Politics Ain't Beanbag
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television Politics Ain't Beanbag By Reuven Frank In simpler times, before toys became mechanized, then motorized, then computerized, a mother would sew a little sack from a spare...
...To people who said, "You can't do that," I pointed out they do it to tobacco ads on TV It only requires convincing the FCC that TV political advertising endangers the national health...
...After 1952, though, a new element made possible more effective exercises in irrelevance, scurrility and mendacity...
...his TV commercials have ignored policy and gone straight for the throat, demeaning his opponents...
...On Television Politics Ain't Beanbag By Reuven Frank In simpler times, before toys became mechanized, then motorized, then computerized, a mother would sew a little sack from a spare piece of cloth or an old sock, fill it with dried beans, and give it to her children to toss back and forth...
...Nobody gives away that kind of money merely to make a better world...
...The antiRiordan campaign succeeded and left Davis facing Bill Simon Jr., a conservative businessman with no political experience, in a state disgusted with politics and moderate on most social issues...
...Gray Davis, Democrat, for U.S...
...and, not least, there are legions of fundraisers, dinner organizers, event planners...
...Some "retail" politics still goes on...
...We already know that of the Democrats who have thrown their hats into the ring for 2004, Karl Rove thinks former Vermont Governor Howard Dean would be easiest to beat...
...The list goes on...
...The retail politics of Iowa and New Hampshire, however, are part of the Presidential horse race, a miniseries previewing the political comedies, or politcoms, enacted not for the voters of those two small states but for the rest of the country following it all on TV Candidacies will be validated or diminished, frontrunners unseated and new champions crowned...
...The money spent on TV spots during next year's Presidential competition will break the off-year's record...
...You can bet, therefore, that we will hear all the old denunciations and regrets about what is happening to our democracy...
...Blaine...
...He used more than $ 10 million to interfere in the Republican primary, in a successful effort to defeat the candidate he most feared to meet in the general election, Los Angeles Mayor Richard T. Riordan, a moderate with a strong mayoral record...
...Anyone who objects will be reminded that politics ain't beanbag...
...After those contests, the media, to the scorn of the pundits will concentrate on the leaders in the polls...
...This is American politics today, and it costs, and costs, and costs...
...The average citizen will still feel it is not his or her vote that matters but other people's thousands and millions, so why bother...
...Some refused to help their friends when they got into trouble...
...Why has it become so expensive to elect ordinary men and women who will argue forever before deciding even the smallest question...
...they could again...
...they are born to the job...
...Public reaction to this storied event endedBurr's promising career, and openly violent tactics have mostly vanished from the American political scene...
...But no king ever excused his squalid embarrassments with the feeble joke that monarchy ain't beanbag...
...To alienate Riordan from conservative activists he needed to prevail, Davis' spots detailed Los Angeles crime statistics, especially murder...
...Nearer to living memory, the electorate has been subjected to stories about Warren G. Harding's mistress...
...Even now there is astonishment and complaint that the campaign finance reform law has not changed anything...
...The spoken text of the commercial, for which Davis has never apologized, declared, "Leona Helmsley and Dianne Feinstein...
...rumors planted about the sexual adventures of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife...
...In 2002, running for re-election as governor, Davis faced no credible opposition in the Democratic primary...
...Nevertheless, it had a tremendous impact only television could deliver...
...Senate...
...Commercials devised and bankrolled by the Davis campaign depicted Riordan as a Catholic opposed to abortion—a fatal perception among the California electorate— and muddied his position on gun control...
...When the campaign season began, polls showed Riordan leading his Republican opponents by more than 20 points and Davis by almost as much...
...His campaign war chest exceeded $70 million, but polls showed his popularity dipping below 50 per cent...
...It also increased the cost of campaigning exponentially, leaving elected officials with little time to do anything but raise funds for their next campaign...
...Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha...
...Rough-and-tumble hurly-burly in American politics dates back to the duel that took place across the Hudson from Manhattan in 1804, when Vice President Aaron Burr fired two shots into the stomach of his rival, former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who had just edged him out in the New York gubernatorial election...
...The Continental liar from the State of Maine...
...But no one listened...
...His career is a lesson in the use of television in politics...
...Truth for a change...
...Not beanbag indeed...
