Is the GOP Getting the Last Laugh?

Many in the black-tie industry crowd inside the Pasadena Civic Auditorium greeted the mean-spirited political punch lines with snickers, cackles and guffaws.

The cameras occasionally caught them rocking and rolling in their tuxes and evening dresses. They applauded and they cheered. They wheezed and they roared, some of them pitching forward in their plush seats, some even holding their sides. A rollicking time was had by most at the expense of a familiar object of derision.

But who’s laughing now?

The Republican Party could not have hoped for a better Emmy Awards telecast than Sunday night’s harangue against the nation’s most celebrated “Murphy Brown” critic, Vice President Dan Quayle. And to a lesser extent, against President Bush.

Bush and Quayle could not have created a more advantageous scenario themselves. Republican strategists who watched the Emmys must have been wading in their drool just contemplating the ways they’d be able to exploit this sorry spectacle that diverted attention from the nation’s real problems by making the President and vice president seem like underdogs at the mercy of the powerful television establishment.

“Boy, Quayle is just getting stomped tonight!” cracked co-host Dennis Miller to huge laughter.

So was television, ironically. While smacking around the vice president, the telecast often left the impression that this was a business that did not care much for itself either. Presenter Roseanne Arnold came on stage chewing gum. Craig T. Nelson of ABC’s “Coach” had to take gum out of his mouth to accept the Emmy as best actor in a comedy. Miller said, in effect, that he was bored. Comic Rosie O’Donnell delivered a mostly TV-bashing monologue. And as the marathon was winding down, presenter Garry Shandling jokingly ordered his limo.

There was, in short, a general lack of enthusiasm. Were these people forced to be on the telecast against their will?

Quayle, however, was hit even harder.

The producers chose to illustrate outgoing Johnny Carson’s Emmy-winning “Tonight Show” with a clip of Robin Williams commenting that Quayle was “a taco short of a combination plate.” Comic Richard Lewis said that if Clinton lost, “I’d run away,” and he gave his version of Quayle on foreign affairs: “Does Sweden have a king or a maitre d’?” Miller bracketed the telecast with his own Quayle mocking. Candice Bergen got in her digs. There were the customary “potatoe” jokes. And so it went.

* You’d think that there would have been at least a few Bush-Quayle defenders among Sunday’s parading performers and other creative types. If so, they were a silent minority.

As a result, the evening’s fusillade of Quayle gags--against a single, token Bill Clinton joke--may have affirmed to the masses just what the GOP and the Bush-Quayle ticket have been charging and what many in the entertainment industry have sought to dispel:

Hollywood is a liberal--code for extremist --monolith. This monolith is biased against the Republicans and, parenthetically, biased against the so-called traditional values that many Americans supposedly espouse and which the GOP has made the 1,000-watt centerpiece of its campaign to reelect Bush.

By evening’s end, Hollywood had helped the GOP make its case against the industry--in prime time. On Monday it was Quayle’s turn to stomp with the cameras rolling, as he accused Hollywood of distorting his “family values” message during the telecast. “Hollywood doesn’t like our beliefs,” he said.

The political consequences of this, if any, remain to be seen. With the economy apparently looming largest in the minds of most voters, the Bush-Quayle ticket isn’t about to win this election merely by running against Hollywood and attacking that amorphous, faceless, ill-defined, shadowy enemy known as the “cultural elite.”

*

Yet an estimated 29.5 million Americans watched at least a portion of the Emmys Sunday night, and there’s no telling whether among them there were a few hundred thousand voters who will carry negative Emmy memories with them into their polling places in November, and who will make a difference in a close race.

How must it have seemed to viewers, from sea to shining sea, watching a 3-hour, 32-minute Fox telecast peppered with ridicule of the GOP ticket? How many viewers were repelled by this battering punishment of Quayle for his politically driven criticism of Murphy for giving birth out of wedlock? Even among those opposing Quayle’s own Murphyphobic speeches, how many found the Emmys more than just a little bit unfair?

You had to wonder what the response would have been, from Hollywood itself, were it the Clinton-Gore ticket getting beaten up on a national telecast.

It was “Murphy Brown” creator Diane English who may have hit lowest Sunday. “As Murphy Brown herself said: ‘I couldn’t possibly do a worse job raising my kid alone than the Reagans did with theirs.’ ”

You wished her words were on the end of a yo-yo she would have yanked back, that after thanking advertisers for resisting Quayle and remaining loyal to “Murphy Brown” she would have acquiesced and left the rest of the rebuttal to Murphy herself when the CBS series returns Sept. 21 for its new season.

Because former President Ronald Reagan spoke prominently at last month’s Republican convention that sanctimoniously demanded allegiance to its own narrow concept of “family values,” his own family’s storied dysfunction has at least marginal validity as a political topic.

But knock the Reagans at the end of an Emmy acceptance speech? What was this, the Democratic National Convention II?

Commenting on the telecast Monday, ABC News correspondent Jeff Greenfield raised the specter of the GOP “demanding equal time in prime time.” Well, perhaps not. At the very least, though, viewers should demand less partisan politics from an event whose stated purpose is to celebrate television, not favor one party’s candidates over another’s.