Democratic National Convention
(August 27, 1996)Breakfast is another lethal injection of cholesterol: cheese omelets, congealed bacon, tepid coffee and spongy croissants. The humans are slow to respond this morning, but the politicians have already seized the podium and are greasing the skids of their own careers with compliments handed out like chocolates. "I would like to thank...", "special", "the greatest", and "wonderful" compete for banality with phrases like "win across the board" and "tremendous message." If language is any index to the quality of thought, the mind of the political process resides somewhere between the Evangelical and the Rotary Club.
After breakfast I have my rendezvous with Lowell Finley, the able campaign finance lawyer I've enlisted to bring me up to speed about the history and strategy of the movement. He advises me that money flows like water and that if you try to block it one place it will flow out in another. "Money will express itself" he says flatly, and it takes me a moment to perceive the humor floating just behind the surface of his eyes. Lowell is young, grave, prematurely gray, with an unflappable, thoughtful air, accentuated by rimless glasses. His sentiments are progressive, but he is candid about being a hired gun whose advice is sought by those who must thread their way through the shoals of campaign finance law.
According to Lowell, the central problem for reformers is that the Supreme Court defines the spending of money as acts of speech and modes of associating, so most attempts at restricting the flow of money eventually collide with that Maginot line. Watergate produced such seismic upheavals in the body politic, that Republicans (defensively) and Democrats were able to cooperate and create the Federal Election Campaign Act placing mandatory spending caps on Presidential candidates. This bill produced the concept of Federal matching funds and the income tax check-off to pay for Presidential campaigns. In return for the money, Presidential candidates agreed to cap spending, a voluntary decision. When the law attempted to extend its purview to Congressional campaigns, it was shot down by the courts because the mandated limit was not voluntary and consequently perceived as an infringement of free speech. When such trade-offs have been attempted at the State-Local level, they have usually been voted down because of scare tactics - the fear that Communists or Nazis could receive tax dollars to spread their message, and nothing has been accomplished.
It's a dodgy subject. The goal, as Lowell describes it, is to build bias into the system which favors the average citizen and evens the playing field (that phrase again) between corporate wealth and individual checkbooks. As it is, 1996 is the best fund-raising year in the history of the Democratic party, and the Republicans are still raising twice as much as their competitors. True reform is a tricky business, and some progressives believe that the anti-PAC campaigns are skillful disinformation. The best evidence for that argument is that corporations (whose PACs give far more than Union PACs for instance) are not against the dissolution of PAC's. It's fairly simple to figure out: large corporation have numerous executives who can write sizable checks, while the same is not true of a union for instance.
The subject is a mine-field of competing bills and counter-proposals which appear neutral on the surface but skillfully disguise bias for their author's camp. In 1988, San Francisco Supervisor Quentin Kopp, proposed an election reform which set spending limits based on a time window: candidates could receive no money before and after a specific date, on a fiscal year basis. It sounded fine, until one understands that in a four year seat the incumbent gets money every year. The challenger, usually starting from ground zero, gets one cycle to raise money and get into the game while the incumbent three prior funding cycles available to them. What appeared to be finance reform was actually incumbent protection, and subtle manipulations like this have plagued all partisan reform plans in Congress. In fact it was Lowell's firm of Remsho, Johanson and Purcell which defeated Kopps finance law on behalf of the SEIU.
In Lowell's estimation, real campaign finance reform must:
1) Establish structures to encourage and reward small money in the local jurisdiction and aid it through increased public matching.
2) Demonstrate to the public how much it costs them NOT to adopt reforms.
3) Educate the press on the importance of financial data, and as a corollary to that:
a) have all financial data submitted in ELECTRONIC form, so that it can be public immediately; manipulated on spread-sheets and searched, so that newspapers no longer have to send reporters into the files for weeks at a time.
4) Public disclosure rules must be strengthened and clarified to follow the flows of money and make it easier to hold people accountable to it.
5) Candidates must campaign on the issue and raise it.
