All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (7 page)

But then came the advent of what was known in the business as “ENG”—electronic news gathering—which relied on lighter and more portable videotape cameras, freeing networks from the shackles of film. And now that videotape could be transmitted, almost miraculously, from a new generation of mobile satellites. The first satellite dishes, unwieldy and temperamental, arrived strapped to the roofs of bulky trucks (with their own onboard generators) in the early 1980s. In 1986, CNN began issuing its correspondents “flyaway dishes” that could fold up and move around the world, which were destined to become the industry standard. The 1988 campaign would be the first where the three networks and this new, twenty-four-hour cable channel would be able to easily bring you updates and interviews from any location relevant to a breaking story.

When Joe Trippi, then a young aide on the Hart campaign, arrived in the remote reaches of Troublesome Gulch to rescue Lee Hart on the first full day of the scandal, he was stunned to find a
row of dishes lined up on the gravel drive like an invading army at the gate. Within a few years, this would be a familiar sight even to Americans who had nothing to do with making or covering the news, but in 1987 it seemed as if aliens had landed from Mars. “Holy shit,” Trippi remembered thinking. “They
move
now.”

As Trippi and his colleagues on the campaign were about to learn, videotape and satellite technology had tremendous implications not just for the transmission of news—that is, how it literally got on air, and how fast—but also for the industry’s notion of what constituted it. Before the mid-eighties, which stories got on the air, and how prominently they were featured, depended almost entirely on their objective news value—that is, on how relevant they were to the public interest. But now that calculation had a lot more to do with immediacy; suddenly a story could be captivating without being especially important. After all, how could you lead with economic data when a little girl was lost in some God-forsaken well, and your correspondent was live on the scene?

What might have been a minor story in years past could now explode into a national event, within hours, provided it had the element of human drama necessary to keep viewers planted in their seats. Even as Hart prepared to announce his campaign at Red Rock, for instance, the media had become thoroughly obsessed with two sensational stories. The first concerned Fawn Hall, who worked as a secretary for Colonel Oliver North, the star of the Iran-contra hearings, and who had smuggled documents out of the White House in her boots and the back of her skirt. (The facts of the Iran-contra scandal itself, having to do with illegal arms sales to Iran in order to secretly finance an insurgency in Nicaragua, made for less compelling TV and weren’t as widely known.) The second story had to do with the disgrace and supposed extortion of Jim Bakker, a television evangelist accused of rape and adultery, and with his wife, Tammy Faye, whose blubbering, mascara-streaked face transfixed the nation for days.

It was an omen of things to come.

• • •

You could argue that all of this hinted at something corrosive not just in American media at the time, but in the culture as a whole. In 1985, the New York University professor Neil Postman published his treatise on the television age,
Amusing Ourselves to Death
, which stands even now as a stunning work of social criticism. Postman’s central thesis is worth revisiting. He declared that George Orwell’s fear for humanity, as depicted in
1984
, had not come to pass; obviously, Americans in 1984 did not labor under the repression of an authoritarian, mind-controlling regime, nor did anything like that seem imminent. But Postman posited that by the mid-1980s we were well on our way, instead, to realizing Aldous Huxley’s disturbing vision in
Brave New
World—that of a citizenry lulled into docility and self-destruction by a never-ending parade of mindless entertainment.

Expanding on the theories of the sixties philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman explained that the dominant media in any given society didn’t just convey news and ideas neutrally, but in fact defined the very concepts of news and ideas in its time. During what Postman called the Age of Exposition, which saw America through its birth and lasted well into the twentieth century, all of our metaphors and frames of reference had come from the printed word. When political candidates debated issues, for instance, as Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas famously did in 1858, they debated in what were essentially entire paragraphs and essays, because this was the only way they knew to receive and impart information. But that era had now given way to the Age of Show Business, in which television was the undisputed king of media. (At the time of Postman’s writing, at the dawn of cable and before the Internet, some ninety million Americans were said to watch TV every night.) And in a television-dominated society, Postman theorized, news and politics had to be entertaining in order for anyone to really pay attention.

“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television,” Postman wrote. The mere fact that TV news shows called themselves “shows” at all, Postman pointed out, hinted at the way they were transforming the expository culture of journalism. He went on:

Postman noted the list of political figures who had now achieved the status of TV celebrity. Senator Sam Ervin, the hero of the Watergate hearings, was doing ads for American Express. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger were popping up on
Dynasty
. George McGovern was hosting
Saturday Night Live
, and New York mayor Ed Koch (also an
SNL
host) was actually playing a fight manager in a made-for-TV movie. “Would anyone be surprised if Gary Hart turned up on
Hill Street Blues
?” Postman wondered. (Actually, Hart’s star turn came the year after Postman’s book, on an episode of the sitcom
Cheers
.) The problem with all of this, he believed, was that Americans were bound to lose hold of the distinction between those who were supposed to be doing the country’s serious business, on one hand, and those who were supposed to make them laugh or cry or buy mouthwash, on the other. Soon policymakers would be nothing more than characters in a national soap opera.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” Postman warned, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their
public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