...Some who are old enough wistfully recall when campaigns began on the Labor Day before Election Day—with the Democrat launching his at a rally in Detroit's Cadillac Square—and people complained that spending two months politicking was too long...
...Hotel queen Helmsley misreported $1 million to the 1RS...
...The rich continue to give bigmoney, and expectareturn:apicture with the winner, a press-barred conference in some tony resort, a round of golf, a well-placed word in an important ear, a phrase quietly inserted in a law...
...Poor Stevenson, an elegant speechmaker who had promised to "talk sense to the American people," had difficulty adjusting to TV's constraints and could not manage to finish before his 30 minutes ran out...
...The same charge against Dukakis would have barely registered as a newspaper ad or even on radio...
...The humorist Finley Peter Dunne evoked this Arcadian era when his character Mr...
...Without the ubiquitous tube, there would be no Gray Davis...
...Pointing to his opponent's unethical business dealings with therailroad industry, Cleveland's side countered: Blaine...
...Meanwhile, the ever-escalating costs of making commercials and airing them has resulted in elected officials becoming beholden to the special interests represented in their campaign treasuries...
...Advisers seek out opponents' vulnerabilities...
...Whichever network had sold him airtime was obliged to cut him off at the 1,800th second, or else it would be required to provide his opponent with free exposure under the widely misunderstood equal time rule...
...He has used his office and political connections to raise campaign funds...
...Before and after the conventions, the media will stick to the horse races—which candidate is ahead, and who has collected the most money so far...
...Like a Dick Tracy comic strip character, he seems—except for occasionally flashing his incisors—incapable of facial expression...
...These are full-time jobs, with plenty of work to go around between elections...
...Then it's on to the raucous formalities of the conventions...
...Their game, called beanbag, conjures up a sweet, wholesome past that may never have existed...
...Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis is still remembered for a single 30second TV commercial that aired once...
...strategists purchase TV time in localities where the stuff being churned out will be most effective...
...Although the terms of the dispute over hard and soft money may be different, it will be as loud and bitter as in the past...
...They are now pointless—merely occasions for free television exposure, circuses of insincerity and disregard...
...A whole culture of specialists and subspecialists grew up practicing various skills demanded by the new form of vote-getting...
...The early face-offs serve as a Daily Racing Form for voters in New York, Ohio, California, and the Super Tuesday states...
...But the voters, sensing that their franchise has been rendered a joke, come to the polls in fewer and fewer numbers...
...The new element was television...
...Feinstein blames her staff for the lawsuit...
...Electoral success hinges on raising enormous amounts of money and manipulating public perception through short, pithy visual dramas...
...Some built extravagant monuments to mark their puny achievements...
...Many serious people take this problem seriously, but no one has suggested what to do about it...
...Accused of race-baiting, the Bush people pulled the spot...
...In San Francisco and the north, they played upon the rivalry between California's two halves...
...Some of the "debaters" had never seen snow before tromping through drifts in New Hampshire and Iowa...
...Should such a move eventually be detected, it would inaugurate a new era in national electoral politics—and establish a new use for the obscenely large sums of money some Presidential candidates, especially incumbents, are able to gather for their second contest...
...Once conventions were noisier than pep rallies...
...But verbal mudslinging has been with us all along...
...My idea angered old friends, yet it would end the fussing over the softness of money...
...Financially, too, politics is far from bean bag...
...So far, there has been no sign of the Bush camp attempting to advance Dean's candidacy...
...Especially on television...
...Others, who would not cheat at cards, stole their rivals' campaign managers and pollsters, and seduced their fat cats...
...pollsters determine what will sway people, and afterward how much they were swayed...
...and a study that showed how much more likely newspapers were to devote front-page coverage to Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower's campaign events than to those of Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson in 1952...
...The answer, again, is television: buying air time, conducting focus groups to identify your opponent's weak points, and producing the commercials that exaggerate and caricature them...
...Think about it: Kings don't need campaign funds because they don't run campaigns...
...Alas, it is apparently an iron law of politics that when it seems things can't get any worse, they get worse...
...With all the millions sloshing around in campaign war chests, interfering in opposition primaries to try to promote the candidate you seem most likely to defeat may soon become standard practice...
...I once proposed banning all TV political ads...
...His commercials worked, but people don't like him...
...But political commercials in those bygone days mostly consisted of candidates' speeches—with running times of up to half an hour...
