Posted on 02/16/2004 11:56:11 PM PST by JohnHuang2
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has smooth answers for the problems of health care, the economy and just about every issue on the minds of voters. Yet he has been afflicted with a complete loss of words concerning a stunning event about which many Americans can't stop talking.
What is striking, and some say telling, is his silence about the raunch-filled Super Bowl halftime show.
Thousand of families in Kerry's home state had tuned in to watch their home team, the New England Patriots, compete for the professional football championship against the formidable Carolina Panthers, only to be embarrassed during the MTV-produced halftime show when pop singer Justin Timberlake ripped away a piece of singer Janet Jackson's costume to reveal her naked breast.
Hundreds of thousands of angry letters have been sent to CBS, to MTV and to the Federal Communications Commission, which is investigating the matter. Yet Insight received no reply whatsoever to its repeated calls to the Kerry presidential campaign asking what the candidate thinks about the incident.
Kerry is not alone among a Democratic field that has been virtually silent about the halftime spectacle. The exception was former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who called it "no big deal" and marched on to further primary defeats.
After all, the media centers pushing the entertainment envelope toward meaningless sex and vulgarity are located in the "blue" states that voted Democratic in 2000. Kerry's refusal to speak out against the event is not playing well in either the "red" states that voted for Bush or the swing states. With the country divided politically and culturally, some on the right are calling the 2004 election the "1960s last stand," featuring John Kerry (in the role of Gen. George Custer) leading the blue troops, and George W. Bush (as Sitting Bull) leading the red troops.
"Everybody is talking about this, but Kerry is avoiding it for one reason or another," notes Rebecca Hagelin, vice president of communications for the Heritage Foundation and a columnist for WorldNetDaily.com.
She speculates of Kerry: "He knows that if he wants to be the nominee he needs Hollywood funding" and doesn't want to risk offending the industry.
"It seems to me to be a political calculus on his part," says Jim Tonkowich, managing editor of the Wilberforce Forum for the Renewal of Culture. "Whether he thought it was offensive or just no big deal, his brain told him it was a lose-lose situation. [He thought], 'No matter what I say, I'm going to get slapped by someone.'"
The growing vulgarity and coarsening of popular culture doesn't have to be a Republican or even a conservative issue. The late politically liberal entertainer Steve Allen wrote many books and articles about what he called the slide "down the moral sewer."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who just dropped out of the presidential race, also has held Hollywood accountable for excessive sex and violence. But many Democratic activists see criticism of the anything-goes message of the entertainment elites as prudish.
For instance, former Clinton aide and liberal journalist Sidney Blumenthal referred to Lieberman in his column on the liberal Website Salon.com as a "scold."
And Kerry naturally is taking into account the concerns of his party's left-wing base. Indeed, in a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, a premier entertainment trade publication, the Massachusetts senator finessed his answers about the moral content of today's entertainment while, ironically, making clear his moral outrage at the rise of conservative media.
When asked by the magazine if the media have "gone too far with their depictions of sex and violence," Kerry ducked.
"Look, are there movies that I find objectionable on a personal level?" he replied. "Yeah. But you don't have to go see them. I think an honest appraisal suggests that it is not the government's place, nor will it ever succeed in eliminating something people want to do or see."
He added, "I think a lot of politicians tend to blame Hollywood and other people for some things that they are unwilling to take reasonable measures to deal with on a public level."
Then, in the same interview, Kerry abandons his straddle between libertarian and libertine to threaten the preferences of those who wish to resist the prevailing Hollywood wisdom by listening to conservative talk radio or viewing Fox News.
Kerry makes clear that he supports reinstating something like the old FCC "fairness doctrine" of the '60s, which if reinstated would force radio and TV stations to provide free response time to the popular paid programming of conservative talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh or commentators Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.
"The loss of equal-time requirements, I think, was a blow," Kerry lamented. "I was for equal-time requirements. Because I think what's happened is that we got networks that are almost providing a single point of view, and I don't think that is wise. The competitive instinct between entities and the bottom line makes the courage to carry counterprogramming very difficult for people, and the trend appears to confirm that."
To conservative media experts with whom Insight spoke, Kerry's reference to "networks that provide a single point of view" was a coded reference to Fox News. And they warn that Kerry's chilling comments are a threat to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and apply it not only to radio but to cable-TV programming. (The Kerry campaign refused response to Insight's queries on this issue as well.)