There isn’t much about Postman’s attack on the show business society that isn’t accepted as plain fact today. But in the 1980s, when most Americans still trusted their evening news anchor and their congressman to explain and grapple with serious issues, his argument was provocative and, viewed now through the prism of time, visionary. In fact, in many ways, the 1988 campaign—occurring just as political consulting was becoming a millionaire-making industry, and just before Americans and their media had really gotten savvy about what these consultants were trying to do—marked the nadir of televised politics. When it was over, Americans would remember only three things about the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis: the silly image of him riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet; his flat answer when asked about the hypothetical rape of his wife; and the racially charged ad that claimed he had let a convicted killer, Willie Horton, go free on furlough. Each was an enduring image made specifically for television, the stuff of cheap drama or sitcom farce, and none had very much to do with governing the country. (It probably isn’t incidental that just over 50 percent of Americans bothered to show up at the polls on Election Day—the lowest voting rate in a presidential election in more than sixty years.)

All of these disparate, emerging forces in the society—a vacuum in the political debate, changing ideas about morality, a new generational ethos and new technologies in the media, the tabloidization of every aspect of American life—were coming together by the spring of 1987. The vortex was spinning madly and gaining speed. If Gary Hart hadn’t been the first to get sucked into it, someone else—Bill Clinton, surely—would have found himself there before long.

And yet, it
was
Hart who was about to lead the way into the modern age of political destruction, consigning himself to disgrace and infamy in the process. And this was more than a mere accident of history. If anyone had been designed to attract the vortex, to pull all of its currents together in a single violent tempest, it was Hart. On
the issues of the day, Hart could see around corners with more clarity than any political figure of his time, or for some time after. But when it came to this shift in the way the society vetted its leaders, he remained disastrously, even willfully clueless.

To his younger supporters, Hart was emblematic of the generational shift that was reshaping America—and not a moment too soon. The rebellious teens of the sixties were just now moving into middle age, with all the angst and self-absorption that had characterized their youth. (The second most popular sitcom in America, after
The Cosby Show
, was
Family Ties
, in which two former hippies struggled with their Reagan-loving teenage son, played by Michael J. Fox.) They had, in many ways, remade the popular culture already, creating an entirely new template for social justice through movies and TV, literature and music; Cosby himself was a transformational figure, drawing a huge number of white Americans into the story of the emerging black middle class. But when it came to political leadership, the Man still wasn’t getting out of the way. By the dawn of 1987, President Reagan was seventy-five (and finally starting to look it), and his main Democratic foil, House speaker Tip O’Neill, was seventy-four. Reagan’s likely successor among Republicans, George H. W. Bush, was a comparatively sprightly sixty-two. Someone had to kick open the door to Washington and let the sixties generation come rushing through. And even before his thrilling run in 1984, Hart had been first in line.

After all, wherever politics—and Democratic politics specifically—had been headed in the two tumultuous decades before 1987, Hart had managed to lead the way. In 1969, when Hart was an unknown Denver lawyer with some ideas about reforming the electoral system, George McGovern picked him to serve on the commission that would institute the primary system for choosing Democratic nominees—an innovation that transformed presidential politics almost immediately by taking power from the old urban bosses and handing it to a new generation of activists, including women and African Americans. A few years later, McGovern, seeking to take advantage of the new primary system, tapped Hart to assemble and run his improbable, antiwar presidential campaign. McGovern overturned the party establishment on his way to the nomination (and a crushing defeat in the general election), and Hart became famous as the young, brilliant operative in cowboy boots, straddling the motorcycle of his new pal, Hunter S. Thompson.

Gary Hart, at right, as Senator George McGovern’s campaign manager in the 1972 presidential election: thirty-five and a celebrity
CREDIT: KEITH WESSEL

Hart got himself elected to the Senate just two years later, making him, at thirty-eight, its second youngest member. (Joe Biden, who got there in 1972, was six years younger.) Some older colleagues expected the glamorous ex-strategist to fashion himself as a leftwing revolutionary. But Hart was from the burgeoning West, where the party’s Eastern orthodoxies were always viewed with some contempt,
and he was, by nature, too inquisitive to follow the crowd. Instead, he made a name for himself by leading the emerging movement to modernize the Cold War military. (Among those who shared his passion was a young Georgia congressman by the name of Newt Gingrich, who joined Hart’s new “military reform caucus.”) Hart’s foray into advances in modern weaponry led him, inevitably, to start thinking about the silicon chip and what it would mean for industry and education, too. Years later, Hart would remember an eye-opening lunch near Stanford with a couple of scruffy entrepreneurs named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who had recently set up a company called Apple in Jobs’s garage.