This information is fresh in mind as I leave our coffee klatch to attend a symposium on finance reform organized by the Creative Coalition. The Coalition is a collection of artists and celebrities who use their power to illuminate issues and move public policy in directions they consider positive. The President is actor, Alex Baldwin and the Board of Directors includes Blair Brown, Stockard Channing, past CEO of HBO Michael Fuchs, Screen Actor's Guild President, Richard Masur and Christopher Reeves. The Symposium, titled Money and Politics: Are Dollars buying Democracy, is an all star event. The narrator is former Texas Governor Ann Richards, universally regarded as one of the wittiest women in public life. Senator Bill Bradley, James Carville, Honorable Thomas Downey, former Democratic Congressman from New York; Ellen Malcolm (Emily's list founder), Representative Martin Meehan of Massachusetts, and Dr. Larry J. Sabato author of Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics make up the panel.Ann Richards lives up to her reputation. After a flowery introduction by Billy Baldwin, she sidles out and inquires innocently in her nasal, gravely voice, "Did he start with that part about the manger?" She advises the audience that the issue of campaign finance reform is an old an intractable problem, and that George Washington was charged with irregularities due to passing out more than his fair share of rum, wine, beer, and hard cider to voters.
Debate is spirited and funny, and from the badinage facts emerge, float to the surface and hang in the air a moment:
* 82% of Congressional members took PAC money from tobacco.
* a special interest group is one you don't belong to.
* A rich man's wallet does not equal a poor man's soapbox.
* You cannot dam the flow of political money in a democracy.
Each member of the panel advanced different schemes and
there was some competition between the "bundling" strategy,(the collecting of many small checks and putting them in a single envelope for the candidate) which Emily's list pursues and James Carville's draconian suggestion that "no one running for office accept anything from anybody."The primary concern of the audience seemed to be "what does the money buy and what does it do to character?" and there was a consistency of opinion among panel members. All agreed that money buys access. Tom Downey said, " if I had three calls coming into my office, two from small donors and one from a big donor, no question, I would answer the big donor's call first." The reason for this is clear when one understands that Downey spent over one million four hundred thousand dollars in his last campaign, and lost.
All agreed that campaign reform will never begin in Washington, will never receive bi-partisan support. James Carville, twitchy as a TV set with a random electrical short, a man who seems to have less internal restraints than most, said it bluntly. "This may be a big deal to a bunch of NPR types, but for a guy who has run a campaign, this is not a hot issue. You will have to do it yourself. I mean, you're honest people and you deserve an honest answer." There is unanimity for the perception that TV is the driving force of all campaign spending and Rep. Meehan is especially vexed about it, reminding the audience repeatedly that they "own the airwaves", and that it could easily be a part of the station's charter to supply free air time for candidates.
A woman on my right who sees me taking notes, leans in to inform me that campaign media consultants usually receive a percentage of the cost of each campaign media purchase, which illuminates a previously darkened corner of the problem and perhaps explains why campaigns have degenerated into nothing more than dueling sound bytes.
Carville warns the audience that, "We have to quit whinin' and outwork em." Consensus dictates that this is an issue that will have to be defined, orchestrated, powered and finally seized by the people themselves. Until there is a groundswell of reform opinion in the general population, nothing will happen.
The conversation shifts to corruption, and a pall falls across the group like a collective day-dream; an unmistakable aura of sadness. All participants agree that they know no one who is overtly "in the bag"; openly bought by contributions, and feel that the real problem is more subtle and more pervasive. Tom Downey ruminates about "the danger of becoming what you came to fight" and explains how, "it's the little votes; not the big Profiles in Courage issues, but the little things you do to keep someone happy that begin to eat into personal integrity."
He continues by saying that he is "more appalled [at the effect of money] now that I am out of office than when I was in." James Carville speaks last, intoning an almost biblical pronouncement on the crumbling of character: "After awhile, all those [little] decisions begin eatin' away...eatin' away...eatin' away. I don't say it corrupts, but it corrodes. And you know, if you corrode enough, well...(pause, matter-of-fact shrug)...you're corrupt."
