all...
...Is the first metal detector unreliable...
...But they are following obscure newspapers and radio stations a media-savvy party ought to be attending to...
...The media, in any case, aren't terribly interested in interacting with Republicans, famously preferring to interact mainly with themselves...
...Bob seemed inclined to believe the parking permit story, and pooh-poohed my suggestion that in the new COP there's no amount of parking permits that can get a highly conservative white male senator from the least diverse state in the Union past the gate...
...Dripping sarcasm isn't the best approach with these guys and by tile time they'd finished the intimate body search I'd pretty much missed the keynote address...
...Seeing what the American journalist will do unbribed, the Democrats have no occasion to kiss up to him...
...they had proper inside bathrooms and they didn't run out of coffee...
...They could drop you at the outer fence and you could, if you were fit enough, set off in the blazing sun across the desert of boiling blacktop toward the distant media tent, shimmering in the haze like a Bedouin encampment...
...you only needed two passes instead of half-a-dozen...
...journalists voted for Clinton-Gore...
Vol. 33 • October 2000 • No. 8
