Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/081092/0810640.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 126 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 72

The Pornography Of Self-Revelation


By Charles Krauthammer


    Biography in the service of politics is not new to
America. It goes all the way back to Abe Lincoln and the log
cabin and beyond. But as the Democratic Convention demonstrated,
American politics is now seized -- obsessed -- with the politics
of autobiography. The acceptance speeches of Bill Clinton and
Al Gore, orgies of self-revelation, mark the full Oprahtization
of American politics.

    U.S. politicians routinely vie with each other for the
Li'l Abner prize for most humble, most miserable upbringing.
The Democrats in Madison Square Garden were no exception. After
four days of speeches a foreign visitor could be forgiven for
thinking indoor plumbing was a Reagan-era innovation.

    Fine. To mine your own history is one thing. But to
exploit your family is quite another. Gore brought tears to the
eyes of millions with the invocation of his sister's death and
his son's near fatal car accident. Clinton matched him with his
father's fatal car accident and his mother's cancer. In
between, a 14-minute Clinton bio had him telling the world of
12-year-old daughter Chelsea watching Dad's TV confession to
"causing pain in my marriage" and then extending an intimate
daughterly exoneration -- reported to millions.

    It is an odd way to show one's concern for loved ones by
laying out their most private tragedies for all the world to
see. Of course, the point is not love or family but politics:
endearing the candidate to the nation as a man of sensitivity
and caring. Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg, reports the New
York Times, said his polls showed that the candidates' "sense
of revelation" had reduced the impression of their being "too
slick and too political."

    The Clinton speech was practically diagrammed. As his own
spin doctors told the press, the idea was to connect biography
with policy. Hence concern for Mom produces -- presto! --
national health care. Granddad's example triggers commitment to
civil rights. Does anyone really believe that "if you want to
know why I care so much about our children and our future, it
all started with Hillary"?

    This is not to say the feelings conjured up by Gore and
Clinton were invented. There is no doubt how much Gore suffered
for his son. And one can only imagine Clinton's closeness to
his mother. The cynicism lies not in counterfeiting a feeling
but in packaging a genuine feeling into a neat anecdote
contoured for political effect.

    Gore, for example, went so far as to liken America today
to his son lying lifeless in his father's arms with "the empty
stare of death . . . waiting for a second breath of life."
Moving briskly from the pathetic to the political, Gore went on,
``Our democracy is lying in the gutter, waiting for us to give
it a second breath of life."

    Shameful nonsense. Nonsense because no one can possibly
look at America today and genuinely see a people, like little
Albert, "limp and still, without breath or pulse." Shameful
because the analogy is meant to exploit our sympathy for father
Gore's pain to convince us that candidate Gore harbors equally
deep feelings for the health of America. If he does, he is a
lousy father. If he does not, he is a dissimulating politician.

    Of course, Democrats do not have a monopoly on this sort
of bathetic exploitation of family tragedy. In the 1988
campaign, George Bush made a point of referring to the lingering
death of one of his daughters. Two weeks ago, fending off
hecklers, he did it again. Conjuring up the memory of
bereavement is a useful way to humanize one's image. It says,
Yes, I too -- I of Andover and Yale, I of the two middle names
-- have suffered.

    Nor is the politics of biography unique to the U.S. Just
before the British election, the Conservatives broadcast a
10-minute TV commercial that consisted almost entirely of John
Major talking of his past as he rode through the working-class
neighborhoods and passed the modest homes in which he grew up.
Brilliantly done, but still the same stuff.

    And it works. Major won. In Madison Square Garden, tears
flowed. Across the country, the Clinton-Gore polls shot up. Why
does it work? The obvious answer is that it appeals to a
television audience Oprah-trained to demand of its celebrities
a psychic striptease.

    But there is a less obvious answer. Beneath the tears,
even the most moved audience feels a bit of a wince. We know
how debasing it must be to reveal oneself and expose one's
family in the pursuit of power. We know that to use family is
not to embrace it but, at the deepest level, to renounce it.
What the candidate is really saying is this: "To be your
President, I must prove that I am totally devoted to you the
people and to my own ambition. To demonstrate that devotion, I
submit to all the ritual self-denials our political system has
evolved: giving up my private life, opening my finances,
forgoing all normal human contact and -- the final sacrifice --
betraying the most private pains, the deepest secrets of my most
loved ones."

    Exposing oneself and exploiting one's family are, in the
end, simply other forms of debasement that a modern democratic
public now demands before it is prepared to confer high office
on anyone. Like the 5 a.m. factory-gate handshake and the other
absurd ordeals that we demand of our candidates, it is a kind
of revenge of republicanism. We say to our candidates, You want
to be exalted over us? First, some humble pie. You want Hail to
the Chief played whenever you enter a room? First, you will have
to suffer. You want to be President? First, betray your family.

    And they do.