Shams Foreign and Domestic: Politics as Soap Opera in Age of Shrinking ‘Thought’ : Television: When players learn to face the camera and pose like Lincoln, form becomes substance and Dan Quayle can be vice president.

Quivering with distaste for their own politicians, Americans are taking a new look at the denizens of Westminster and marveling at their antic procedures. This education is being provided by the videotaped sessions of the House of Commons, portions of which have been broadcast since November every Sunday on C-SPAN, a cable TV network that specializes in public affairs.

At first C-SPAN provided only on a random basis slices of “Question Time” from the Tuesday and Thursday bouts in the Commons, but by March the network’s Kristin Wennberg reports that it had become “one of our most popular programs. People called in saying they loved it, so we gave it regular air time. Our viewers find it very entertaining, because it’s so different from the way senators and congressmen behave.”

So Sundays, at 9 p.m. and then at midnight, the American people tune in to “Westminster.” Wennberg suggests respectfully that these viewers are “interested in government and issues.”

I doubt this. Since many of the questions in these interrogatory sessions are invoked only by number, the actual subject matter is incomprehensible to Americans. What they enjoy is the drama. Politicians here are currently enduring a particularly vigorous spasm of public loathing for their cowardice and venality, but also for their impenetrable pomposity. “Question Time” viewers were stunned, then delighted to see Margaret Thatcher, treated here with almost religious veneration by the White House and the press, being splattered with the brusque pleasantries traditional to the Commons.

In American political ritual there is no such thing as “Question Time” where the President can be grilled by members of Congress. So the public, with no standards of comparison, takes the form for the substance and supposes that because Thatcher is being howled at by Laborites only a cubit or two from her nose, she is somehow thereby being subjected to democratic restraints.

(In California, state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara)--inspired by the British model--has proposed a ballot measure to require California governors to meet three times yearly with the state Senate to answer lawmakers questions.)

But it doesn’t matter how vigorously these Laborites howl or how discomfited Thatcher may appear. The British constitution vests Thatcher--and any other prime minister--with authoritarian powers that are the envy of any President.

Unconscious of these realities, the deluded American viewers of “Westminster” compare this television-induced misunderstanding of British democracy with C-SPAN’s rendition of Congress, which is similarly misleading.

TV coverage of the Senate and House of Representatives is governed by a formal dramatic etiquette far more exacting than that deployed in Japanese No plays. The camera may only show a speaker on the rostrum and only from one angle. The audience is never shown, for the simple reason that the senator thundering his outrage is probably speaking to an empty chamber or one decorated by a couple of sleeping colleagues. Most politicians usually confine their public oratory in the chamber to a few perfunctory remarks and place a more ample oration in the Congressional Record, which is then dispatched to the voters.

The American equivalent of “Question Time” is the presidential press conference, where the President presumptively receives a merciless pummeling from the press corps. But again television conspires to present as high democratic exertion something that is actually a charade.

Only Richard M. Nixon, sweating with shame and pallid with the awareness of his own deceptions, was actually discomfited by a press conference. Every other American President from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George Bush has had no serious problems with them, even Ronald Reagan who ran consistently high scores on the Alzheimer’s graph. The sessions are in fact as ritualistic as “Question Time” and with essentially one real purpose: They are the venue in which TV networks audition new talent.

Suppose you are Randall Rakejaw, ambitious political correspondent of, say, the Des Moines Register. In the press conference you rise to your feet, finally attract the President’s attention and then ask him . . . . But it doesn’t matter what you ask him. What matters, so far as the watching TV network moguls are concerned, is how you ask him--with just the right mixture of deference and lusty bravado, like Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Once upon a time Americans believed that politics was a matter of secret deals hatched in smoke-filled rooms. They came to the conclusion that what was needed was the healthy glare of sunlight and spotlights exposing the deals. Some states have “sunshine laws,” decreeing that all official business involving any gathering of politicians must take place in public.

This yearning for democracy had two consequences. Public politics became soap opera, as politicians learned to speak toward the camera and look like Abraham Lincoln. Meanwhile back-room politics turned into telephone politics or was handled by lawyer intermediaries and thus got more crooked and more expensive than ever.

There are now three levels of politics in America: the ritual of congressional politics; the presidential press conference, and the campaign, when politicians buy television time in which to vilify their opponents. People affect to dislike this and talk wistfully of some time in the distant past when “issues” were discussed. But they know well that because of negative TV advertising there are now only two issues--taxes and the death penalty (abortion having begun to disappear as an issue when Reagan-Bush yuppies realized that they might actually lose the right to choice).

Because of the soaring cost of TV political commercials, the language of American political life has become correspondingly compacted. Prof. Dan Hallin of UC San Diego recently reported that 20 years ago the average political “thought”--stated position, pledge to the American people--took 43.1 seconds for a politician to articulate publicly. By 1988 it took 8.9 seconds. By the year 2000 we’ll be down to a 1-second blurt. By way of contrast, Hallin should make some recordings at the San Diego Zoo. A Cicero in every cage.

Americans are realistic about this degradation of political life and by way of maintaining their sanity now dwell simultaneously on two levels: reality and soap opera. Politics is confined entirely to the second category, which is why many Americans managed to vote for a President who chose Dan Quayle as his running mate, a man generally recognized as being in all known ways unfit to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

The argument for Quayle presented by Bush was entirely frank: His campaign needed a young, male lead. It was a matter of proper balance in casting. On this level Americans readily understood the point. In terms of soap opera it made sense.

Democrats tried to fight back by saying that Bush might keel over and Quayle end up in the White House, with unthinkable consequences. But not too many people were bothered. Ushered on as a soap-opera character, Quayle had no substantive reality beyond that category.

A prime function of royalty is to provide a decent bit of ritual for the populace while the lawyers and crooked politicians push along with their deals. The seamier life gets in Thatcher’s Britain, the more sharply upward soar the ratings of the Queen. This side of the Atlantic, the soaps play the royalty role.

So as politicians here ponder how to reverse their low station in public esteem, they should mark the success of C-SPAN’s “Westminster,” whistle up a couple of good directors and reconstruct congressional TV coverage as an epic, action-packed struggle for justice.

Of course it would all be a sham, just as “Westminster” is a sham. But at least people, fully cognizant of the sham, would have the comfort of improved soap-opera politics as they go about the arduous business of daily life.