ANTI-DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION: It’s fashionable to bemoan the networks’ lack of gavel-to-gavel coverage of the conventions. Even Peter Jennings (Washington Post, 7/12) said it was “a little sad” that the networks were passing up “a chance to present the democratic process in the purest sense.”
Of course, the modern stage-managed conventions are anything but a democratic process–and the media bear a lot of the blame. In the last few Democratic conventions, anything that resembled democracy–a debate over a pressing issue, a resolution that wasn’t pre-approved–was denounced as “mischief” from “special interests.”
This year is supposed to be different: “Certainly the portents are brighter than they were at the conventions of 1980, 1984 and 1988, when turmoil marred the nomination spectacle,” wrote David Broder (Washington Post, 7/12). Juan Williams, in the same edition, praised Clinton for having “a strong enough hand to control Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown, thereby staging a peaceful, unified convention.”
If the Democratic Convention is nothing but a meaningless spectacle, that’s exactly what many media pundits have been calling for. Let’s hope they don’t start attacking the All-Star Game as overly divisive.
INVISIBLE INTERESTS: We’re hearing a lot about the role of “interests” in the Democratic convention–one Thomas Edsall piece in the Washington Post (7/13) featured “liberal interests,” “various minority interests” and (in a quote from a Clinton delegate) “every weird special interest that could exist on the face of the Earth.” The “interests”–defined by Edsall as “blacks, gays, unions, feminists”–are invariably contrasted to the “middle class.” To present these groups as the opposite of the middle class is sloppy enough (as if most blacks, gays, unionists and feminists weren’t middle class), but to pretend that it is representatives of the middle class that are moving the Democratic Party to the right is downright disingenuous.
With all the talk about “interests,” why is there so little discussion of the honest-to-gosh special interests that have real power in the Democratic Party? Take Clinton’s campaign manager, Mickey Kantor: His law firm represents such tribunes of the middle class as GE, Martin Marietta, United Air Lines, ARCO and Chemical Bank (New York Times, 6/7). Two important fundraisers for Clinton (New York Times, 3/3) are Robert Barry, a longtime lobbyist for GE, and Thomas Boggs, a $1.5 million-a-year lawyer whose firm has represented various corporate interests, including the notorious BCCI. DNC chair Ron Brown is a partner in Boggs’ firm, where Brown has personally represented the Haitian dictatorship of “Baby Doc” Duvalier, as well as the association of foreign auto dealers (Village Voice, 7/14).
The money Clinton runs on didn’t come from the middle class. As William Greider noted in Rolling Stone (4/30), “half or more of Clinton’s funding came from conservative corporate interests”–including Wall Street investors and Washington lobbyists.
Any serious examination of the real interests of the Democratic Party, and particularly the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council which produced both halves of the ticket, will disclose these kind of affiliations. If the way to win is to appeal to the middle class, why is Clinton steering the party so close to the corporate elite?
POLLS APART: In an inordinately nasty attack on Jesse Jackson (“There have always been two Jesse Jacksons–there’s Jesse the radical, who preaches rage and black separatism…. And there’s Jesse the self-promoter, who preaches desegregation and compromise”), Dan Rather (7/13) parroted the DLC line that suburban voters, who he said comprised most of the electorate, are “not in the mood to see much more money spent on the poor.” Yet in a May 11 CBS/New York Times poll, 60 percent of respondents said too little was being spent on problems of the big cities, with only 15 percent saying too much. Sixty-one percent said too little was being spent on improving conditions of blacks, while 10 percent said too much. If this poll was flawed, CBS should retract it; otherwise, journalists might be more skeptical of the DLC line that one can’t appeal to both the middle class and the poor.
PRETZEL LOGIC: The choice of Al Gore as running mate was greeted enthusiastically by most media organs. Most commentators seemed to accept as logical, as R.W. Apple did (New York Times, 7/10), that since “the general-election contest…will involve Mr. Bush, Ross Perot and Mr. Clinton, three moderate-to-conservative candidates…Mr. Clinton felt no need to move to the left.”
A very different logic seems to apply to the Republican Party: The subhead of a recent New York Times Magazine cover story (7/5) read, “Dan Quayle’s war on ‘cultural elites’ is more than just an attempt to toughen up his image. In a three-way race, the vice president’s ability to keep Bush-wary conservatives in line could be decisive.” Could it be that mainstream journalists’ own biases against constituencies of the Democratic left prevent them from seeing that the same logic should apply to the Democrats’ base?
QUAYLE’S TRIUMPH: In a sign of how much Dan Quayle’s recent speeches have influenced the “media elite,” most commentators noted that Al Gore’s wife Tipper’s crusade against rock lyrics signified a respect for “family values.” Family values, apparently, has come to mean blaming family problems on entertainers, and hoping that the government can protect children from these entertainers where parents have failed.
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