John Rapley - FOREIGN FOCUSI WAS listening to Ben Affleck at the Democratic Convention the other day chide the media for taking an obsessive interest in the private lives of celebrities, insisting that movie stars had weightier opinions the public wanted to hear and I thought, Puh-leeze: Ben old boy, Hollywood doesn't pay you millions to talk politics, it only wants to know about J.Lo, so get with the programme.
And that programme, to judge from the convention, is for Hollywood to take control of U.S. politics. American conventions have become highly-scripted affairs, so lacking in drama and spontaneity that the major networks scarcely cover them anymore. They are just showcases for the candidates, in which every camera angle is worked out ahead of time and every speech is 'edited' to remove off-message content. Poor Howard Dean, the renegade who fired up the party earlier this year, looked like he'd been squeezed into an ill-fitting suit for his speech. His many loyalists throughout the hall it was said they had dated Dean but married Kerry had to make their own signs with pens and loose paper. All the Dean posters were banned at the entrance.
The apogee of this marriage of Hollywood and Washington came in Bill Clinton's speech on Monday night. His delivery was perfect, his timing impeccable, and he worked the audience into raptures. But afterwards, you kind of felt like you'd left a fast-food drive-through: the presentation was appealing, plenty of flavour-enhancers were added, but once you wolfed down the meal you felt like you hadn't eaten anything. Probably because you hadn't. The cause of these anodyne conventions and in a few weeks the Republicans will probably substitute some country-and-western singer for Ben Affleck, but stick with the same approach is that everyone is trying to reach for the 'swing' voter. Committed voters who really care about issues have already made up their minds. And since the uncommitted are channel-surfing, you need to catch them with slick adverts and clever marketing. Style over substance.
DIVISION
The difficulty in America today is that, as one political commentator joked the other night, there are maybe nine or 10 swing voters left in the country. Going into this election, America is more divided than it has been in decades. In assessments of the candidates, the gap between Democrats and Republicans is wider than it has ever been. One pundit recently joked that George W. Bush's promise in 2000 to be a uniter rather than a divider came true: Democrats so dislike him that they have temporarily buried their many differences and rallied behind a candidate few of them really care for.
On the plus side, the result of the depth of feeling in America today is that far more people are taking an interest in this election than was the case in 2000. Despite the efforts of the gatekeepers to keep it off the convention floors, substance is creeping back into U.S. politics. A real debate is resuming. Both parties, and especially the Democrats, are confident that they have locked up their core voters. Now they want to go after the uncommitted. Herein lies a problem. The political divisions in America are most manifest among party activists. Sociologists who research the views of the wider public find that in fact ordinary Americans are much less divided than their parties. This presents a dilemma. A political leader can appeal to the centrist majority, as Bill Clinton did in the 1990s. The problem is that in so doing, he risks alienating his partisan base with a watered-down message: Mr. Clinton bequeathed Al Gore a demoralised and divided party in 2000.
But if, on the other hand, the leader tries too hard to shore up his core constituency, he risks alienating the centre. However, to win an election, any leader needs both: there are not enough voters in the core to put him in office, and the centrist voters are too uncommitted to turn out in sufficient numbers. It comes down to a balancing-act. Conventions become delicately choreographed affairs, in which loyalists are soothed off-camera while prime time is given over to the centre. If it all has the air of theatre, it's because that's what it is. And the winner is...
John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
