Pity Clinton. He has the bad luck to be the quintessential politician running for president at a time when many Americans have renounced traditional politics. Voters are sick of it all: the candidates, the press, the primaries, the process. What Perot offers, or at least seems to offer, is something wholly new. Call it Talk Show Democracy: an electronic web of “interactive” television and radio shows, 800 numbers, phone banks, fax machines and computer billboards. By its very nature, Talk Show Democracy attacks multilayered, Washington-based politics, which seems unable to produce gutsy leaders or sensible solutions. “Voters and leaders are sick of mediating institutions, of go-betweens,” says political scientist Christopher Arterton, coauthor of “The Electronic Commonwealth.” “They want direct communication.” Think of it this way: if national politics, as traditionally practiced, was a computer, it would look like an ancient mainframe in a world of high-powered laptops. Talk Show Democracy offers a new, direct outlet for voters’ views. But it is not an entirely healthy development. It can be manipulated by demagogues and special-interest groups alike, creating a tyranny of the majority that could stifle courageous leadership.
The evidence of voter alienation keeps mounting. Clinton won primaries last week in New York, Wisconsin and Kansas, putting himself back on a smoother path to the nomination. But in the Democratic bastion of New York, only about one in four registered voters turned out, and 29 percent of them cast their ballots for Paul Tsongas, who had “suspended” his campaign, and who declined afterward to get back into the race. Nationwide, a Times Mirror poll shows that two thirds of Americans remain dissatisfied with all the candidates, Democrat and Republican. Perhaps the most telling new sign of dissatisfaction with mainstream politics-and Clinton’s weak position in it-arrived late last week. A new ABC News poll showed that in a three-way race this fall, Bush would get 38 percent, Clinton 28 percent and Perot 24 percent. " There’s less confidence in the system than ever before," said Bush adviser Charles Black. Clinton adviser James Carville agreed. “It’s deeper than anything I’ve seen.”
The sources of voter rage, fanned by the talk shows, run from the historically profound to the immediate, even trivial. The recession and colossal federal debt have left voters, already soured on Democratic economic leadership, distrustful of Republican answers as well. A grand national mission, akin to defeating Soviet communism, has yet to emerge. The savings and loan crisis, the House bank scandal and the spectacle of the president and the Congress fighting over perks all add to the air of corruption and hopeless, bipartisan gridlock. “This dual contempt for both parties has almost no precedent,” says author Kevin Phillips. “We’re in a situation where both parties have proved they don’t have answers, and voters can’t see a way out.”
So far, Clinton and his campaign have done nothing to brighten the public mood. Stung since before New Hampshire by press stories about his character, Clinton responded primarily by attacking his opponents. In New Hampshire he depicted Sens. Bob Kerrey and Tom Harkin as pay-raise-grubbing insiders. In Florida he painted Tsongas as a boardroom toady who threatened social security and aid to Israel. He attacked Brown, who finished a disappointing third in New York last week, as a New Age rerun of Ronald Reagan and an equivocator on abortion rights. Clinton, whose handlers admire the slashing style of the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater, demolished them all. But Clinton did nothing to gain respect for himself or the process other than to emerge as the last man standing. " Now they’re wondering why his negatives are so high," said one veteran of Democratic presidential efforts. “One reason is that they’ve run such a negative campaign themselves.”
Clinton’s ingratiating personality, engaging up close, makes many viewer-voters uncomfortable in the age of Talk Show Democracy. He hails from one of the last states, in the South or anywhere else, where politics is practiced person to person in what writer Dudley Clendinen once called the “cousinly style.” Clinton, the Arkansas Bubba with a Rhodes scholarship, at times combines the elbow-rubbing of a Lyndon Johnson with the high-flown rhetoric of a Robert Kennedy or the Biblical cadences of a Martin Luther King Jr. In person, it can be inspirational; on television, it can sound oleaginous or worse, at a time when straight talk is what voters want (page 36). His carefully modulated positions on the issues and his legalistic hairsplitting about his past only make matters worse. Well-educated suburbanites seem the most turned off by him-and they’re now, for the first time, a majority of the electorate. In New York state Clinton lost suburban Long Island to Tsongas. The irony is that “Slick Willie” isn’t really slick at all: he is a natural-born politician who doesn’t seem to know how phony he sometimes sounds.
