Politics as Drama, Complete With TV Player-Coaches

Glorious, superb, thrilling, jaw-dropping, breathtaking . . . thoroughly enjoyable.

--Michael Medved of the New York Post, quoted in an ad for the movie “Alaska.”

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Act 2, Scene 1.

Now you know what they mean when they call it the Windy City.

Democrats assembled in Chicago’s United Center are getting their shot at America through television because the Republicans already got theirs in San Diego. So. . . .

At 7:20 p.m. Monday, veteran CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer delivered a truly disturbing bulletin from the podium at the Democratic National Convention. “You have speakers in the hall, and I don’t think you can hear them that well,” Schieffer observed, staking his reputation on his well-seasoned ears. “Frankly, so far, I don’t think it’s going that well.”

Not going that well? Oh, nohhhhhh!

Curious thing. The preliminary speakers Schieffer alluded to were not deemed worthy to televise by CBS during the 7 to 8 p.m. live coverage that it, ABC and NBC are over-generously granting the convention. So why should he or his network care whether delegates in the hall could or couldn’t hear speakers that CBS understandably wasn’t bothering to carry or whether the convention so far was or wasn’t the smash hit that its partisan impresarios envisioned?

Later, after the first evening of Democratic talks had ended with President Clinton pausing in his whistle-stop tour to cheerfully rally Chicago loyalists live via satellite from Toledo after Christopher Reeve’s somber televised address in the hall, columnist Mark Shields observed on PBS that the presidential cutaway “didn’t work nearly as well as the cutaway to Russell, Kan.,” hometown of GOP candidate Bob Dole, during the Republican convention. Tsk, tsk.

Why should it matter to Shields, in his role as PBS political commentator, how the Democrats’ staged live shot stacked up against the GOP’s staged live shot?

Because . . . this is what it has come down to.

Throughout recent history, we’ve gotten all the important skinny from movie critics, theater critics, music critics, literary critics, architecture critics, culture critics, food critics, television critics, you-name-it critics.

Now, as TV anchors, reporters and commentators mentally twiddle their thumbs while the two major political parties execute their camera-ready stagecraft en route to Nov. 5, comes this new species: journalists who carry the weighty mantle of political convention critic.

Does it play well? Is the audience enthralled? Incredibly, the conventions being labeled show biz are being judged by the standards of show biz by the same people who continually gripe about them being show biz.

“Heart-wrenching yet inspirational,” was NBC News correspondent Jim Miklaszewski’s bottom line Tuesday on the Monday night speeches of Reeve, the actor paralyzed in an equestrian accident, and handgun control activist Sarah Brady and her husband, Jim, wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt against then-President Ronald Reagan.

Reeve and the Bradys were telecast live by ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC and C-SPAN, the usual suspects who also gave opening-night live coverage to a Ronald Reagan video and speeches by former First Lady Nancy Reagan and retired Gen. Colin Powell during the Republican convention.

Was the Democrats’ first evening as “heart-wrenching” and “inspirational” as the GOP opener in San Diego? For that we must wait until Miklaszewski and other critics release their Top 10 lists on election eve.

In any case, his blurb on the Democrats was the equivalent of Siskel and Ebert proclaiming, “Two thumbs way, way up!” You could envision it bannered across an ad for a Democratic National Committee video of the convention. As you could columnist Christopher Matthews’ assessment, delivered on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” of Brady rising from his wheelchair to walk haltingly to the dais with help from his wife: “The guy stands up and walks!” And Matthews is not easy to please, either.

Critics being the nit-picking dandies that they are, inevitably there were mixed reviews. “These sad and poignant stories were supposed to bind us together but left me kind of sad,” Gwen Ifill of NBC News groused about the Brady Moment during the “Today” program’s own traditional morning-after round table of convention critics.

Yet her verdict on Reeve was a flat-out rave: “It absolutely fit. There was an outpouring of emotion.” Added Bryant Gumbel: “There may not have been a dry eye in the house!” (Which is what some critics said about “Courage Under Fire.”) And then this influential blurb from Lisa Myers of NBC News: “The first people on their feet were the liberals.”

It’s a big, crowded convention floor, so credit Myers at least with extraordinary panoramic vision and remarkable knowledge of the political bents of all of the delegates.

And credit gavel-to-gavel CNN with knowing that behind every show there’s a good sidebar on how it was put together, such as the “special demonstration of that massive video wall behind the podium” that it featured Tuesday morning. How do such things work? How does Peter Pan fly on stage? These are important questions that inquiring theatergoers want answered.

It’s becoming ever clearer that, as much as TV newscasters complain about being managed by politicos, in their hearts of hearts they think of themselves as extensions of the very political process they are supposed to be objectively observing.

Recently, for example, a reporter being interviewed for a network TV news story about the conventions was asked what the Democrats and Republicans should do in 2000 to ensure the same level of live coverage their conventions are getting in 1996. “Should they limit the conventions to an hour each night?” he was asked.

The interviewee replied that he didn’t know and didn’t care, that it was not the role of the press to advise political parties how best to stage self-serving media events. Nor is it the media’s role to help them.

Obviously, some in the media disagree. All this week, for example, the newer, worse-than-ever “CBS This Morning” has been hoping to attract viewers by running “exclusives” with the Clintons. On Monday, it managed to brutally coerce First Lady Hillary Clinton into admitting that yes, if we really must know, if we really must demean her like this, that she really cares enormously for the nation’s children. Bullied by CBS News, she just blurted it out, letting the political chips fall where they may.

Then on Tuesday, the CBS News terrorists were at it again, with reporter Jose Diaz-Balart sadistically twisting the arms of Hillary Clinton’s childhood friends in her hometown of Chicago until yes, if he must know, they thought she was just a swell, wonderful, extraordinary person. The first lady looked on, obviously just overwhelmed by this public display of affection she had helped engineer.

Meanwhile, there was her Tuesday night speech to attend to, and some of Hillary Clinton’s self-appointed close advisors in the adversarial media were stroking their jaws about what her strategy should be.

“A little splash of humility, of humor” should be her goal, advised Matthews on “Good Morning America.” Advised Cokie Roberts of ABC News: “Smile a lot. I think that is the key here.”

Should she heed their counsel, some of us were already readying our blurbs to toast the likely outcome: Glorious, superb, thrilling, jaw-dropping, breathtaking . . . thoroughly enjoyable.