...Policy activists legitimately dismiss such reporting as "horse race" coverage, because it pays scant attention to issues...
...When the late publicist Tex McCrary purchased network time to show a "round table" featuring an obviously rehearsed candidate Eisenhower with a "representative sample" of equally practiced "average Americans," it was hailed as a breakthrough in Presidential politics...
...the vicious anti-Catholic campaign that dogged Democratic Presidential candidate Al Smith in 1928...
...Some made mistakes and blamed their ministers...
...It went on to flash a mug shot of a convicted murderer named Willie Horton, who raped a woman and stabbed her husband after skipping out on a 48-hour furlough...
...Candidates were actually selected on the floor, party platforms were heatedly and sincerely debated, and the country paid attention...
...Some chased after women and maintained mistresses...
...Feinstein wants to be a Senator...
...What proof is there that Super Tuesday produces greater executives than heredity...
...In the end Davis beat the Republican by a narrow margin...
...If Riordan won the Republican nomination, he threatened to attract votes from the state's many independents and some Democrats...
...Presidents and Congresses got elected before there was television...
...During the 18 84 Presidential campaign Grover Cleveland faced taunts about a child he allegedly fathered out of wedlock: Ma, ma, where's my pa...
...More than once audiences missed the point of his oration when he ran long, and the money spent by the party was wasted...
...Both Presidents Bush, pallid figures by themselves, owed their victories to brilliant manipulators, Atwater for the elder, Karl Rove for his son...
...Even last November's off-year Congressional and gubernatorial campaigns seemed to go on ad nauseam, and they cost more than it would take to permanently eradicate diseases like malaria and dengue...
...The 1988 campaign between Vice President George H.W...
...Feinstein misreported $8 million to the Fair Political Practices Commission...
...Small wonder that one public survey after another shows the citizenry's interest in politics waning, with the young especially turned off...
...When as state controller in 1992 Davis challenged San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein for the Democratic nomination for U. S. S enator, his most notorious commercial showed a photograph ofMrs...
...producers exploit those weaknesses, by exaggeration or falsehood, in spots...
...Davis spent more on the Republican primary than the two leading GOP candidates combined...
...Since then, television has become an increasingly effective vehicle for nasty politics...
...By contrast, November 2, 2004 will conclude two whole years of campaigning, raising money, and, for the party out of power, candidates' so-called debates...
...Moreover, politicians, at the state and local levels elsewhere, whatever the offices they might be pursuing, don't have to like Davis to take his lesson to heart...
...Despite a nearly complete lack of what we currently call charisma, Davis has been a California political figure for decades...
...In the less than four decades it took for television political advertising to morph from half-hour policy speeches to 30-second attack commercials, the nature of American politics changed...
...Helmsley blames her servants for the felony...
...That may not guarantee greatness every time, but do elections...
...No words were required to identify the perpetrator as a black man...
...Fewer than half of the registered voters will go to the polls, which editorial writers will deplore...
...James G. Blaine...
...True, history shows that some kings lied about why they waged expensive wars...
...The phrase became a favorite refrain of two alumni of Boston's Democratic machine, President John F. Kennedy and House Speaker Tip O'Neill, and it has always been true...
...Of course, television figured in the 1952 White House contest too...
...The commercial was paid for by a vaguely identified ad hoc group—another useful tool under current rules governing TV advertising...
...Could Davis' meddling tactics prove to be an example...
...Helmsley is in jail...
...California is a very strange place;ridiculedandenvied in the other 49 states, it often foreshadows their behavior...
...Dooley observed that "politics ain't beanbag...
...Some kings lost their marbles...
...And no king ever owed his job to sound bites, photo ops or 30-second attack commercials...
...So I have another idea: Let's bring back monarchy...
...Feinstein next to a picture of Leona Helmsley, the New York real estate mogul who was in prison at the time for tax fraud...
...Conceived under the tutelage of Bush's campaign manager, the late, renowned Lee Atwater, it suggested Dukakis was responsible for a state prison furlough program—although that happened to be instituted by his Republican predecessor...
...Particularly in preparation for the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, candidates actually meet voters one on one...
...Another master choreographer of public opinion was a central player in Californias's Politics of the Absurd festival out West, recalled Governor Gray Davis...
Vol. 86 • September 2003 • No. 5