The audience filed out, quiet and thoughtful, as if they had witnessed a public tragedy, and in a way they had. The inner workings of a grave national problem had been revealed to them, and then, with the horror and its implications visible, they had been abandoned, leaderless and flung into the abyss with the injunction "you have to do it" as their only succor.
From the Goodman Theater I have just enough time to reach the Field Museum where the Human Relations Foundation of Chicago is hosting an UNCONVENTION, A Colloquy on Race and the Creative Imagination - "an attempt to get the dialogue on race to a deeper, more creative level. Senator Bill Bradley is the host, and panelists are poet Garrett Hongo, authors Bharati Mukherjee, Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, playwright David Henry Hwang, and Harvard professor and author, Cornell West.
By way of introduction, panelists recounted personal stories of the effects of racism on their lives. Bharati Mukherjee described being "exoticized and Peter Seller-ized" as a young Indian immigrant in Canada. Cornell West's grandmother bled to death due to complications from a badly pulled tooth. Refused admittance, she died on the hospital steps at 31 years old. Garrett Hongo describes being "seen" and acknowledged by his Jewish literature professor, who stopped him during a walk one night, and said to him, "I know why you're angry. Why you're quiet. Your parents were in that camp," provided a window for him to find "language to express my personal perceptions."
The full house was pin-drop quiet, and the level of conversation was extraordinarily high. These conversations mattered to the speakers and the audience. They were not designed to persuade or motivate behavior; to create cliques or disparage competitors and opponents. Highly refined and perceptive human beings were harnessing language to reveal, as clearly and honestly as possible, the complexity, contradictions, pains and absurdity of being human. Listening carefully, one had the impression that these powerful personas and imaginations were monitoring one another and no one wanted to drop the baton before their peers. Toni Morrison speared corrupted language deftly and marked it's costs: "Racism stops new thoughts," she said, "allowing only new ways to say the same things. Which is what coded language is."
Panelists agreed that racism was a problem which could not be consigned solely to the realm of consciousness, and all spoke about the need for bridging consciousness and practice. Cornell West, whose energy-charged speech moves him to the edge of his chair, punctures invisible resistance with his forefinger and reminds the audience, "We've had the artists! What is the American attitude toward the artists and imagination that blocks those imaginations from having an effect? They are not listening. That problem is part psychological, but part institutional."
Toni Morrison hit the subject on the head with a stick. "Racism has utility, benefits, bonuses," she points out. " It is worth money, and self esteem and white people, have to give up their tickets to privilege." Bharati Mukherjee, stressed the importance of law. "You cannot change race," she pointed out, "but you can stop discrimination."
The dialogue produced strong feelings and provoked self-examination. It was the kind of colloquy I had hoped to hear at the Democratic convention; language in the service of real thought; discriminations which make a difference in the way one perceives the world and behaves. I never did. As I filed out of the crowded room I took small comfort from realizing that synchronistic with the bullshit and bunting, the pat phrases and empty speeches, serious human beings, on their own imperatives, were addressing the problem and seeking to solve it for themselves. I was glad that I had been a part of it.
THE CONVENTION FLOOR
After a shower and a change of clothes, I leave for the Convention Center and enter as the ever-passionate Mario Cuomo is pleading the cause from the podium while a curious image on the big-screen TV behind him magnifies his right hand in a curiously partial second image, waving like a disembodied limb. He's good, he's articulate, he's dedicated. "We need jobs" he declaims, "not in Thailand, not in Bangladesh, not in Mexico (all good speechwriters love specificity) but in Chicago, rural Mississippi." He reminds us that the public education system produced men like Colin Powell and President Clinton and urges us not to abandon it. Someone next to me comments to their neighbor, "He's good, but he has no guts." I intrude shamelessly to question that, and a woman with owlish eyeglasses regards me suspiciously and informs me definitively that "you don't flirt with the Presidency. If you get that close, throw your hat in the ring and take the heat."
