Bill Needs a Better Deal in Hollywood : Besides schmooze and cash, the Democrats could use creative video marketing.

At the same time that conservatives are launching their own National Empowerment cable channel, which they call “C-SPAN with attitude,” it is ironic that President Clinton and the Democratic National Committee were holding a fund-raiser Saturday in Creative Artists Agency’s atrium in Beverly Hills. It served to underscore the strange, and so far less-than-productive, relationship between this Administration and Hollywood.

Perhaps a recap of this courtship is in order. On election night last year, I was in Little Rock, Ark., working in Clinton headquarters. Despite rumors that Tom Cruise and Barbra Streisand were nearby in hotels and that U2 was going to play, only six Hollywood faces were actually seen, including three stars: Richard Dreyfuss, Woody Harrelson and David Keith. At the VIP financial party, industry executives Dawn Steel, Peter Guber and Mike Medavoy waited with everyone else to shake the new President-elect’s hand.

While many in the Hollywood community did support Clinton late in the campaign, I had been at meetings and parties in Los Angeles where many booed at the mention of Clinton’s name. In fact, I had five free tickets to hear Clinton make his California primary victory speech, and not even my agent friends would take them off my hands. (The hip thing for male aficionados was to go over to the Boxer campaign and meet women.) But the inauguration galas, of course, you couldn’t move without literally bumping into Jack Nicholson or Goldie Hawn or the producers of their current movies.

OK, I know this is how politics works. But if the Hollywood community is going to get involved in politics, and the Clinton Administration is going to court them, I wish this romance would be a little more productive than the current mutual schmooze-fest. Instead of fund-raisers of $1,000-plus a ticket, why doesn’t Hollywood help the Democratic Party produce an entertaining, interactive “infomercial” that would help explain how Clinton’s policies are making our lives better? Barry Diller giving the Democrats a couple of hours on the QVC Network to sell T-shirts and subscriptions to a newsletter would not only be more populist; it also would raise a lot more money and in a manner that would not smell of trading access to special interests for campaign funds. (The Clinton people are going to look awfully strange as strong proponents of the nation’s information superhighway when the major financial beneficiaries of such a policy are the same folks in Hollywood raising big money for the party.)

Of course, the true irony is that with little help from Hollywood, the Republicans have mastered the use of alternative media to both educate and fund-raise, as evidenced by Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell.

It’s not surprising that Democrats have been slow to catch on. Last year, younger people within the campaign argued for months that Clinton should go on David Letterman’s show and MTV. We were told that the campaign was going after an older demographic market, since young people don’t vote. Then, when Clinton was running third and in trouble, they tried such channels and it worked. I had hoped they would build on that once in office.

If they really want to use their Hollywood connections, David Wilhelm and the Democratic National Committee folks might enlist such talent to help them create an infomercial with MTV-style graphics and Lettermanesque top-10 lists that would help explain to Jill and Joe American how the President’s program can work for them. (Just showing Vice President Al Gore asking Pentagon workers to guess how much cheaper their office supplies are at Staples would be as entertaining as “The Price Is Right” any day.) A home-shopping segment would not only let Democrats sell Clinton saxophones, Hillary cookies and Al Gore charm books; viewers also could Press 1 to donate $5 to the campaign for gays in the military or Press 2 to send a message in support of the health-care plan to their member of Congress, all while Whoopi Goldberg or Robin Williams do comic riffs about what is going on in this country.

I eagerly await the day that Democrats find a smarter, more democratic way to raise funds than just having the President’s name on the call sheet of everyone in Hollywood.