Two elaborate, enormous, exhaustively analyzed made-for-television events have concluded within the past month and in sifting through the confetti, the balloon carcasses and the hand-lettered “Bob Dole Rocks” posters littering my living-room floor, I find myself already starting to have a hard time remembering which event was which.
One of them, the Republican National Convention, was a carefully scripted teleplay designed to make conservatism look like the most broad-based movement since the heyday of beef. The other, the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, was a sprawling sporting spectacle turned by NBC into a carefully scripted teleplay designed to make delayed puberty seem heroic.
Why, you may be wondering, the confusion? What kind of TV-addled dullard would be unable to tell the world’s most physically fit humans from Republicans?
Let me count the ways the GOP confab was like the Olympics, many of them probably not experienced by people who limited their convention viewing to the nightly mini-dose offered up by the big three networks or to the Speech of Bob Dole’s Life(Reg. trademark):
1. Bob Costas was everywhere. In San Diego, as opposed to Atlanta, the NBC Olympics anchor ingeniously disguised himself as Susan Molinari. Anytime you changed the channel, there, again, was the pert Costas/Molinari creature occupying the television screen.
2. The music was culled from the compilation album, “Substitutes for Ipecac.” Redneck rocker Travis Tritt was chosen to follow Dole’s big moment with a treacly ditty about how much better things used to be (you know, back when the country had institutionalized racism and sexism). Four Republican senators took the stage together to sing the “This Is My Country/You’re a Grand Old Flag” medley before dedicating, inexplicably, the country number “Elvira” to Elizabeth Dole. Someone named Patty Cabrera pranced about, exhorting the delegates, “Don’t let the energy fall down now,” before launching into a family-promoting R&B lite number. Al D’Amato danced–enthusiastically. It was nearly enough to make you miss the barrage of slick, soulless pop emanating from the Olympics.
3. Sloppy emotionalism ruled the day. In the journalistic preamble to Dole’s big speech Thursday, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw opined that Dole, “this tough guy,” “will probably mist up,” a bit of expert analysis suggesting the Dole camp should, after all, have gone with the campaign slogan, “Bob Dole: His Tear Ducts Are Functional.” Elsewhere, NBC happily ignored most of the rainbow coalition of regular people the Republicans brought onstage, but it did devote time in its shortest-of-all-the-networks broadcasting schedule to interviewing the woman who was willing to speak from the podium Tuesday about her rape. No disrespect to her or her ordeal, but was NBC really thinking the issue she was highlighting–victims’ rights–was one of the gathering’s most significant, or was it thinking of the emotional value of an attractive woman willing to talk about a sex crime?
Cameras from all television outlets, meanwhile, as has become de rigueur, relentlessly probed the crowds in hopes of catching dewy-eyed delegates for reaction shots in the manner of all those closeups of teary Olympic medal winners and losers. The Republican Party could have, and may well have, helped things along by providing TV with a map of delegate allergy sufferers.
4. Two-man volleyball continued. This time, though, the partner of gold medalist Kent Steffes was Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who kicked off his moment on the podium by introducing Steffes and having him stand there, mute, like a trophy wife under strict orders to keep her mouth shut at public functions. “Kent is an example of what freedom is all about,” said Gingrich. Indeed. He makes his living playing volleyball. On the beach. Wearing very few clothes.
5. A former object of public approbation tried to recast his image. The convention’s equivalent to Carl Lewis was none other than the preternaturally pleasant Gingrich, who added sounding like one to the list of traits he shares with teddy bears.
6. The words and images that people at home saw were controlled by one entity. In the Olympics’ case, it was NBC. In the convention’s, it was the Republican Party, which took advantage of the networks’ scant broadcast schedule by packing those brief moments with material that kept analysis to an ineffectual minimum. The networks, highlighted by Ted Koppel pulling “Nightline” out of San Diego, complained that they were being manipulated, but by keeping their convention broadcasts to a shortest-ever average of just under five hours each, they pretty much guaranteed a role as stooges. They did not give themselves adequate time to take issue with, elaborate on, or explain the mitigating subtleties of the barrage of political claims.
7. They came, they saw, they concurred. In Atlanta, NBC’s announcers agreed that anything American was noble and newsworthy. In San Diego, it wasn’t just the delegates singing sweet harmonies. The electronic journalists pretty much did backflips in their efforts to praise Colin Powell and Nancy Reagan, toast Susan Molinari, pat Bob Dole heartily on the back for reading from a prepared text with a minimum of inchoate mumbling, and elevate Elizabeth Dole to a status somewhere between Oprah Winfrey and God. There was a lot more theater criticism taking place than there was journalism. And it was up to people like Comedy Central’s Bill Maher to stick pins in all the hot air. Maher, elaborating on the conventional wisdom that conventions have become infomercials, said Thursday, “That’s probably true because I noticed that during Dole’s speech you could actually call in and buy his influence.”
8. Who needs a rainbow when you’ve got red, white and blue? Beyond wrapping themselves in the flag, the Republicans cut it up in little pieces and turned it into ties, vests, T-shirts, skirts, even carpeting. The Olympics, you may recall, had a similar obsession with the colors of the French flag.
9. There was more discussion of injury and illness than in a hospital corridor. This, after an Olympics dominated by tales of appendicitis attacks and gruesome car wrecks. You get the sense that Bob Dole would rather talk about public policy, or even ballroom dancing, than his war wounds. But nary a speaker at the Republican convention could mention Dole’s name without bringing up his “sacrifice,” his “multiple operations.”
10. Frequent crowd chanting. Unlike the “U.S.A.” refrains in Atlanta, the San Diego Republican chorus of “Dole-Kemp,” heard as background noise on a television broadcast, sounded not unlike the chant Bears fans take up when they feel a referee has made an error in judgment.
However, one key difference between the two spectacles was that at no point during the Olympics did Comedy Central air humorist Al Franken’s visit to an anti-abortion rally to ask the participants if they’ve had homoerotic dreams.