I wander out into the hall, forgetting for the moment that I have exited the several levels lower than where I entered, and soon, am lost in the intestinal corridors. There are no landmarks. Plastic garbage bags storing signs for the Hillary demonstration later, lie abandoned in random locations. People enter and exit the corridors aimlessly from unidentified rooms, others sit on folding chairs smoking and staring into space and no one seems to know or care where the lobby is. I'm rescued by a Center maintenance man who seems to have nothing better to do than accompany me to the lobby.
"You're an actor aincha?" he says, and when I concur he introduces himself by saying, "I work maintenance." That satisfies our conversational requirements until he guides me successfully to the lobby; I buy him a Coke and a lethally greasy Italian sausage sandwich for myself. Checking the front of my teeth with the top of my tongue for lumps of food, I wander back into the maelstrom of the Convention hall, following a middle-aged man with a Bob Dylan hair-do who turns out to be Phil Angelides, "the scariest trial lawyer in America," I am told. He is a securities litigator who goes after computer company executives who don't live up to their promises to investors, and the sponsor of initiative 211 which makes them personally liable for these broken promises.
I take my seat again, passing Ariana Stasinoupolis, wife of Michael Huffington, the millionaire who spent something like twenty million of his own money trying to win a Senate seat. Ariana is a formidable woman; Oxford graduate, author of a gossipy book about Pablo Picasso. When I met her some years ago, her tresses were dark, chestnut brown and shoulder length, and she was trying to convince me about the superiority of her guru, a spontaneous American variety named John Rogers. This evening she wearing a broadcaster's head-gear covering chic-ly short bright orange hair and smiling at a newscaster who looks bemused and vaguely familiar. A woman in front of me wearing glasses whose frame is contorted to spell 1996, glosses Ariana diffidently and confides to her companion that she considers Ariana, " a stain on women."
Martha Whetstone is laughing to someone about Clinton's loyalty to Arkansans which borders on the. "I mean, he'll come up to me and say, `Hey Martha, did you see that guy over there? He's from Menah!', as if the guy was...I mean, that's loyalty!" I bite my tongue and do not offer that Menah, Arkansas was widely reputed to be the site of a rural airport used as a CIA narcotics drop during the Iran-Contra Scandals, and some (admittedly extreme) underground publications even tried to tangle President Clinton in that morass.
I'm sitting beside a plump, motherly-looking black woman with doe eyes named Helina Parks who works in the DNC office in Washington. We discuss the coronation of Ron Brown's ghost the night before and she confirms my impression that the reception was "genuine", and like myself was moved. She speaks softly and tenderly, making no effort to argue her point, and informs me that she worked under Ron Brown, and like the crowd, considered him a "special man."
As she talks, brave Joe Biden, so ferocious attacking Anita Hill during the Clarence White nomination hearings, is at the podium, his unpleasantness magnified on the TV screen, newscaster hair-do, gravel voice, a polished, bull-dog. He is warning the crowd that he is going to get tough on young criminals. The subtext of his speech is that if those namby little piss-ant, shit-head kids get out of line around him, he will personally kick their asses.
John Kerry follows, trim and handsome as an idealized submarine commander, but his speech is pearls before grime...no one listens to a word, and trying to listen I am torn between embarrassment for the speakers and respect for the crowds' ubiquitous contempt and then finally angry when a woman takes the podium and recounts the details of her husband's murder and son's paralysis in the Long Island commuter train shootings. Someone talking in the corridor abandons their conversation long enough to ask me what she's talking about and I snap, "Her husband's murder. If you'd shut up and listen you'd know."
I'm angry because the whole flatulent event is designed for television, and what actually exists in this present room in this present moment does not seem to count at all.. The flesh and blood people here have been reduced to the role of extras waving their props. The real audience is "the fly-over people" out there in television land, and everything else, civility, order, integrity, and serious policy discussion has been sacrificed for the propaganda value of the Nation's four year dumb show.
