Democracy’s Rough Edges Were Showing

The CNN-televised “International Town Hall” on this nation’s Iraq policy may have been a bad day for the Clinton administration, but it was a great one for democracy.

This was the Wednesday afternoon event on the Columbus campus of Ohio State University, with senior Clinton foreign policy advisors having jetted to the loyalist heartland for the purpose of using television to castigate Saddam Hussein and continue making a case for blistering Iraq for resisting the United Nations weapons inspections it agreed to after getting clobbered in the Gulf War.

From their lips to America’s ears. To say nothing of Saddam’s, and the ears of millions of others globally tuned to this combative affair that was aired live at an hour in the U.S. said to be--coincidence!--prime time in Iraq.

Except that it turned out to be not that simple for those not-quite-ready-for-prime-time players--Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and U.S. Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger--when they joined CNN anchors Judy Woodruff and Bernard Shaw on a stage amid a revved-up throng of 6,000 in the university’s basketball arena.

The only slam dunks were scored by the Founding Fathers.

“It’s been noisy,” Woodruff summed up before the closing credits. “But that’s the way it is in America.” Indeed. On a choreographed sales mission, three of the government’s top guns get verbally scudded at times on a campus hardly known as a hotbed of anarchy? And it’s on television?

Where else but in the United States would this happen? And where else would one of them--the spiny, formidable Albright--resume her campus tour on Thursday, the day after she and her colleagues were symbolically dragged down from their pedestals?

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Most of the crowd was polite. And you’d suspect that Wednesday’s 1,000 invited guests included the uniformed members of the military who were frequently seen on camera--stout-hearted men always being a good visual aid on behalf of presidents. As a live-TV crap shoot that didn’t play as hoped by the organizers, however, this has become Clinton’s version of the prosecution’s glove debacle in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. Instead of a walkover, the Clinton trio encountered loud, disruptive hecklers, although only a few. Instead of soft lobs, there were challenging, even hostile questions--more than a few.

“You’re not answering my question, Madam Albright,” one interrogator snapped at the secretary of state from behind one of the mikes set up in the audience. Actually, all three officials ducked their share of questions, and it was Cohen’s turgid, sermonizing bureaucratspeak-by-the-numbers that seemed to ruffle the most people. Add to this scenario some strong questions from Shaw and Woodruff, and you had the kind of tumultuous, confrontational event that put the administration exactly where it didn’t want to be--on the defensive.

Everyone on the stage appeared rattled at times. It surely was not what the White House envisioned when these top policy officials were dispatched to Ohio State for an afternoon of selling the U.S. public on bombing Iraq, and selling Saddam and the rest of the globe on the concept of Americans being solidly behind their president on this issue.

“This is not an open forum,” a particularly shrill dissenter lectured the participants near the end of the 90 minutes. “It is a media event staged by CNN.” One at which he ultimately got a chance to say his piece, by the way. So much for tyranny.

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Albright was on the morning shows Thursday, wearing a stiff upper lip while putting a positive spin on the Ohio State event. As did Clinton during a press conference that morning. And as did Albright, Cohen and Berger Wednesday on ABC’s “Nightline,” whose Ted Koppel and a camera crew had accompanied the traveling trio to Columbus for a program titled “On the Road to War.”

“It had not gone well,” Koppel concluded afterward, in advance of Albright, Cohen and Berger assuring him on camera that it had gone well.

Ironically, it was “Nightline” and Koppel who pioneered the televised town meeting on weighty issues, and Clinton himself who has so masterfully used that formula to mobilize political support, although none of those programs were as raucous as this one.

Ridiculing Wednesday’s format, a Republican politician somewhere called what occurred on CNN the “Oprahfication of diplomacy.” Way off the mark, for this program rarely made room for a soft question, and there were no applause signs or cue cards, no strategic edits, no vamping by the hosts, no trivializing by the lens.

In fact, this not being a sterile, White House-managed exercise was hardly something to lament. It was something to celebrate.

Some of those in the audience were disorderly screamers whose sole agendum seemed to be chaos and disruption, and to some extent they succeeded. It wasn’t pretty. If, as some say, Saddam is taking comfort from that, so be it. As CNN affirmed on this day, democracy is messy. And thank goodness for it.