Experienced conservative broadcasters say they know all too well that, because of the cost of compliance with demands by liberals for response time, the Fairness Doctrine as utilized by liberals in the '60s acted as a barrier to popular conservative programming, allowing the establishment liberal bias of the network media to dominate the airwaves.
But conservatives aren't the only ones with this point of view. In his book, "The Good Guys, the Bad Guys and the First Amendment," liberal former CBS News president Fred Friendly documented how the Democratic Party organized campaigns in the 1960s to harass conservative radio personalities with the Fairness Doctrine. He calls the doctrine a violation of the First Amendment.
Although some conservatives initially opposed the Reagan administration's repeal of the policy in 1987, thinking the liberal electronic media would shut out their voices even more effectively, cable TV and the newly freed markets of the airwaves responded to public demand with conservative commentators such as G. Gordon Liddy, Limbaugh and Hannity, providing a counterbalance to the establishment liberal media.
When Democrats tried to bring back the Fairness Doctrine in the early years of the Clinton administration, the conservatives led their millions of listeners in a successful letter-writing campaign.
But now, because of a recent congressional rollback of proposed FCC regulations regarding media ownership, some liberals and Democrats feel emboldened, says political strategist Jeffrey Bell, a principal in the lobbying firm Capital City Partners. Even some conservatives, such as Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center, joined in the fight against the FCC's proposal to lift the ownership caps for broadcast networks.
The FCC wanted to raise the percentage of the American audience a network could reach through the stations it owned from 35 percent to 45 percent. In a compromise, Congress fixed the cap at 39 percent as liberals clearly expressed their intention to stop conservative Fox News from getting more powerful.
Kerry said in the interview with the Hollywood Reporter that he is "against the FCC decision" to allow expansion of markets. Many opponents of the FCC proposal to raise the cap to 45 percent are calling their successful attempt to stop it a "first step," with the next steps including restoration of the Fairness Doctrine to eliminate the conservative commentators.
"I do think they lament the rise in conservative talk radio, and they want to get back to a time when, if somebody said something conservative on the air, you had to provide equal time, which made it impossible to have that kind of programming," Bell says.
Now, Bell adds, Kerry's words in the Hollywood Reporter, which make clear he "certainly does" want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine to drive conservatives off the air, may be just the thing to get Bush's base riled.
"If people think that government reregulation is going to close down their options to listen to talk radio or cable, then I think they're not going to be very favorable to Mr. Kerry's point there," he says. "The Democrats' base is motivated. Things like this could make the Republican base just as motivated, if he's trying to take away people's ability to listen to the type of broadcast they want to."
Encouraging acceptance of permissiveness in media and entertainment while attempting to put restrictions on the airing of the conservative views seems to many on the right to be a legacy of the New Left from the 1960s. And they tell Insight they see Kerry as one who has been very much a part of that culture.
After honorably serving in Vietnam to the rank of lieutenant junior grade, Kerry joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a motley group of pacifists and schoolboy Lenins declaring its commitment to revolutionary change and funded by "Hanoi" Jane Fonda.
In the early 1970s, in congressional testimony and in his book The New War, Kerry accused American GIs of systematic atrocities, cruelties and war crimes -- for which he gave not a shred of evidence. He made a public show of throwing his medals over a White House fence, later claiming to have thrown only ribbons or someone else's medals when his own turned up on display to impress visitors to his political office.
Since Kerry repeatedly has politicized the Vietnam War and joined in the fabricated Democratic smear that questioned Bush's National Guard service, he is said by his critics to have opened the gate to making the personal political. Thus, say reporters, he should not be surprised if issues concerning his divorce, his marriages to two rich women, alleged infidelities with very young women and his dating of Hollywood sex bombs such as Morgan Fairchild drift into public discussion. He is, after all, an icon of the '60s generation.
Certainly Kerry's New Left background still shows in the coarseness of his attack on supporters of the war and his ascribing of sinister or racist motives to his opponents.
Gary Aldrich, president of the Patrick Henry Center and author of Thunder on the Left, was the FBI agent assigned to the White House under Bill Clinton and has been a close observer of political Washington for many years.
