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Bush and Dukakis campaigns: entertainment over substance


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By CHARLES N. WHEELER III

Have civility and substance in politics become vestiges of a bygone era, like starched collars and muttonchop whiskers? The question seems apropos entering the final month of the 1988 national campaign, a political season that from early on has generated more heat than light from the candidates and that once again has pundits bemoaning the choices facing voters.

Predictably, some politicians blame the media for the aura of shallow mean-spiritedness that thoughtful citizens detect surrounding the national campaign. Republican presidential nominee George Bush, for example, proclaimed that journalists were caught in a "feeding frenzy" when the newshounds delved into the background of his relatively unknown choice for vice president, Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana. Moreover, conspiratorialists among GOP partisans saw the stories about Quayle's lackluster academic career and convenient entry into the Indiana National Guard as proof of the media's liberal bias. At one point Quayle's handlers arranged a hometown question-and-answer session for the national media in front of the senator's friends and neighbors in Huntington, Ind., who angrily jeered and heckled the press inquisitors.

By making reporters the bad guys and portraying their digging as an assault on National Guard honor, Republican "spin artists" hoped to elicit sympathy for their candidate. While their ploy seems to have worked, it ignores valid concerns and legitimate questions. Perhaps the most obvious is whether there's an element of hypocrisy in hard-line cold warrior Quayle's having opted for National Guard duty, rather than accepting the draft and actually going to fight in a war he professed to believe in.

And what does Bush's choice of an undistinguished Senate back-bencher, over better-qualified and better-known candidates like Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas or Rep. Jack Kemp of New York, say about the vice president? As for media bias, former Democratic presidential hopefuls Gary Hart and Joe Biden might dispute the notion that the press corps sharks crave only right-wing Republican prey.

Still, the press shouldn't be totally absolved of any responsibility for campaign shortcomings. In a sense, the media — particularly television — have been accomplices for years in an ongoing trivialization of electoral politics, a process in which 15-and 30-second sound bites, often negative, and carefully staged photo opportunities have come to displace genuine ideas as the chief currency of modern campaigning. Both national conventions, for example, were little more than stage productions following carefully drawn scripts, although Republicans deserve credit for adopting a platform spelling out in considerable detail their vision of America and its role in the world. Democrats, on the other hand, embraced a porridge of platitudes providing no more insights than the delegates' simple-minded "Where was George?" refrain.

Out on the hustings, neither Vice President Bush nor his Democratic rival, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, is earning high marks for the intellectual content of his campaign. Neither seems to have the desire, much less the knack, to move beyond pat one-liners and convenient labels to frame cleanly the vital issues facing the nation and to delineate clearly the policies they would pursue in dealing with them.


October 1988 | Illinois Issues | 8


However vacuous that approach might be, it's one that faithfully reflects the realities of campaign coverage today. Seasoned politicians know that well-reasoned arguments won't fit the short-and-snappy mold that plays best on the 6 o'clock news nor, for that matter, the desires of newspaper editors worried about boring readers with long, complicated stories. Nor do meaty pronouncements mesh well with the pervasive tendency to cover campaigns like pennant races, placing more emphasis on who's ahead than on what's being said. But the symbiotic relationship between the candidates and the press that nurtures campaign froth does not operate in a vacuum. Instead, it responds to outside influences, few more powerful than the desire to give the public what it wants.

There's ample evidence to support those in politics and in the media who share the perception that the public — whether voters or viewers — wants entertainment, not enlightenment. One need look no further than the ratings for network convention coverage or the circulation figures for the supermarket tabloids.

Even more disturbing, there are reasons to suspect that large segments of the public aren't intellectually equipped to consider issues on any but the most superficial level. Consider, for example, the astounding results of a National Geographic Society-sponsored survey that found almost one out of four adult Americans unable to find the Pacific Ocean on a map, almost half unsure of where Central America is, and fully three-quarters ignorant of the Persian Gulfs location. How can the candidates discuss in a meaningful fashion, and the press report in an effective way, the foreign policy options available to this nation and their implications, when so many potential voters have no idea what part of the world they're talking about?

What hope is there for enlightened debate on the environment or space exploration or combatting AIDS, when large segments of the population are woefully ill-informed about basic scientific matters, as suggested by a nationwide survey of college students in which 40 percent opined that cavemen and dinosaurs were contemporaries? How can there be any informed political participation by the estimated 23 million U.S. adults who are illiterate?

Such questions transcend any single campaign and pose ominous challenges for a people subscribing to the premise that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.□

Charles N. Wheeler III is a correspondent in the Springfield Bureau of the Chicago Sun-Times.


October 1988 | Illinois Issues | 9



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