Perot, by contrast, sounds like a trumpet blast-the last and highest evolution of the Uncandidate. Other would-be uncandidates have fallen short. Patrick Buchanan is a product of talk-show politics, too, but his well-honed identity as a right-wing attack man imprisoned him in his initial conservative base. Tsongas had gobs of straight talk in his famous 86-page booklet, “A Call to Economic Arms,” but he lacked the energy and speaking skill to make it sing. Brown has had trouble credibly posing as an outsider, given his long history of government involvement. Perot is sui generis. He has the independence of a vast fortune, a track record of daring accomplishment in business and no votes or legislation to answer for. It’s as though he were specifically created for the talk shows. “He’s the man on an electronic white horse,” said author Phillips. “He could be the right guy for this incendiary electorate.”
So far, Perot’s campaign has been conducted almost entirely on the talk shows and by telephone. He and his small staff of aides in Dallas mark the course of his campaign in TV time-an electronic campaign trail running parallel to the traditional one on the ground. “The key date is Feb. 20,” explains press spokesperson Sharon Holman. “That’s when he appeared on ‘Larry King Live’.” At that time, Perot announced that he might run for president if volunteers were able to get him on the ballot in all 50 states. The phone calls came in avalanches thereafter. Well over 2 million calls have been logged since, most of them on a state-of-the-art voice-mail phone system that automatically routes calls to volunteers overseeing ballot-petition efforts in individual states. Nationwide, some 700,000 petition signatures are needed. So far, he’s on the ballot only in Tennessee, but his organizers confidently expect to meet their next deadline: Texas on May 11. Perot is going back to his own private New Hampshire this week with a return engagement on “Larry King.”
Though blunt as a punch in the nose, Perot is “very nonthreatening” to voters, says Frank Luntz, Buchanan’s polltaker. “He comes across as an average guy-with two billion dollars in his pocket.” But the bluntness hides a convenient lack of specificity on solutions to the problems he complains about so vividly. With more force than Tsongas could muster, Perot warns of a nation in permanent decline unless it balances the fiscal books. Last week the newspaper editors in Washington pressed Perot for specifics on how he would eliminate the federal deficit, this year running at $400 billion. He courageously proposed to trim $20 billion from social-security and Medicare payments to the wealthiest seniors. But the rest was politically painless talk-show nostrums. He said he would save $100 billion annually with tougher tax collection, though Congress has long since squeezed most of the extra revenue it can from clamping down on tax cheats. He claimed he could save $180 billion a year by eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” in government, the mythical holy grail of the Reagan Years. An additional $100 billion annually would come from cuts in defense spending abroad. “He’s talking a bunch of bull,” snorted Clinton aide Carville.
Still, the Clinton and Bush camps are not taking Perot lightly. The Bush campaign, worried about Texas and monitoring Perot closely, is preparing to paint him as a liberal in CEO’s clothing who’s shaken the federal money tree for years. “He’s got some very liberal views,” says Bush adviser Black, previewing the attack line in the South. “He’s pro-choice, pro-gun-control. He was against the Persian Gulf War, and for a state income tax in Texas. None of that will sell.” The Clinton camp, ruefully expert on media scrutiny, thinks Perot’s thin skin and testy relations with reporters will do him in when his business dealings get a campaign-style going-over. " His press plane will be empty 15 days after it takes off," says Carville. “He will have thrown everybody off of it.” Perot, of course, may not need to bother with a press plane. All he wants and needs is a TV studio. He’s vowed to spend $100 million of his own cash to buy air time and anything else he needs.
Some critics worry less about how he’ll run for office than what he’ll do if he gets there: govern with interactive video plebiscites that he says, would force Congress and the bureaucracy to follow the people’s will. Perot says his administration would stage-what else?-talk shows. In what he calls " Electronic Town Halls," he’d gather experts for televised skull sessions, laying out policy options to the nation. Voter-viewers would punch in their choices. There are several risks to such a concept. For one, notes political scientist Arterton, power would flow to those who shaped and staged the electronic sessions. “The clout would belong to the president’s producer,” he said. “Do we want a TV producer running the country?” Kevin Phillips sees the rise of what he calls “apple-pie authoritarianism” in the name of pure democracy. On the other side of the equation, there would be no “mediating institutions” to brake the power of well-organized interest groups, which could use the technology to rig the system’s responses. Last week the House acted to raise social-security payments by $7 billion for some recipients, a typical election year budget buster that President Bush may not be willing to oppose. Now imagine every member of the American Association of Retired Persons with a modem when it’s time for President Perot’s “Entitlement Town Hall.”
