2 Days at Political Circus With PBS

“Vote for Me: Politics in America” is highly relevant without mentioning Nov. 5.

Airing on PBS in two parts tonight and Tuesday, it’s a near landslide of an election special, a four-hour timeless primer as persuasive and seductive as an artful campaign pitch. Credit filmmakers Louis Alvarez, Andrews Kolker and Paul Stekler and the political culture they capture so perceptively and entertainingly.

Quips a chatty political leader in Oklahoma: “Politics is show business for ugly people.” Is there a more deserving topic in the U.S. than politics, or a fatter, uglier target?

While a whopper of a show as far as it goes, “Vote for Me” doesn’t directly address the fundamental moral and ethical subtext of U.S. politics, the twisted values underlying the hypocrisy, deception and double standards that drive candidacies in all parties at all levels, nourishing scorn and apathy among the masses whom the system should serve and energize.

Meanwhile, meet the kazoos of campaigning and the clowns, the baby kissers, pig kissers and butt kissers, and the vote-seeking automatons pumping hands at plant gates. In Providence, R.I., we see the same handshake-by-handshake “retail politics” so skillfully utilized in 1996 by President Clinton and First Lady wannabe Elizabeth Dole. Only the practitioner here is five-term Mayor Buddy Cianci, who, someone says, “would attend the opening of an envelope.”

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Watch how he loves working the crowds leading to his reelection: “Hello.” “How are ya?” “Thank you.” “Hey, good to see ya.” A constituent tells Cianci he wants a tree and sidewalk replaced. “Take care of that,” the mayor orders a young aide who comes forward with a notebook.

The things you have to do to win. . . . In tiny Johnston, R.I., we’re told, six-term Mayor Ralph aRusso had an unflattering picture taken of a foe, then ran it in an ad above the caption: “Is this man a member of the Mafia?” The resourceful aRusso added the lower case “a” to his name 20 years ago to ensure his place at the top of the ballot. But two can toot that tune, for one of the opponents aRusso faced in his latest reelection bid was Mario aaRussillo.

Now to the bold-faced upper case of campaigns otherwise known as television, not only costly political ads (“Vote for Me” omits the unsightly underbelly of fund-raising), but also the “free TV” that candidates rely on to supplement or supplant their paid messages. So here is Kathleen Brown, in the sunset of her 1994 campaign to unseat California Gov. Pete Wilson, on a bus marathon with her press entourage in a last gasp of camera-ready media events that includes a 3 a.m. stop at a chicken processing plant.

Here also is a course in the politics of Chicago, with its long tradition of Richard Daleys as mayor and even longer tradition of candidates and public servants secretly accepting envelopes.

And in the most commanding section of Part 1--a revealing spectacle of insider choreography--here is a dose of Texas politics featuring a wired-for-sound State Sen. Rodney Ellis schmoozing, dealing and cajoling (“This ass-kissing is killing me”) his way to victory on a floor vote in Austin.

What really drives these people? What makes them run? Individual agenda may differ, but what are the common denominators that bind? Narcissism? A hunger for power? A love of the game? A genuine desire to serve?

Why does an aging Bob Dole, already the angel atop the U.S. Senate’s Christmas tree, gamble everything on a risky underdog sprint for the presidency that, if the polls are even near accurate, will soon flame out? Why does Clinton decide as a schoolboy that he wants to inhale politics all the way to the White House?

In “Vote for Me,” it’s a Louisiana teenager, not a young Clinton, who declares with conviction: “I want to run for [state] representative when I’m 18, then run for [state] senator, then run for governor. And if I feel happy about what I’ve done for Louisiana, I want to run for the U.S. Senate.”

While fulfilling his dream scenario, what ethical corners does he cut, each time just a little sharper, until finally there is nothing left to slice?

Someone says here that “politics is what we do instead of shooting our opponents.” Indeed, nothing is more striking in “Vote for Me” than the shrill cynicism expressed by some of its subjects. Says a Texas legislator-turned-lobbyist: “You’ve got to convince the public that you’re sincere and honest and that you conduct yourself properly at all times. And once you’ve learned to fake that, you’ve got it made.”

The question not faced here is how the “got it mades” live with their hypocrisy. How they can reconcile their moral lapses on the political front with the loftier values they may espouse in other areas of their lives. How these presumably decent people, while endorsing commonly accepted standards of honesty and integrity, can justify suspending these values in the heat of campaigning. How the parent preaching honesty to his kids can justify fibbing to win an election. How party spinners can excuse the deceit of giving phony opinions about their candidates to TV cameras and the public.

Do we merely dismiss this as endemic by saying, as journalist Michael Barone does in “Vote for Me,” that politics is “vulgar” because it comes from the people?

You won’t learn much from politicians themselves. “Vote for Me” follows the Chicago aldermanic race of incumbent Brian Doherty, for example, only to have him slam the door when he and his associates gather in his office for a “political meeting.”

Fortunately, another door opens wide in the final 90 minutes of Tuesday’s “Vote for Me,” resulting in some stunning eavesdropping on the 1994 congressional race of Maggie Lauterer in the mountains of North Carolina.

An Asheville TV reporter with roots deep in Appalachia, Lauterer is the true political outsider, a bright, warm, earnest and enormously likable novice recruited by desperate Democrats to battle entrenched GOP Rep. Charles H. Taylor. An old-style politician, his name-calling clashes with her mantra “that God’s children should run campaigns as cleanly as they can.” She adds: “When I have to meet my maker some day, I wanna feel real good about the report of the campaign of 1994.”

Any doubts about Lauterer’s sincerity end after she plays her dulcimer and sings “Amazing Grace” on the stump. Her awkward evolution as a candidate and fate at the ballot box are a wonderful story that shouldn’t be missed. Taylor would have made an even more revealing one, but in the tradition of conventional politics, his door wasn’t open.

* “Vote for Me: Politics in America” airs tonight and Tuesday at 9 on KCET-TV Channel 28.