It's My Party (12 page)

Then the press went to work. It harped on a single exchange. Suggesting that Reagan was no tougher on terrorists than Carter
had been, Ferraro had compared the 1983 bombing of our embassy in Lebanon with the 1979 taking of hostages in Iran. Replying,
Bush had attempted to draw a distinction between the two incidents, beginning his answer, “Let me help you with the difference,
Mrs. Ferraro, between Iran and the embassy in Lebanon.” Ferraro had grown indignant, accusing Bush of patronizing her. The
television commentators replayed the exchange again and again, describing the vice president’s demeanor toward Ferraro as
if he had been a Viking and she a nun. Within an hour the polls began to change. Bush’s margin of victory narrowed. A poll
on
Night-line
showed that Bush had won by only 9 percent. Later polls showed Bush’s margin of victory shrinking still more. By the following
morning, the
Washington Post
was able to report no clear winner.

As a demonstration of the effect the press has on voters, the incident could hardly have been neater if it had been designed
in a laboratory. When they saw the debate for themselves, Americans reached one conclusion. When they saw the debate through
the medium of the press, they reached a different conclusion. It was, to use Pete Wilson’s phrase, the goddamdest thing.
^*

* * *

Pondering the relationship between Republicans and the press, I reached two conclusions. The first is that campaign finance
reform will never be enacted as long as Republicans can stop it. The second is that even though as I write Senator John McCain
is leading in the contest for the Michigan primary, McCain is unlikely to grasp the Republican presidential nomination. Permit
me to explain.

As we have seen, Republicans are convinced that the press skews the political contest against them. Consider, for example,
John Morgan, the friend who used to work across the hall from me when I was writing speeches for Vice President Bush. John
is now a political consultant. Although the GOP has the support of the great mass of ordinary Americans, John believes, the
press remains a serious tactical problem. “We’re like a vast army,” John says. “But we have no air coverage because we don’t
control the media. The media comes over and sweeps down like dive-bombers, and it scatters us.”

What flak can Republicans put in the air to combat the media dive-bombers? The answer is simple. Advertising. “If we as Republicans
don’t get our message delivered properly through the national media,” Congressman Christopher Cox of California told me, “then
we have to make up for that fact with paid advertising.” Republicans believe they have no choice. They must resort to selling
themselves the way Coke sells soft drinks or Procter & Gamble sells soap. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich put it
this way: “Republicans are on defense for one year and ten-and-a-half months out of every two-year cycle. It’s only when you
go to paid advertising in the last six weeks [of campaign season] that Republicans are able to be on offense.”

There’s just one problem with paid advertising. You have to pay for it. In every election cycle, Republicans thus find themselves
in need of a great deal of money. Under the current regime of election laws, they’re able to raise it. But under the reforms
now being proposed, they wouldn’t. So? So Republicans block the reforms. There is a second and nobler reason for opposing
the reforms than the damage they would do to Republican electoral prospects: As the Supreme Court has held, political money
is essential to political speech, so the reforms would pose a direct threat to the First Amendment. Republican officeholders
do make this argument. They make it every time they vote to block or water down another campaign finance reform. But even
as they’re talking about free speech, it is easy to suspect, they’re thinking about all the money they still need to raise
before election day.

The exception, of course, is presidential candidate Senator John McCain of Arizona. McCain, as everyone knows, is ardent in
the cause of campaign finance reform. He has said that “all of us have been corrupted by the process … where big money has
bought access which has bought influence.” No doubt McCain believes this assertion. But he cannot adduce any evidence to support
it. In study after study, political scientists have found that officeholders vote according to two factors, the views they
themselves hold and the views their constituents hold. The sources of their campaign money play no demonstrable role. Perhaps
the most famous studies are those that examine the voting patterns of senators and representatives after they announce their
intention to retire. No longer in need of campaign money, these officeholders suddenly find themselves in the position of
congressional monks, owing allegiance to no one but their maker. Yet none changes his voting patterns. Either the officeholders
in these studies go on voting to please special interests for the fun of it, an obviously dubious proposition, or they were
never voting to please special interests in the first place. Politicians don’t go looking for contributors to whom they can
sell themselves. Contributors go looking for politicians who already hold views they find amenable. Policy comes first. The
money follows.

Since Senator McCain’s home state of Arizona is one of the few places in the country in which the press lacks the usual liberal
bias—to this day, for example, the
Arizona Republic
, once owned by Dan Quayle’s grandfather, Eugene Pulliam, remains moderate to conservative—John McCain might find that he
could win elections just as easily after the passage of campaign finance reform as before. Very few other Republicans would
fare as well. “I like John,” Pete Wilson said to me about McCain. “But his reform would destroy our party.”

He will be hard-pressed to win the support of a party in which so many officeholders and activists see him as a threat. I
grant that he might prove me wrong. But if he does, study the faces of the delegates to the GOP convention when McCain delivers
his acceptance speech. Behind their smiles, many of them will be grinding their teeth.