Aldrich tells Insight: "I think as time goes by we're going to see more and more information come out about Kerry's hard-left political leanings, including the so-called peaceful war protesting, which was code for aligning himself with the harshest Marxist rhetoric in town."
A '60s man in every aspect of his rhetoric, Kerry openly used the F-word to criticize Bush in a November interview with Rolling Stone. Defending his vote to authorize presidential use of military force in Iraq, Kerry exclaimed, "Did I expect George Bush to f-- it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did."
Of course, politicians are not saints, and in 2000 candidate Bush referred to New York Times reporter Adam Clymer in a whispered aside as an "a-hole" when he didn't know a microphone was turned on to make the remark audible.
But what makes the Kerry vulgarity different is that it had all the marks of being planned to make him seem daring to a young audience. Kerry spokesman David Wade told the New York Post that use of the word reflected the fact that Bush's Iraq policy "makes John Kerry's blood boil."
But a presidential scholar for a liberal think tank criticized the Kerry sixtiesism. "It's so unnecessary," Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution told the Post. "In a way it's a kind of pandering to a group he sees as hip."
Reflecting its blue-states base, coarseness in language increasingly is common at Democratic Party events. At a fund raiser for Howard Dean in New York in December, "pro-Dean comics took the stage ... and competed to see how often they could use the F-word in the same sentence," reports the New York Post's Deborah Orin.
Kerry also is being said to pander to the style and febrile hysteria of the '60s generation by leering suggestions that Attorney General John Ashcroft is a racist tool of a WASP elite. At a September debate of the Democratic candidates in Baltimore, Kerry opened with this canned zinger: "I look at this audience and there are people from every background, every creed, every color, every belief, every religion. This is, indeed, John Ashcroft's worst nightmare here."
Many, including this magazine, have criticized Ashcroft and parts of the USA Patriot Act which he defends. But only extremist '60s-era activists have impugned his motives or tarred him as a racist. Indeed, Ashcroft's top lieutenants include blacks, Jews and Asians.
One of the main authors of the USA Patriot Act was Viet Dinh, a Vietnamese immigrant who now teaches at Georgetown Law School. But Kerry used a similar line in Iowa in January when, ironically, "the audience was almost all white," according to the Boston Globe's Peter Canellos.
Kerry's New Left commitment also continues to show in his minimizing of Saddam Hussein, says Aldrich, just as his fellow '60s radicals once minimized the intentions of Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and other communist terrorists in Southeast Asia.
Kerry has called Saddam's dictatorship a mere "law-enforcement" problem. In late January, when campaigning in South Carolina, the former activist for Vietnam Veterans Against the War decreed the fight against terrorism should be only "occasionally military."
And he insisted that the response to Sept. 11 should have been "primarily a law-enforcement and intelligence operation that requires cooperation around the world -- the very thing this administration is worst at."
To Aldrich, this was Kerry's "Mondale moment," comparing it to Walter Mondale's 1984 promise to raise taxes. "In that moment of clarity, you see exactly where you would be if this guy were in the White House," Aldrich says. "You'd be right back to the good-old, bad-old days of Bill Clinton, where we're allowing terrorists to basically roam freely if they avoid the service of the subpoena. 'We'll try to catch you with a subpoena or handcuffs, otherwise you're free to roam the world, blow up buildings, whatever you want.' This is what Clinton had for us, and this is what Kerry wants to bring back."
Even so, and '60s throwback or not, it isn't entirely correct to characterize Kerry as "antiwar." He supported military intervention in Haiti to keep Marxist strongman Jean-Bertrand Aristide and backed the war in Kosovo during the Clinton administration. Of the war in Kosovo, Kerry wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed piece in 1999 that "there is cause enough for American intervention on the basis of security issues, our commitment to NATO, and overwhelming humanitarian needs. ... Kosovo is not another Vietnam - unless we decide to make it so, for lack of resolve or a willingness to submit to the terror of [Serbian leader Slobodan] Milosevic and leave our humanitarian mission unfinished."
Columnist Charles Krauthammer recently addressed this seeming inconsistency by the '60s generation in an address after receiving the prestigious Irving Kristol award from the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute.
"How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks?" he asked. "They don't have an aversion to the use of force. They have an aversion to the use of force for pure national interest."
