Concocting Satiric Counterpoint to Conventions

It is becoming a mantra of political punditry: The presidential race is too dull, the presumptive nominees are too scripted and ordinary Americans are about as electrified by the upcoming conventions as they would be by an Elks Club reunion.

Those who have tuned out, take heart. California has created an Un-Convention, complete with political satire, celebrities and an Internet “bozometer”--so you can vote thumbs up or thumbs down during those long convention speeches. Here you will hear speeches by poor working moms who can’t afford to buy their kids winter clothes.

As network executives minimize coverage plans to accommodate football, a loose group of high-tech, media and social reform heavyweights--galvanized by reinvented conservative columnist Arianna Huffington--have been plotting to capitalize on the prime-time ennui with mutinous self-styled “Shadow Conventions,” during the major party gatherings in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

“Conventions are boring coronations now. There’s no competition anymore, no question of the outcome,” lamented “Politically Incorrect” comedian Bill Maher, who has promised to participate in the Los Angeles shadow event. “It’s an infomercial--and a bad one.”

Counter-convention ringleaders say they will goose the American body politic with a tough agenda--campaign finance reform, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the unequal prosecution of blacks and Latinos in the “drug war”--that they believe many Americans care about but neither party dares to touch.

Sen. John McCain has already agreed to speak on campaign finance reform at the Shadow Convention during the Republican gathering in Philadelphia. The Rev. Jesse Jackson says he will decry unaddressed racial inequities in Los Angeles. Hollywood actor Warren Beatty--whose cinematic alter ego, Sen. Jay Bulworth, did a rapping sendup of American political hypocrisy--says he may speak. Radio personality Harry Shearer is listed as a participant, along with the actor Ron Silver and 1960s radical satirist Paul Krassner.

Organizers describe a format that borrows from “Point Counter-Point” and “Saturday Night Live.” They promise three days of political parody and music--spliced with indicting testimonials from minority families in which fathers have been jailed for using an amount of crack cocaine whose powder cocaine equivalent lands wealthy white movie stars in rehab programs.

Experts are to air serious issues each day between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., before the party conventions get rolling. So organizers expect delegates--and the cable network C-SPAN--to show up. After that, political skits, satire and music will build the irreverence into the night.

The Los Angeles venue, Patriotic Hall, is within walking distance of Staples Center, where, Rev. Jackson and others say, issues like the growing incarceration of black men for nonviolent drug offenses may not get sufficient attention at the Democratic convention.

“Campaigns are driven by polls and not by convictions,” Jackson said. “That’s why the voices of our side must rise for changes and inclusion. These issues must be addressed.”

Idea Conceived at High-Tech Conference

Huffington, a former Republican insider who has become the doyenne of a high-powered salon on Los Angeles’ liberal Westside, said the Shadow Conventions were conceived at a Monterey high-tech conference in February that drew minds as diverse as news personality Tom Brokaw, television producer Norman Lear and the actor Sinbad.

Huffington was at a breakfast with Internet impresario Peter Hirshberg, who had just unveiled a new Internet game, Ipocracy, that sells American government in a mock public stock offering and allows anyone to run for president and get high poll ratings--as long as they sell out to special interests.

At the time, Hirshberg recalls, McCain and his Straight-Talk Express had thrown some excitement into the race with his upset victory over Bush in the New Hampshire primary, prompting many to conclude that although Americans feel disenfranchised by the political process, they care about issues and appreciate candor.

And the party conventions are expected to produce about as much controversy as a Pat Boone concert.

“The conventions have been pablumized by the parties,” Hirshberg said, referring to the strained mush people feed babies. “I think we can have a lot of fun.”

A lot of fun--especially with the politicians themselves, by streaming convention video on the Internet with “simultaneous translations” that lampoon the hypocrisy of speakers who are, for example, pandering to the elderly after voting to cut seniors’ benefits. There will be some unspecified deviltry with two Web sites--myalgore.com and mygwbush.com--Hirshberg said.

“We need to expose the emptiness of the rhetoric,” Huffington said. “Everybody in the media realizes it’s become Kabuki theater, and yet the coverage takes it at face value unless something blatantly ridiculous happens. That’s what we want to burst.”

Not to mention, Huffington said, that “we have the vacuum on our side.”

Funny man Maher agreed. No one, he said, is expecting a rerun of the lively 1992 Republican “culture war convention”--at which Buchanan took center stage with a social conservative call to arms so smoldering with fire and brimstone that columnist Molly Ivins suggested it “probably sounded better in the original German.”

Or a return to the glory days of the 1960s, when the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War swept the divisions convulsing American society directly into the uproarious 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

“All that stuff I remember vividly,” Maher said. “It all kind of went downhill from there. No one cares. No one is watching.”

The Shadow Conventions are “probably going to be covered almost as much as the real convention,” boasted Maher, who will speak on two nights, on campaign finance reform and the war on drugs.