For a brief moment, everything snaps into congruent focus when Aretha Franklin claims the stage to sing the Star-Spangled Banner. If proof was ever required that culture is more powerful and pervasive than politics, Aretha is it. ALL chatter stops; ALL vagaries and distractions are put aside as Aretha grabs our tattered, impossible-to-sing old chestnut of an anthem and tears the heart out of it, raising it aloft to God like an Aztec priest. The video camera zeros in on a WWII vet, snapped to perfect attention, eyes riveted on her as the passion of her voice expresses the weltering complex of feeling that plays across his face. He is transfixed by memory, and my respect for him and the intensity of his feeling, forbids cynicism and makes me proud.
Dick Gephardt, whipped back in line by his failed Presidential explorations, a faithful party Doberman now (nursing a feral urge to run against Al Gore next election) He has been traveling the country assessing his chances, but tonight, a team player, he introduces Tipper Gore, still my favorite speaker. She addresses the problem of civility, and her address (I've admitted my bias, folks) cuts to the heart of the real problem assailing the world's nations; the fundamental loss of civility in discourse and policy, the winner-take-all-and-damn-the-rest procedures which are sundering the political process and victimizing all the players in it. I am reminded of a paragraph in an essay, "Politics, Morality, and Civility" in Vaclav Havel's wonderful book, Summer Meditations:
"...however important it may be to get our economy back on its feet, it is far from being the only task facing us. It is no less important to do everything possible to improve the general cultural level of everyday life...And it is not true that we have to wait until we are rich to do this; we can begin at once, without a crown in our pockets. No one can persuade me that it takes a better-paid nurse to behave more considerately to a patient; than only an expensive house can be pleasing, that only a wealthy merchant can be courteous to his customers and display a handsome sign outside, that only a prosperous farmer can treat his livestock well."
In this vein, Tipper urges the audience "to disagree with decency and dignity and keep our sense of humor," and, suspicious as I am, and as tuned to performance as I am, I like and believe in the sincerity of this woman.
Hillary's moment arrives and her entrance is stunning. John Lennon's Imagine plays through the sound system and the crowd leaps to its feet, waving a blizzard of white signs displaying WELCOME HOME HILLARY in letters of deep blue. Their cries are fused into one roar, and the intensity of their declaration to her provokes goose-bumps up my back and arms. They are thanking her; loving her; supporting her; nursing her wounds; making restitution for the vicious barbs and razor-slices of the opposition she has taken on their behalf. She tries to stop them and begin her speech, but can't. The applause holds her in place until they are spent and then, satiated, and allow her to begin.
There is no question that she is good. She begins with a few anecdotes and jokes. She confesses to having considered the idea of dying her hair red and changing her name to Hillary "Rodman" Clinton. The speech is well-crafted with fine phrases, and particularly effective when she speaks of children and decries values which decree that "the logos on their clothes are more valuable than the generosity in their hearts", but I am uncomfortable. This is a different woman than I was mesmerized by yesterday. The tone of her voice, her cadence, are distancing me and I am uneasy to discover that I do not believe what she is saying, and determine to analyze why.
I begin picking apart not her text, but her subtext, as if I were watching an actor in class. The voice catches my attention and I focus on it. It is comforting. It is unnaturally slow and calm, addressing me carefully, as if English were perhaps not my native language. I am struck with the thought that she has been coached to soften the edges some find abrasive and diminish potential liabilities to her husband. I cannot shake my feeling of being manipulated, and for the rest of the speech feel detached and disappointed that at this critical juncture someone felt that helping President Clinton demanded diminishing the power of a brilliant and autonomous woman. As Hillary continues, her speech gets slower and more soporific, as if we might be having difficulty understanding her.
