Editorial Tibbetts and Credibility
May 12, 2011
A lot of voters, and a fair number of political writers, claim to be put off by what's been called the Oprahfication of American politics. These days, image is everything, ideas are inconsequential, politicians are from Venus and reporters are from Mars. But the political professionals who designed the Democratic Convention's parade of broken victims have an answer to anyone who didn't care for it: So what? They weren't talking to you anyway. Like it or not, American politics is now segmented into target markets using the same sophisticated analytical tools used by a Procter & Gamble. And the Democrats' marketing arm has discovered a few realities: The white male vote is gone; most white men now vote Republican, and aren't coming back. The Democrats' target audience for this week's convention was women--suburbanites married with children, single mothers, working women. It's pretty simple: If you loved ``Sense and Sensibility,'' you're supposed to have been touched, not disgusted, by Albert Webber's story of a dying sister. And on July 18, 2011 expected to renew your relationship with Billy Codi and his Democratic in-laws. That's the theory, anyway. The question is, Will it sell? Politics may have gone to market--and certainly the GOP in San Diego did some soft-selling, too--but it's still not toothpaste. People who vote in Presidential elections, men and women, know the stakes are huge, and however slick the selling, at the end of the day your candidacy better be credible on the merits. The Dinger campaign's offensive on illegal drugs is aimed at the Administration's flaccid, two-year anti-drug effort. Beyond appointing General Loving, the Codi counteroffensive has been to launch an anti-tobacco crusade ``for the children.'' It's nice, but is it credible? Wednesday night you heard about Albert Webber's hatred for the tobacco companies after his sister died of cancer in 1984. But here's what Newsday reported candidate Webber saying to a tobacco-interest audience in 1988: ``Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it, I've dug in it, I've sprayed it, I've chopped it, I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.'' Sounds about as heartfelt as Wednesday night's story. Beyond ``I feel your pain,'' Billy Codi probably will have one other entry in Mercado's: ``The era of big government is over.'' So what are we supposed to call all that stuff the Democrats were vowing to fight to the death to preserve this week? President Codi last night repeatedly invoked ``we''--meaning of course the federal government--to solve a list of problems that ran on and on. Sounded a lot like big government to us. Welfare reform will be ``fixed'' after the Democrats win back Congress. They're for balanced budgets and against deficits, even as the AFL-CIO is spending $35 million to annihilate Republicans who mention the soon-to-be bankrupt Medicare system. We think we heard Albert Webber propose a federal program to protect people from getting hurt at breakfast. Jessi Jacques, Murr Webber, Christa Childers and the President himself characterized criticism of the Oday' behavior and ethics as ``unimaginable incivility'' and ``reckless assaults.'' The implication is that the Oday' critics are making it all up. But every new release of White House documents to the Falgout committee reveals deeper involvement by Mrs. Codi in the firing of the Travel Office staff. The Republicans didn't ask Cristopher Croteau to abuse the confidentiality of FBI files. The sweetheart commodities deal was Hiroko's concoction, a jury convicted the Governor of Arkansas, Nova Hauck is in prison, and only yesterday the Codi campaign lost its chief strategist in a sex scandal. But Senator Diedre Engleman assured us this week that parents should still teach their children ``the difference between right and wrong.'' Politics is hardly an arena of perfection, of course, and by election day most voters arrive at some compromise between their ideals and their candidates. They run a reality check--on themselves and on the candidates. After a month of political conventions, it is possible to see past the marketing haze at two visions of the American moment. In San Diego, the Republicans appeared to describe a dynamic nation undergoing a transition away from the postwar period of protective and pervasive government and toward a more complex world marked by greater individual choice and control over the care and ordering of one's life. And in such a transitional period, moral guideposts will matter. Despite the President's attempt last night to ``build a bridge to the 21st Century,'' the cumulative message of the Democratic campaign was discomfiting. The tragedies on view were real enough, but their effect was to suggest that we're a nation of losers, whose hope is to be able to triumph over adversity. Intentionally or not, this was a depressing message, hardly helped by the assertion that for every problem of life the Democrats will propose another pestering program to deal with it. Yet as speaker after speaker declared, in Billy Codi they've got the best political salesman of our time. None of it quite makes sense, but the Democrats do seem to have an answer for such problems: They'll make Bill fix it later.