A
t any given time, political scientists estimate, only about 20 percent of voters belong to a party other than the one in which
they grew up. (For the purpose of these statistics, political scientists treat Independents as a party in their own right.)
This figure implies that in any given election year—the time when most of those who change their party registration do so—only
a tiny proportion of voters, perhaps as little as 3 or 4 percent, turn their backs on the party in which they were raised
to join another party instead. Yet tiny as their numbers are, these voters prove crucial to both of the major parties. Now
at rough parity—registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans, but fewer Democrats vote, offsetting the Democratic
advantage—the Republican and Democratic parties can each achieve the majority status it craves only by winning converts.

Working on this book, I thought for a moment that I could imagine what it would be like to leave the GOP to join the Democratic
Party instead. It would be great. I’d be leaving the uncool for the cool, the dour and straitlaced for the free-spirited,
the hard-hearted for the compassionate. Looking into the mirror as I shaved each morning, I’d say to myself, “You see that?
That is the face of a man who
cares
.” Then I recognized a problem. To keep members of my family from hearing about my switch secondhand, I’d have to tell them
about it myself. As my journal entry indicates, I couldn’t imagine doing so. I just couldn’t.

That made me wonder. If I had been unable to imagine going from the GOP to the Democratic Party, what must it be like to go
the other way? From cool to uncool, from free-spirited to dour and straitlaced, from compassionate to hardhearted? Why would
anybody do it? Once you found a few who had, could they tell you anything the GOP could learn from?

I investigated the matter by talking to three converts I happened to know. I had never given their conversion to the Republican
Party any thought. Now I saw that each had done something noteworthy, all the more so since each had grown up in an especially
Democratic tribe. One was a Jew, one was an African-American, and one was a Catholic.

As he conducts his radio show, a call-in show that reaches more than a hundred markets, Michael Medved sits at a table, a
microphone in front of him, earphones on his head. His eyes remain in constant motion. He glances down at notes and newspaper
clippings that lie strewn across the table, left to a computer screen that lists the topics that callers, waiting on hold,
want to discuss, then up to a pane of glass, behind which stand his producers, to whom he signals with nods and hand gestures.
One of Medved’s legs jitters up and down, as if dispensing opinions for three hours a day represents an insufficient outlet
for his energy. I sat in his booth with him for ninety minutes, just half of one of his broadcasts. In that time Medved took
up more than a dozen topics.

He railed against the bombing of Serbia, which was then still taking place. By attacking Russia’s historic ally, Medved argued,
we were strengthening the hands of the anti-western faction in the Russian parliament. “Here we win this historic victory
in the Cold War—thank you, President Reagan—here we win this historic victory over what was rightly called the ‘evil empire,’
and now we’re in danger of bringing the Communists back to power.” He aired a report on President Clinton’s visit to Seattle
earlier that afternoon, playing a chant that protesters shouted when Clinton was delayed: “He’s late. He’s late. He must have
had a date.” He attacked the Republicans in Congress, not from the left, but from the right, agreeing with a caller who thought
the GOP was failing to stand up for itself. “You’re right,” Medved said. “The Republicans are behaving like a puppy that’s
been hit on the head with a newspaper.” He reviewed two made-for-TV movies,
Joan of Arc
and
Noah’s Ark
, and the new
Star Wars
movie,
The Phantom Menace
, attacking his fellow movie critics, who were all panning the
Star Wars
film, as “elitist.” “There are so many
wonderful
characters in this thing,” he proclaimed. “The film is
terrific.”
Medved mocked the Canadian province of British Columbia, where the police had been handing out free cell phones to prostitutes,
hoping for leads on a serial killer. “Those wacky Canadians. They’ve done it again.” The police should be rounding the girls
up, Medved argued, not giving them phones they could use to book more business. And he railed against Jesse Ventura’s just-published
autobiography, in which Ventura admitted that he didn’t wear underwear. “I mean, do we really need to know this?”

As pugnacious a conservative as Rush Limbaugh, Medved nevertheless differs from Limbaugh in several regards. Whereas Limbaugh
is grandiloquent, Medved prefers a light touch, engaging in conversations with his callers instead of lecturing them, and
whereas Limbaugh sticks to politics, Medved comments regularly on popular culture, making book, television, and film reviews
a staple of his show. But the most marked difference between the two probably lies in the way they deal with religion. Limbaugh
ordinarily mentions religion only obliquely, seldom doing more than acknowledging his belief in traditional values. Medved
talks about religion openly. When he reviewed
Joan of Arc
, for instance, Medved praised the respectful manner in which the movie portrayed Joan’s faith. Medved’s callers respond in
kind, talking about religion just as openly as he does. Medved regularly receives calls from avowed Christians, the kind who
know their Bible verses. The day I listened in, one of Medved’s callers worried about Democratic moral standards. “How would
I say it?” the caller said. “Democrats promote an immoral lifestyle.” Another caller commented on the distribution of cell
phones to prostitutes in British Columbia. “Scripture is real clear on this, Michael,” the caller said. “ ‘Woe to a nation
that calls ‘evil’ ‘good’ and ‘good’ ‘evil.’’ ” Even some of Medved’s sponsors are Christian. Among ads for “Comfort Airbeds,”
AMICA Insurance, and Amazon.com, Medved ran an ad for Crosswalk.com, “the ultimate site for Christians on the Web.”