George, Al and the Logic of Survivor
So one should savor those gratifying moments when it's displayed in a blinding flash just how negligible the make-a-difference class is in the larger scheme of things. Such a moment came last week as Al Gore and George W. battled over their respective tax-cut schemes in a series of high-profile appearances in the Midwest and Florida. At the height of this first pitched battle of the presidential campaign?a battle that, after all, involves the very core of American governance?how did the headlines read? "Annoying fat guy from Rhode Island wins on Survivor!" (Or words to that effect.) In The Boston Herald, the Survivor story took up two thirds of page one, and in the Globe it ran above the fold. In The New York Times it ran below the fold?but barely.
There are good reasons for this emphasis on the scheming creep's victory on Survivor. It's probably the first honestly exposed Machiavellian moment that American television viewers have ever been witness to. I saw the only episode of Survivor I've ever seen at the bar of the Wolfgang Puck pizzeria in LAX. It was one of these three-screen airport bars. One screen had Joe Lieberman's speech from the convention and, later on in the evening, Karenna Gore's. Another had the Oakland A's, battling for the AL Wildcard and playing in a close game. You'd think the manly men there that night?the traveling salesmen-types, if they still exist?would be watching one or the other. No way. Everyone was crowded around the third tv, which had weird-looking muddy people jumping up and down in scuba flippers and sitting around eating dinners together. "What the hell is that?" I asked the guy next to me. He was one of those cool, young, wish-I-lived-in-California-instead-of-just-flying-in-from-Tulsa-to-visit-my-girlfriend dudes, in wraparound shades (at night!), a $125 t-shirt, $250 shorts (at night!).
"That's Survivor," he said. As soon as he was sure I understood vaguely how the program worked, he proved himself an object lesson in why it had so many viewers. "I don't understand it, man," he said. "They had this incredible babe on the show and they voted her off. Why did they do that, I wonder?"
"Well," I said, "maybe the less babe-like characters ganged up on the babe."
"Yeah," Bar Guy replied, as if I had unlocked some great mystery for him. "Yeah! that's it!"
Bar Guy was right: he didn't understand it. He understood a lot about fashion, but not much about human life. Bar Guys all over the country watched Survivor because they're so used to seeing human passions pasteurized into propaganda that when real, ugly human passion is presented to them, they're riveted. Politicians will obviously never take note of this.
Both sides make really unreasonable assumptions. Bush's assumption that Social Security funds invested in the stock market will increase more than Social Security funds do now is true enough. Given that we have a pay-as-you-go system, it's almost a truism. But his assumption that such funds can accrue risk-free seems an assault on common sense, since returns on investment are nothing more than returns for taking risks. And how do you sock aside money from the existing system (which is what you have to do to get the magic of compound interest working for you) without weakening the pay-as-you-go system? But Gore's own stand-pat assumptions are just as unreasonable. The Vice President's claims that he can easily pay for a vastly expanded federal government rest on the outlandish assumption that the unprecedented growth of the last decade will continue for the next decade. At the end of the day, it's a wash. This is a race between two big-government centrists putting forward tax plans that are very similar.
Their most important similarity, however?and here's where the Survivor analogy comes in?is that they're both too complicated for the public to understand. Taxes are a drama that fascinates people while leaving them without the foggiest idea of what they're fascinated by. The important thing is to respect the viewer's (or in this case the voter's, which probably amounts to the same thing) sense of drama. The only sin is to look bad on camera.
Last week, George W. Bush looked bad on camera. On balance, I prefer his plan to Gore's, but, again, this is Survivor. The level of ignorance on the subject is so universal that it doesn't matter who has the better plan. If Bush's plan were praised by 20 Nobel laureates, while Gore's were shown to have been written in lipstick on a beer-mat by Tom Harkin's yogi at 4 o'clock in the morning, it wouldn't matter. What mattered last week is that, in appearance after appearance, Bush appeared incapable of thinking intelligently about taxes and Social Security. He didn't understand what his own plan said. He even (in an unfortunate WASPy slip) said "terriers" when he meant tariffs.
Voters who think about it realize that if George W. Bush were elected president, he would bestow on his father one of the greatest gifts a son could ever give his father: he would instantly render Bush Senior merely the second-stupidest man ever to sit in the Oval Office. The key for Bush is to get voters not to think about it. In stumbling on taxes and Social Security, Bush did the only thing he must avoid doing at all costs: he raised the Too-Stupid-to-Be-President issue.
As Bush's intelligence raises more concerns, he and his campaign sound more and more liberal in dismissing them. A Tom DeFrank piece in the New York Daily News had stated that Bush was eager to duck out of the Boston debate scheduled for this fall, and hinted that he sought to change the rules on the others. Last week, The Boston Globe interviewed a Bush adviser, who responded irately that the debates weren't a "real" measure of presidential intelligence: "What does that show of your leadership skills to be in those eighth-grade style debates?" the aide said. "You're never going to be in a situation like that in real life." He sounded like an affirmative-action supporter attacking the use of SATs in college admissions.
Everyone outside of the two party hierarchies complained that the Philadelphia and Los Angeles conventions were nothing more than four-day advertisements. Well, fine. Let's make a relative assessment of the two convention speeches as advertisements, then. Bush's speech, which again was the better of the two, had the goal of luring nontraditional voters into the Republican camp. Thus far it has failed. Bush is still polling low among blacks and Jews.
The main goal of Gore's speech, by contrast, was to throw so much "substance" at the American electorate that Bush would have to respond to it, to lure Bush out of the chitchatty barroom of platitudes and into the dark alley of statistics and logical arguments, where Gore and his surrogates are waiting to coldcock him. Last week shows that that strategy has succeeded beyond Gore's wildest dreams.