There is an absurd element to the moment as video cameras riding on the shoulders of operators like technological humps, pass between the speaker and myself, obscuring my vision, trailing sound people and passing through the clotted crowd like icebreaking ships in an Arctic sea.Hillary's speech now is not much more than a tonality over the hub-bub, going on about children and family and family and children and I can't help remembering that her husband has just signed a bill consigning 40% of the nations poorest children to limbo, and that her only counter to media questions about contradictions between that act and her profession of family values, was the hope that, if elected, the President will be able to soften the most egregious portions of the legislation. [And if he is not re-elected, or can't? The legislation is a political gamble played with the poor as chips.] Where, was the President and his bully pulpit I am wondering in challenging Republicans when they successfully framed and co-opted the debate on Welfare and the poor? Why did he not inform the American people that the welfare program under discussion (created by women reformers in the Thirties) amounted to no more than 3% of the budget; primarily supported white people and the 7 million unemployed our Nation finds an acceptable number. Why was the President, as the Nation's father, not explaining that this ill-considered piece of spite would send another four million mothers out to compete with the already underused expendables? Where was the information to counter propaganda coding welfare for black; insinuating that the poor were being coddled and taking the tax-payers for a ride. According to The New Republic Magazine, a WPA style program assuring every able-bodied American work would cost about 50 billion dollars or .7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. The Marshall Plan cost the United States 1.5 percent of our GDP yearly, could we not do half as much for our own ravaged cities? Now on the eve of the election, it is too late, and the President, having abandoned the advantage of his office, is forced by election year necessities to sign the bill.
Evan Bayh begins to speak, and after three sentences, I am convinced I am listening to the phoniest white man in public life. He is pimping his mother's death from cancer to demonstrate his sensitivity and family values and I am revolted with him and want to be alone with my reactions to Hillary's speech.
I admire this woman and identify with her. I respect her intelligence, the grace she has showed under disgraceful assaults; the universality of her concern for community and the old and the poor. I wanted to feel that she had redeemed herself with this speech and do not. My imagination is constructing scenarios of her being coached by people trying to change her "effect" instead of translating her essence. I am disturbed that she might abandon herself when the stakes got high and pander to something other than her truest instincts. Of course I know none of this, am inventing possibilities to explain my malaise. Making me feel worse, is the fact that no one around me seems to have noticed the change in Hillary at all. People are delighted with the content and seem to have ignored the persona filtering it. This dissonance between myself and everyone I query makes me feel estranged from the process, unrepresentative of the public. I question why I am even there at all.
I stop by John Kennedy's GEORGE party at the Asian-Art museum, the hottest ticket in town. It is jammed with what appear to be the sons and daughters of famous people, and has all the distracted vigilance of a high-voltage event. I sit for awhile with Liz Carpenter and mine her for LBJ gossip, and after too many tepid Chinese egg rolls and chicken strips, leave, still troubled, to visit Chicago friends, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, ex-Weathermen, underground for more than a decade. Bill is currently a respected author and professor at the University of Chicago, and Bernadine is a passionate advocate for children at the Northwestern University Legal Clinic. They are hosting a party for Senator Patrick Leahy which I have promised to stop by.
People are discussing the speech as I enter and pump me for details. It is a relief to discover that most here feel exactly as I do. They too, despite having politics far to the left of Hillary's, respect her, but feel that the speech was a "strategy and not a communication."A well-spoken marketing specialist with a trim white beard and patient professorial manner, named Jock Gill, offers another perspective. He agrees with my premise that there was a "dislocation, a distance" between the persona of the speech and the authentic center of the First Lady, but counters that, "she was trying to tell a new story." He glosses the word "story" to mean weltanschaaung or equally complex conjunction of altered premises, identity, world-view and persona. He concurs that she was attempting to diminish any liability to her husband, but in his view her real goal was to express the maternal, clan-oriented, compassionate side of her personality which her harder-edged intellectual talents have been dedicated to expressing legislatively, as if a jewel were to spin on its own axis to reveal another facet. In his view, the dislocation I perceived was not cynical, but the psychic equivalent of faltering. It is a compassionate defense and I admire his effort. It does not explain away my feelings or the possibility of acts of commission; does not explain precisely why one would choose to "send a message" rather than be authentic, but this is after all, the world of politics with different standards than those we in this room hold for one another. While I am personally disappointed, I can take a deep breath, and think, "100% true or not, Hillary's is a mind that I want placed in the center of public policy debate; and if I have to swallow some personal discomfort to assist that, it is not such a difficult chore." Feeling better, I decide it will all go down better with a beer.