Watching the Election : Politics Always Acts the Part

In my earlier days as a reporter, I spent a fair while covering politics. I drove the length and breadth of Nebraska following Estes Kefauver and Robert Kerr through a Democratic presidential primary. In Illinois, I looked on as Scott Lucas, then the Senate majority leader, fought a losing battle against the silver-tongued Everett McKinley Dirksen.

I watched John F. Kennedy spend a whirlwind weekend in Orange County a few months before the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in 1960. John Bryson got a wonderful picture of him rather awkwardly kissing a baby that had been thrust at him. Late that night, sitting in a rocker at the Disneyland Hotel, his back paining him severely, Kennedy said to his local political adviser, Joe Cerrell, “Tell me it’s all worth it, Joe.”

A few years later I followed Harold Wilson, about to be England’s prime minister, around his constituency near Birmingham on British election day. (I applauded some of the differences: a limited four-week campaign; no paid television advertising possible but free equal time to the major parties.)

Politics is living theater. In the days before television took over so completely, the motorcades, the train rides, the fatigue and the Speech (delivered in an ever-hoarser voice) were even better street drama than now.

You’d think Hollywood would have made even more of the dramatic potential of politics. But the movies, and television, live by consensus. They entertain by the consent of the entertained, and simple wisdom says that the fewer toes you step on, the safer you are. That’s why the major Vietnam films came after the withdrawal, when a national consensus had formed. And that’s why the best of the few political movies of the past have been what you might call party-blind.

You could hazard a guess that Spencer Tracy in “The Last Hurrah” had to be a Democrat, since most of the big city political bosses of whom he was an exemplar tended to be Democrats. You might guess that James Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” was an idealistic young Republican who wouldn’t stay captive of the fat cats who’d engineered his candidacy.

But they could have been Whig and Tory for all the brand identification we were given. It was the process, not the party that was at issue in both cases, and it was safer that way.

The best and the most accurate of all the modern political films is still, I think, Michael Ritchie’s “The Candidate.” Here again, I don’t remember that it was possible to say whether Robert Redford was Republican or Democrat, an earlier-day Gary Hart or Dan Quayle.

He was young and attractive and with each passing day more a puppet in the hands of political advisers who lived by demographics, calculated evasions and dissimulation. The image of Redford, the dazed but now-victorious candidate, sitting in the limo and reciting a parody of the Speech (“You shall not pit black against old. . .”) is as devastating to remember as it was to see. The candidate could no longer remember what he believed and had no idea what he would do in office.

There is much that will need to be said about this election, whoever wins today: The distorting, deforming sums needed to campaign for any office and for or against any issue; the tyrannies of the photo opportunities and sound bites, those bright, empty snippets of words; the profound cynicism about the process and the electorate--all cry for attention beyond the last hurrah.

Books will be written, but whether Election ’88 will be used as the stuff of visual drama (the year blurred, the candidates renamed) is a question to which the answer is not encouraging.

Maybe Ritchie should do “The Candidate II” (where are Roman numerals when you really need them?), although most of the perils of modern politics were noted in the original film. They are just larger and more perilous now, like the unkillable aliens in a science fiction thriller--but with no good scientist hiding in a cave and saying, “There’s only one hope, but it . . . just . . . might . . . work.”)

Idealism has become an item of nostalgia. You remember Stewart collapsing into a basket of telegrams on the House floor and realize that present filibusters are about abortion, aid to the Contras and other divisive, partisan issues.

There seems to be a shortage of the vivid rascals who ran the big cities, a mixed loss since the bosses did keep politics vigorous at the local level, and they created their power by serving the people, whatever the cost-plus basis was.

I view this election day with no great enthusiasm whatever. But, as it is with all major drama, I can’t wait to see how it comes out, and whether there is a surprise at the last curtain in the best tradition of drama.