In other words, observers say, Eurocentrics such as Kerry and his cohorts still believe the United States is too immature to fight a war if one or more European countries object. Kerry's views really haven't changed that much since as a candidate for Congress he told the Harvard Crimson in 1970, "I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations."
When the Crimson recently republished those remarks, Kerry's campaign had no comment other than to note that the senator has tended to support the autonomy of the U.S. military in recent speeches.
On both cultural issues and the war on terrorism, the pundit consensus now is that the United States is about evenly divided. But this may not be the case. While the '60s ideas and values no doubt still are a powerful influence on popular culture, largely manufactured and sold from the blue states, there appears still to be a moral consensus even beyond the heartland of the red states that puts Kerry and many Democrats outside of the American mainstream.
A recent University of Michigan survey shows 68 percent of Americans support the recently enacted ban on partial-birth abortion -- a Bush-backed ban that Kerry voted against. And in a January poll conducted by Zogby International on behalf of the conservative group Focus on the Family, 96 percent of U.S. parents said abstinence was the best sexual option for teens, bringing to mind the adage that a conservative is yesterday's liberal who now has a teen-age daughter.
In fact, culture seers on the red-states side of the blue-states studios and editorial board rooms tell Insight they expect the Super Bowl provocation to be remembered as a cultural watershed. Up to that point, networks had been asking, "How dirty can we get? How close can we get to HBO without crossing the line?" Lowell "Bud" Paxson, chief executive officer of the family-oriented PAX TV network, tells Insight. Now, he and others say, parents are pushing back.
"I was watching it with a group of friends who are sort of open-minded types who had seen it all, and we were appalled," says Christian Josi, a jazz musician who performed at the prestigious AOL Time Warner holiday party in Washington and who is a former executive director of the American Conservative Union.
The key in both the halftime show and some of the commercials was that the provocation came at a family event.
"If you see chicks kissing chicks on the MTV awards, it's one thing because that's the place where all the freaks go, and it's not as shocking," Josi says. "The Super Bowl is an entirely different animal. It's very much a family event, during the dinner hour, watched by 80 million. Not to sound prudish, but I think the country holds artists at the Super Bowl to a higher standard."
And recent evidence suggests that Americans are rewarding artists who do hold themselves to that higher standard. Norah Jones, a singer and pianist who beautifully mixes the sounds of country, jazz and soul, has sold 8 million copies of her album Come Away With Me, even though it doesn't contain one dirty word or explicit description of a sex act.
Timberlake, by contrast, sold 3 million copies of his recent album. Jones, whose highly anticipated new album Feels Like Home was just released, also shies away from Britney Spears' skimpy outfits and Kama Sutra poses. And the highest grossing recent movie is The Return of the King, the third from The Lord of the Rings, a series of films that, like the J.R.R. Tolkien novels on which they are based, celebrate valor in a just war. In fact, movie critic Ted Baehr notes that PG-rated movies now consistently outperform R-rated films at the box office.
And one more sign of America's positive turn in entertainment from discordant pop culture is singer Beyonce, the one entertainer to come out of the Super Bowl universally praised. She wore a crisp suit, was escorted by a top Marine general, and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" as a deeply felt love song to her country.
In interviews before the game, she talked about how thrilled she was to have this honor. "She went to great lengths to be respectful in her appearance and the way she sang the national anthem," Josi says. "I think she is ultimately going to be the one who comes out the winner in this whole process." Not coincidentally, Beyonce's group, Destiny's Child, performed at a youth concert celebrating George W. Bush's inauguration in 2001.
So again, even without the cultural issues that triggered the move to have Clinton impeached, the moral outlook of the '60s generation may play a significant role for voters in the elections as one of the era's personifications, John F. Kerry, runs for president.
Says Julia Hughes Jones, an independent-minded Republican whose 1993 switch as state auditor from Democrat helped make Arkansas a two-party state that ended up in Bush's column in 2000, "People are looking for somebody who has a sense of morality and who has a sense that character is important."
Thanks for posting this. The comment in red is a stringent warning. The problem is that, it's our team against 'their's'....thats the thought process of the bulk of American voters. THE requirement of winning is to get the truth out, and back it up with verifiable references....otherwise, we are shooting in the dark.
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