-Caveat Lector-
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a341b9f6f53.htm
December 10, 2000
THE UNVEILING
Behind the Political Curtain
By NEAL GABLER
THINGS used to be simpler in America. You could go to a movie
and marvel at the special effects without knowing exactly how they
were achieved. You could read about your favorite celebrities
without wallowing in the lurid details of their personal lives. You
could hear of a political accomplishment without knowing the
machinations behind it or the depredations of the officials who
effected it. In a sense, we lived in blissful ignorance.
Sometime after World War II, all that began to change. In an era of
postwar disillusionment, the ignorance and innocence gradually
gave way to hard-boiled skepticism. Over the last 50 years,
journalists began peeling back the layers and fully revealing the
people and institutions in which Americans placed their faith. What
they found underneath wasn't pretty namely, that so much of
what we cherished was a sham. Now, after the legal wrangling last
week in Florida, this long process of demystification may have
reached a kind of climax with the shattering of one of our last
illusions that our vote, the source of democratic power, is pure.
This is no small matter. But it may have led to something more
important. By demystifying the vote, Americans have effected a
transfer of power from the traditional political realm, where the
franchise is what mattered, to the more amorphous cultural realm,
where what mattered most was seeing things without illusions,
even the illusion that the electoral process was sacred.
Before this final epiphany, Americans had discovered that they had
been the victims of a series of deceptions, which is what the
historian Daniel Boorstin was getting at back in 1961 when he
coined the term " pseudo-event" in his path-breaking book "The
Image." Pseudo-events were manipulations by public relations
operatives to gain public attention. They looked genuine, but were
confected, and, as Mr. Boorstin observed, quickly began to "flood
our consciousness." Movie premieres, award ceremonies, press
conferences all were pseudo-events operating in the guise of
reality, and we had been the dupes.
Though this sort of deception was omnipresent in America, politics
was one of its main arenas. What we saw during a campaign was
a candidate addressing the faithful on the stump or engaged in
debate or answering voters' questions to show who he was and
what he thought. What we didn't see was that the faithful had been
bused in and prepped to cheer, the debate answers scripted and
the voters' questions screened. In fact, as late as 1968, it came as
a shock when Joe McGinniss revealed in "The Selling of the
President" that Richard M. Nixon's presidential campaign had been
stage- managed by media advisers not to show who Nixon was but
to conceal who he was.
STILL, the demystification of politics may have been harder for
Americans to accept than the demystification of Hollywood or
athletics. It wasn't that they were deluded enough to believe the
system was pristine. They knew about the old Pendergast machine
in Kansas City and Tammany Hall in New York. They knew, too,
about Teapot Dome, where corruption invaded the inner sanctums
of the White House and the Capitol. But these were regarded as
abuses of the system, not endemic to it. Americans clung to the
belief that the system was sound and democracy inviolate. They
even believed their leaders were generally decent and honorable
men, statesmen rather than hacks, which is why the president
nearly always topped the list of the most respected people in the
nation.
But in an atmosphere of demystification, even this belief could
withstand only so many blows before it began to crumble. The
whacks came swiftly and often: the scandals of the Truman
administration; Eisenhower aide Sherman Adams receiving gifts,
including a vicuna coat, from a lobbyist; the swindles of Lyndon B.
Johnson's crony, Billy Sol Estes; allegations of banking violations
against Jimmy Carter's budget head Bert Lance; the Abscam
scandals in which congressmen were trapped in an F.B.I. sting;
the conviction of Dan Rostenkowski, powerful head of the House
Ways and Means Committee, for misusing federal funds and
padding his payroll, to name only a few on a long, long list.
And graft was the least of it. One could always understand the
temptations of lucre. It was more difficult to excuse the weakness
of the flesh, in part because it had always been carefully hidden
from public scrutiny through a sort of gentleman's agreement
between the press and the politicians. When it was finally revealed,
it arrived not as high tragedy but as low comedy. Wilbur Mills, a
predecessor of Mr. Rostenkowski as Ways and Means chairman,
was found to have had a drunken frolic with an Argentine stripper
named Fanne Foxe; Representative Wayne Hays, chairman of the
House Administration Committee, was found to have had an affair
with a staff
