THE COVERAGE THEY DESERVE
THE COVERAGE THEY DESERVE On the final evening of the Republican national convention in San Diego, just before that business about someone accepting the party’s nomination for the presidency of...
...We have defeated attempts to cut our defense budget irresponsibly...
...And so emblematic of the entire Democratic convention, which promises to match and exceed anything the Republicans even attempted in San Diego by way of stage-managed and deceptive marketing...
...In purely theatrical terms there is no drama at all...
...There is no drama in our convention...
...And with that in mind, Smith admits, “Everything is scripted...
...Will this be a manipulatively “packaged” convention ? la San Diego...
...Geffen expects the album to go double platinum...
...Needless to say, these are not the views of the Democratic party’s most committed and aggressive activists: the convention delegates themselves, who are every bit as “unrepresentative of America” as any Christian-Coalition Republican in San Diego...
...The final document does express “respect for the individual conscience of each American” on abortion, and a wish that the procedure be “more rare...
...A fifth are working politicians: congressmen, senators, governors, state party chairs, and officials of the Democratic National Committee...
...Gay rights...
...1992’s “right” to universal insurance coverage is a right no more...
...Tony P. Hall and William O. Lipinski wanted a platform plank explicitly acknowledging that some party members oppose Roe v. Wade...
...Mighty Morphin Power Rangers...
...the leftward half of American political argument will receive no such support in Chicago...
...Inside his own party, President Clinton now holds all the political cards...
...What Chicago might sound like has been obvious for weeks to anyone who bothered to read the party platform adopted by the Democratic National Committee after a pro forma three-hour hearing August 5. The conservative platform ratified by Republicans in San Diego was a rare spark of ideological life in an otherwise largely idea-vacant convention...
...We would not include ‘Seasons’ unless it were very, very meaningful,” the convention’s executive producer, Gary Smith, insists...
...And the Chicago Democratic convention is therefore determined to ignore them—in the most calculating fashion imaginable...
...As the Republican convention was just getting underway, ABC’s Peter Jennings told the San Diego Union-Tribune that “whenever a political party goes out of its way to restrain, isolate, or box in other voices—and both parties do it—then you almost invariably attract the attention of journalists...
...Their performance was only a frolic...
...Will our news hounds and talking heads maintain this steadfast watchdog role in Chicago, and protect an unsuspecting public from bucketloads of Democratic propaganda...
...The American media have hammered at the GOP for the ideological subterfuge of its convention...
...In other words, today’s Democratic party is the deliberately ambiguous Clinton presidency, nothing more...
...The show’s second-act anthem, “Seasons of Love,” is the Democratic party’s openingnight finale...
...And this performance is anything but a frolic...
...American journalism did a gleeful job of revealing the evasions and contradictions of the Republican convention...
...They have ideas that are sometimes in conflict with majority American opinion...
...The federal budget...
...But “The Vocal Majority,” as the singing senators fashion themselves, are an amateur act...
...He has the Chicago convention locked down tight...
...He has actively betrayed the Democratic party’s liberal soul by signing the most significant piece of social legislation in 30 years: a Republican welfare-reform plan that ends the federal government’s basic entitlement for the poor...
...Pro-life Democrats like Reps...
...The new Democratic platform stands where Clinton stands: wherever necessary, as determined by the polls...
...He has rhetorically betrayed the Democratic party’s liberal soul on questions of federal budgeting...
...And it’s a presidency the platform describes with a dissent-quashing, history-rewriting boldness that should make Haley Barbour green with envy...
...How meaningful...
...Here’s hoping he’s right...
...I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that,” says Gary Smith...
...Those were good, Democratic ideas all along...
...Clever, no...
...Abortion...
...Health care...
...If those problems are not reported, then conservative suspicion of “liberal media bias” will finally be borne out, beyond dispute...
...The trick is to make a series of foregone conclusions “as emotional and provocative”— and risk-free—as possible...
...Republicans...
...Gone is any memory of Clinton’s first tax-hike budget or the 1993 stimulus package...
...They should, if only to make up for the credulous oohing and aahing with which they reported Clinton’s “Man from Hope” routine four years ago in New York...
...But the rest of the platform’s “choice” language makes clear these clauses are just for show...
...But since they lost control of Congress in 1994, a loss that is the president’s fault more than anyone else’s, Democrats must depend for their institutional survival on retaining the executive branch...
...Republican legislation on unfunded mandates, the line-item veto, and welfare reform...
...National security...
...It was yet another RegisandKathie-Lee moment in the convention’s weeklong frenzy to persuade America that, shucks, the GOP isn’t really very political at all...
...THE COVERAGE THEY DESERVE On the final evening of the Republican national convention in San Diego, just before that business about someone accepting the party’s nomination for the presidency of the United States, four distinguished senators shed their suit jackets to harmonize an a cappella barbershop version of “Elvira” in honor of Elizabeth Dole...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Today’s Democratic Party”— the phrase must recur a hundred times in 30-odd pages—offers “the end of the era of big government and a final rejection of the misguided call to leave our citizens to fend for themselves...
...He said it...
...So Clinton has enjoyed the first uncontested Democratic presidential nomination since Lyndon Johnson’s...
...He is shipping the entire professional cast of Broadway’s hit show Rent to Chicago...
...Almost 15 percent of Chicago delegates are teachers-union members...
...They got rolled...
...Democrats oppose them...
...We know pretty much everything there is to know...
...The Democratic party is now for no-new-taxes fiscal balance in seven years, just like Newt—only nicer...
...Democrats claim credit for the incremental insurance reforms that Republicans always supported and that Clinton once swore he’d veto...
...Worse evasions and contradictions will be available for commentary in Chicago...
...The Democratic convention’s centerpiece musical number, by contrast, comes courtesy of Hollywood bigfoot and Clinton crony David Geffen...
...These people are, pardon the expression, liberals...
...They are cartoonishly evil, wanting to “take Big Bird away from 5-year-olds” and “destroy the food stamp and school lunch programs...
...Another fifth belong to the AFL-CIO...
...This meaningful: The morning after the world’s oldest political party advertises Rent’s big tune on network television, David Geffen’s record label will begin selling the first 250,000 original-cast recordings of the show all across the country...
...Don’t ask, don’t tell...
Vol. 1 • September 1996 • No. 49
