You’d Better Duck; They Have Punch Line on Cable

And then, President Clinton showed up and brought it all home.

It came at the end of a very long day of television, where the Democratic National Convention played out like a sideshow in search of a circus.

“Tonight, there’s already controversy at the Democratic National Convention,” was how Fox News Channel’s terminally foreboding Bill O’Reilly opened his “O’Reilly Factor” on Monday.

He was referring to the sideshow du jour: Teresa Heinz Kerry’s telling a conservative columnist/editorial writer from a Pittsburgh newspaper Sunday night to “shove it.” To the extraordinary good luck of the cable news chatters -- give that Pennsylvania TV station a gift certificate for some FCC merchandise -- video of the exchange had been caught on tape. And so O’Reilly could lead with it. Behind his head, down on the convention floor, Al Gore was about to take the stage. But the conservative bloviater made it clear there was nothing of note going on down there.

Maybe O’Reilly had it right. First of all, conventions feature people in hats that just aren’t practical. Meanwhile, Democratic Party leaders had declared anti-Bush rhetoric verboten -- a kind of parental, “You be nice” order before relatives from swing states arrive for dinner.

In the face of this, the misfit children of the cable news networks busied themselves making up conflict and then responding to their own contrivances. Was Hillary Rodham Clinton still feeling snubbed? Was loose cannon Howard Dean going to let the Kerry team vet his upcoming speech? Already on CNN, “Crossfire’s” James Carville and Robert Novak had weighed in on Heinz Kerry -- the conservative Novak calling her a serious problem for the Democrats and Carville countering: “I find her to be quite charming.” (Earlier, the CNN ticker read: “Saddam Hussein is passing time in prison writing poetry, gardening and snacking on cookies.” Wait, I get confused: Isn’t Saddam the insane one?)

Determined not to offend, the Democrats scheduled politically problematic speakers and symbolism well out of prime time. If you were watching CSPAN at 2:50 in the afternoon, for instance, you saw Roberta Achtenberg, former assistant secretary for Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration and a lesbian, utter the words: “We Democrats call for gay and lesbian families to be fully included in the life of America.” This was hardly the sort of issue the Kerry team wanted in prime time.

By 7 p.m., the Big Three -- ABC, NBC, CBS -- had joined the proceedings in time for a remembrance of Sept. 11. The networks are only giving up an hour a night, because even reruns have rated better than recent conventions.

But President Clinton on Monday was no rerun. “Americans long to be united. After 9/11 we all wanted to be one nation, strong in the fight against terror,” he said. “The president had a great opportunity, but he chose to use the moment of unity to push America too far to the right.”

Clinton comes through the television; he hooks you emotionally and then gets into the details of his politics. This is what Kerry must do. Whether he can deliver the same kind of TV moment, 72 hours from Clinton, remains to be seen.