He said he would borrow heavily from his HBO special “Be More Cynical,” just as many of the premier issues to occupy the Shadow Convention have been aired in Huffington’s new book, “How to Overthrow the Government”--tie-ins that detractors say reveal less synergy than veteran self-promotion.

Activists Delighted at High-Profile Platform

But social issues groups, accustomed to languishing in righteous obscurity, are unreservedly delighted at the high-profile platform, which will be free and open to the public. (A Web site, www.shadowconventions.com, was launched this week.)

“I was happy to join,” said Common Causes’ Scott Harshbarger, a campaign finance reform advocate. “The two parties are not going to address these issues in a credible way. This offers the opportunity for a level of visibility that, alone, we could not have.”

Activist preacher Jim Wallis, the convener of the national interfaith Call to Renewal movement, is being heavily courted by both parties. But he has chosen to be part of the Shadow Conventions to draw attention to an issue he doesn’t think either party is addressing enough: the gap between rich and poor in boom-time America.

Huffington said half a million dollars has already been raised, with George Soros’ Open Society Institute contributing $175,000. Additional staff and money are being donated by the convening organizations, which also include United for a Fair Economy, Public Campaign and the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, she said. Organizers are talking with the Pew Charitable Trust, Arca Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation about possible grants.

Ethan Nadelman of the Soros-financed Lindesmith Center, which advocates changes in U.S. drug policy, views the contribution as a worthy investment. “The Shadow Convention is a good opportunity to establish credibility for this movement and get closer to the mainstream of politics,” he said.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), an icon of 1960s civil disobedience who will be a delegate to the Democratic convention, said its planners would be smart to include debate on the kinds of serious issues he would like to raise: ending the corrupting influence of money in political campaigns and amending U.S. free trade agreements to include real labor, human rights and environmental protections.

“If they don’t do that, it will justify Arianna’s show,” Hayden said. “The convention will be vacuous. It will be scripted for prime-time television. The delegates will be props. Arianna’s salon will be a place to be.”

In that case, the demonstrators outside both conventions “are likely to be described as a faceless horde,” he lamented. “They ought to get the attention.”

Still, if he was invited to the Shadow Conventions, he would attend, he said.

Jonathan Kozol, a longtime educational reformer who worked with Cesar Chavez and was twice arrested with Dr. Benjamin Spock in protests against the Vietnam War, said he wouldn’t have promised to speak at the Shadow Conventions if he didn’t believe they would be just as weighty as the street protests.

“Anyone who imagines that this will be an understated voice of opposition should come hear this protest,” Kozol said. “I don’t see anything timid or mitigating about this. It’s very important to do this in a place we will be heard and not scattered around the city.”

‘People Are Really Excited’

Anne Biondi Simonds, a Shadow Convention organizer, called the celebrity recruitments “media insurance: It’s always so tempting to bring celebrities into everything. We’ve had incredible commitments from Warren [Beatty] and Ron [Silver].”

Simonds, a self-described “caring Democrat” whose family is “incredibly close to the Clintons,” said her involvement began--like Beatty’s short-lived flirtation with a presidential run--at a dinner party at Huffington’s Italianate Brentwood home a few months ago. Huffington had invited “influential editors and bureau chiefs.”

Since then, “the reaction we’ve had at cocktail parties is that people are really excited,” Simonds said. “It’s like ‘Hey, you’re concerned; so am I!’ ”

Especially about political apathy among the young, that “powerful demographic that we all know really well in the entertainment industry” (Simonds’ father is a former Universal Studios chairman; her husband has produced such films as “The Wedding Singer”).

The celebrities involved in the Shadow Conventions “provide wonderful role models on our issues and on leadership,” she said. “Their voices and their dedication are wonderful examples.”

Beatty called the Shadow Conventions “a very positive thing.” What “needs to be addressed is the overall homogenization of the two major parties, and this of course is a result of the conditions in which they raise money,” he said.

Said Maher: “If Arianna wants me to walk out there in a chicken suit, I would do that for her.”

One Shadow Convention strategist “highly recommended” asking the often raunchily sexist Chris Rock to be a presenter. The man’s memo listed three “important criteria” for participants: “(1) being hip and fun, (2) being personable, and (3) being an expert.”

“Speakers that are exciting and entertaining enough will keep things from getting too serious and will help us contrast . . . with the stale, arrogant and formulaic conventions,” it said. “This is how Jesse Ventura won. He was simply more honest and more entertaining.”

The memo said the Shadow Conventions need “one or two simple concepts,” a “sound bite we want the evening news and the daily papers to report.”

If this sounds like a somewhat cynical realpolitik, consider what some intellectuals are saying about the real conventions.

“It’s like the Pasadena Rose Bowl parade,” said Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s magazine, who has tentatively agreed to participate in the Shadow Conventions. “American politics at the moment are a sham democracy. We have both parties solidly entrenched in the status quo. . . . We have speeches, we have people going through the motions. It’s Democracyland.”