Treading High and Low Road of Politics

If only America were more like Cicely, Alaska, the fictional, small-town setting for “Northern Exposure,” the CBS series that creates grand, witty entertainment by portraying complex issues in miniature form, without trivializing them.

Cicely is a place where Charles Kuralt would stop. In a recent election there, folksy Holling Vincoeur failed by eight votes to retain his job as mayor, losing to another long-term Cicelian he had unknowingly offended five years earlier by ignoring her request for a stop sign to slow down lumber trucks rounding a curve on her 12,000-acre spread.

There were some hard feelings during the campaign, as Holling tried to swing votes away from Edna Hancock by serving free beer at his tavern, and a candidates’ debate turned out to be pretty much of a bust.

Along the way, however, Cicelians who hadn’t seen eye to eye somehow came together, guileless Ed Chigliak learned about voting and eloquent radio deejay Chris Stevens--a parole-jumping felon who effortlessly quotes Whitman, Jefferson and Lincoln--wistfully philosophized about the wonder of free and peaceful elections.

In this unlikely hamlet set in the rugged tall timber of the Northwest, democracy had worked. And afterward, the defeated Holling poured a friendly drink for the new mayor, and everything seemed about back to normal.

Cicely, whose gentle ironies and basic truths inevitably triumph over bigness and so-called “progress” at 10 p.m. Mondays, is where you might like to live.

America is where you do live.

The real democracy--”It’s not pretty,” host-managing editor Bill Moyers forewarns viewers--surfaces in the new PBS series “Listening to America,” a weekly status report on the nation that begins Tuesday (at 10 p.m. on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, at 9 p.m. on KVCR Channel 24) with an hour titled “Who Owns Our Government?” Merely posing the question hints at the grimness of the answer.

The same election-year ideals-vs.-reality theme underpins an April 15 “Frontline” hour, “The Betrayal of Democracy,” in which journalist William Greider explores “the deepening divide between the governed and the governing.”

Some of those aspiring to govern surfaced on PBS last week in a special edition of that bravura little series “The 90’s,” whose behind-the-scenes glimpse of electioneering in the Chicago area between Super Tuesday and the March 17 Illinois primary acutely captured the tone and rhythms of the campaign.

The big winners in Illinois were Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and low-budget Democratic senatorial candidate Carol Moseley Braun, whose shocking upset of incumbent Democratic Sen. Alan Dixon was his first election defeat in 42 years of politics. At a rally, an elderly Braun supporter gave homespun motherly advice to the hard-campaigning grass-roots candidate: “Keep your feet elevated at night.”

It’s government ethics that need elevating, according to the depressing scenario unfurled like a tattered, unraveling Old Glory by Tuesday’s “Listening to America” segment, produced by Martin Koughan. It traces the sources of public discontent with career politicians, the very frustrations reflected in outsider Braun’s victory over insider Dixon and in a new poll from the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press showing that 66% of Americans are dissatisfied with all of the presidential candidates.

Politicians inevitably seek easy scapegoats. When talk-show host Phil Donahue last week pressed Democratic front-runner Clinton on questions about his character in front of a national TV audience, Clinton shot back: “You are responsible for the cynicism in this country!”

Hardly. “Who Owns Our Government?” joins others in arguing that it is the political Establishment--mainly the White House and Congress--that creates and nourishes the cynicism. Virtually equating political contributions with bribes, the program explains how these strings-attached gifts to key congressional committee members directly led to the savings and loan disaster that may end up costing taxpayers $600 billion.

The debacle was well covered in a 1991 “Frontline” investigation that, just like Tuesday’s program, gave us President Ronald Reagan (“All in all, I think we hit the jackpot”) euphorically signing deregulation legislation in 1982 that preceded the savings and loan industry’s self-destruction.

“Who Owns Our Government?” goes even further, however, in closely pairing the unregulated growth of S&Ls; with political fund-raising on the part of Republicans and Democrats. At the same time Senate and congressional committees were debating deregulation in the early 1980s, we’re told by producer Koughan, money from the S&L; industry was pouring into members of those committees. Guess what? They backed deregulation. And in a “pact of silence purchased by campaign contributions,” Koughan charges, both parties agreed not to make S&Ls; an election issue in 1988. They had too many hidden skeletons.

Declares Michael Waldman of the watchdog group Congress Watch: “As far as S&Ls; were concerned, there weren’t two parties. There was one party--the fund-raising party.”

Meanwhile, “Who Owns Our Government?” goes on to explain how a loophole in the campaign finance law allows huge cash contributions--such as the minimum $100,000 payments to George Bush’s 1988 campaign by the 249 members of his elite “Team 100”--that undermine public financing of presidential campaigns. Called Bush’s “ruling class” by Common Cause president Fred Wertheimer, the 249 are surely not political philanthropists. Six went on to receive ambassadorial nominations, and it’s safe to assume the rest also got favors for their money.

Finally, Tuesday’s program also claims that critically needed health care reform is being undermined by special-interest money from the $700-billion health care industry. As the nation’s health care crisis grows, Koughan says, “the Congress mostly talks, the Administration tinkers and the lobbyists hover.”

The message is no gentler on the next two editions of “Listening to America.” They follow the research of two Philadelphia Inquirer reporters who tackle the most-asked question of the election year: “America: What Went Wrong?”

We may still be asking that question after the November elections.

In tiny, make-believe Cicely, what went wrong was dwarfed by what went right. With 87% of the electorate taking part, the process of voting became an exhilarating end in itself, a renewal and reaffirmation of values regardless of the outcome.

Heady with egalitarian fervor, Chris Stevens left his radio studio to step outside and fill his lungs with “the deep air of democracy.” The scene was meant to be off the wall and funny, and it was. Yet at a time when the deep air of cynicism is polluting and choking America, you wanted to be there with him.