Perot poses a challenge to Clinton that is at once vexing and potentially liberating. Perot’s presence could make it far harder for the Arkansas Democrat to run as the candidate of change. Perot would make him look like a plodder, and even Bush is striving to claim the “mantle of fundamental reform” by posing as the scourge of Congress, the teachers’ unions and the welfare bureaucracy. Clinton, his aides say, must revive the theme with which he launched his campaign: that he has shrewd, proven ideas for how to make the government at once more compassionate and efficient, and Americans more self-reliant and better educated. In the abattoir of the primaries, Clinton’s reform message got lost.
He must be a reformer, however, while at the same time cajoling the party insiders to support him. They remain rather reluctant. A new NEWSWEEK VIP Poll shows that only 52 percent of the party’s convention “superdelegates” are willing to back Clinton just yet, and most of them are in the South. Many of the rest are in Congress, an institution whose members Clinton must be careful about embracing too enthusiastically. “He has a fine line to walk,” said one top Democratic Party insider. “But it’s the kind of thing he’s good at.”
Clinton must reintroduce himself, as well. Television, which has treated him roughly, must somehow be employed to portray something other than a man answering–or not quite fully answering–questions about his personal past. “We have to show who Bill Clinton is, why he wants to be president and what he’d do when he gets there,” says Carville. Clinton is ultimately a believer in the value of government, even the one in Washington. So selling himself means renewing Americans’ faith in the very “mediating institutions” they now scorn. That will be a difficult task in a year when congressmen are fleeing for the exits and Ross Perot’s phone is ringing off the hook. But Clinton has no choice: he has to find his true voice and make people listen to it. If he can’t, the country will change the channel to someone else’s talk show.
Photos: Finding a voice: Clinton at a pro-choice rally in the capital, Perot in Washington last week (IRA WYMAN FOR NEWSWEEK; ROBERT TRIPPETT-SIPA)
Photo: The 1-800 king: Brown’s ‘We the People’ campaign didn’t push him ahead last week (LARRY DOWNING-NEWSWEEK)
..CN.-Talk-Show Democracy
For candidates eager to tap voter anger, the talk-show circuit is the new campaign trail. But this sort of electioneering has less in common with Abe Lincoln than with Milton Bradley.
PLAY THE MEDIA GAME!
Loudmouther local deejays like New York’s Don Imus or syndicated Rush Limbaugh stir up grass-roots dissent. Candidates try out jokes, themes: Jerry Brown used radio to rev up his campaign.
Superresponsible supercitizens call in, watch you squirm or charm. Ross Perot caused a sensation.
DANGER: ‘Hard Copy’ gears up for embarrassing expo
Anchors play peewee Tom Brokaw. (In New Hampshire, WMUR-TV ruled the campaign.) Satellite feeds let you hit 20 media markets at once.
YOU KNOW NAME OF DIARY PAGEANT QUEEN. GAIN 500 VOTES.
It’s duty-bound to be dull, but the show does bestow credibility. Warning: PBS viewers actually think about what you say, but no call-ins to trip you up.
THE GREAT LEAP … Your 800 number goes national
OH NO! Jay Leno makes jokes about your ‘dorky tie’
… TO BIG TIME TV but so do your gaffes
People like reg’lar guy Larry; candidates like his softball questions. (Perot has gotten 1.7 million calls since March appearance.)
KEPT CALLERS ON HOLD TOO LONG. LOSE 50 VOTES.
Things can get dicey. Studio audience is Greek chorus of politics. Key moment in New York: audience boos Phil for asking Clinton more adultery questions.
TESTY REPLY TO SENIOR CITIZEN LOSES 6,000 VOTES.
ADVANTAGE! Let them see the real you!
Lots of stature–Koppel reading full text of Clinton’s draft letter gave Bill a huge lift–but Ted will eat the unprepared for lunch.
ARSENIO SHOW, WITH GUEST MACAULAY CULKIN, AIRS AT SAME TIME. LOSE 100,000 VIEWERS.
The ultimate exposure, the ultimate danger. Clintons used post-Super Bowl audience to contain infidelity charges, but lost Grand Ole Opry vote. Perot piece lunar-launched Texan’s bid
You’ve won the nomination, you’re waving and grinning on every TV channel. Now, get out those ads, gear up for the debates..and go on all the shows AGAIN. (HAMILTON-NEWSWEEK)
