The Weekly Standard hits Clinton from the right, The Nation whacks him from the left, while The New Republic swings and misses
By DAN KENNEDY
The political journal of opinion is an odd creature. Ostensibly aimed at persuasion through the careful marshalling of fact and argument, it more often than not preaches to the choir, telling its readers that they hold the opinions they hold because they're smarter and more virtuous than everyone else. Challenging the beliefs of one's audience is a fine idea in theory, but do you want to shell out $40 or more for a subscription only to be regularly told that you're wrong?
With the Democrats gathered in Chicago, the Big Three national opinion weeklies -- The New Republic, The Nation, and The Weekly Standard -- really have a chance to strut their stuff.
The current issues of the left-liberal Nation and the conservative Standard deliver the goods with impressive cover packages attacking Bill Clinton for being (take your pick) a welfare-mom-bashing, environment-trashing, corporation-coddling sellout or a shameless, lying weasel who'll cast off his moderate image in favor of an amoral, gay-embracing, Hollywood-style liberalism as soon as the hapless Bob Dole has been dispatched this November.
Curiously, though, The New Republic, whose centrist New Democrat orientation most closely matches that of Clinton, is AWOL. Oh, you wouldn't know it to look at the cover, headlined "Friends: Who's at Bill Clinton's Party?" But it turns out to be a case of false advertising: Inside is a package presumably tied to the convention that turns out to be as nourishing as the birthday cake the corpulent Clinton is inhaling in the lead illustration.
How soft is TNR on the Democrats? Try this: Fawning profiles of keynote speaker Evan Bayh and Democratic National Committee chairman Chris Dodd; a report on the unlikely comeback of convention impresarios Harry and Linda Thomason, last seen mucking about Travelgate; and a humorous (but not very) piece on Clinton's 50th-birthday party, by Harper's contributing editor David Samuels, that describes Clinton as "the president of pop," who has embraced "the corporate-sponsored Hollywood image-making that has turned our democratic system into telegenic mush." Biting, yes; new, no. At least the profile of Bayh, by the Chicago Tribune's Michael Tackett, makes the case that Indiana's conservative governor would be an attractive presidential candidate in 2000, adding a much-needed dollop of relevance. Otherwise, it's hard to find anything here that speaks to the ideological and spiritual struggle now underway at the core of the Democratic Party.
By contrast, The Nation and The Standard offer plenty of meat and bile.
"This is a time of liberal discontent," The Nation declares, and it amasses a lengthy bill of particulars. Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer blasts Clinton for embracing the welfare-reform bill, and the incomparably vicious Alexander Cockburn introduces into the record a hard-to-follow but sleazy tale of Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt ("Babbitt the Magnificent") selling out Yellowstone to oil-company interests. Chicago Seven veteran Tom Hayden and leftist economist Jeff Faux suggest a way out of the party's current addiction to the corporate status quo. And Michael ("TV Nation") Moore offers as succinct a description as you'll find of the joy of voting: "Year after year, we drag our ass into some smelly elementary school gym and vote for the evil of two lessers."
Unlike The Nation, which despises the Democrats almost as much as the Republicans, The Weekly Standard is openly and rabidly pro-GOP, which if nothing else adds a sports-page-like clarity to its critique. My favorite convention-special piece is a review by senior editor Andrew Ferguson of Bill Clinton's awful new book, "Between Hope and History: Meeting America's Challenges for the 21st Century." (No, I haven't read it, but with a title like that . . . ) Ferguson is hilarious in imagining how Clinton arrived at the tortured language used in the acknowledgments to describe the contribution of "public policy consultant" William E. Nothdurft, who, after all, merely wrote the damn thing. The package is rounded out with a look at the pro-Clinton agenda of the purportedly nonpartisan gay Human Rights Campaign (marred by some unattractive mincing by staff writer Matt Labash) and an essay by criminologist John J. Dilulio, Jr. on the holes in Clinton's crime record.
Still, The New Republic's absence is sorely missed. As the most eclectic of the weeklies, it often offers a unique synthesis that eludes its more ideologically rigid competitors. Its Republican convention package was anchored by a brilliant John B. Judis analysis of the fissures within the GOP. A Judis exegesis on the Democrats' neoliberals, paleoliberals, old liberals and nonliberals would have been a welcome addition to this week's conversation.
Presumably, new editor Michael Kelly, who arrives from The New Yorker in November, understands that his most important task will be to restore TNR to consistent timeliness and relevance. With former editor Andrew Sullivan gone and executive editor Margaret Talbot on maternity leave, Kelly's debut can't come a moment too soon.
Dan Kennedy is the media reporter for the Boston Phoenix.
Sound and vision from the engineer who keeps the airwaves over Chicago's convention unjammed
By MARC HERMAN
Just tell them that when you found me I was slumped over and bow-legged," says Ron Hacker, the "frequency cop" at the Democratic National Convention. Hacker is king of the airwaves in Chicago this week: Every electronic transmission in this most electronic of media events goes through him. If there is anyone who understands the volume of media here in Chicago, Hacker does, and he and his team of assistants are working too hard.
There are well over 2,000 radio frequencies under Hacker's administration this week, he says, 2,000 slices of air over Chicago that the networks, convention organizers, camera crews and everyone else with a mike and a story to tell wants to use for their putatively all-important transmissions.
An electronics engineer who has worked large events before, Hacker spent a year bargaining with everyone who might possibly represent a source of flowing radio waves during the convention, figuring out how to get them all dialed in. You see, he says, the sky is not infinite. To an engineer, it's a spectrum of bandwidths, the equivalent of colors in a rainbow. Every media organization at the convention, he says, wants to own one of those widths, their own exclusive piece of the sky over which to send their news and internal communications. They include reporters on the floor talking to the anchor booths in the skyboxes, producers in back offices piping directions to their assistant's headsets and mikes beaming words a few feet to the videotape in the cameras.
Hacker is slicing the sky fairly thin, he says, a few kilohertz here, a few there, to accommodate all of this noise. The allotted slices can't even be that close to each other, he says, because radio waves have a bad habit of merging. Getting red and blue too close to each other means purple.
"You can't put two side by side," he says. The press scrums you see on TV around celebrities, the huge crowds of cameras and mikes being shoved into Hillary Clinton's or Fritz Mondale's face, are to Hacker a mess of signal lines that will get hopelessly crossed and tangled if they are not, despite their physical proximity, kept electronically as far apart from each other as possible.
Meanwhile, a platoon of Federal Communications Commission regulators are squirreling around making sure no one does anything that will intrude on the really important frequencies -- say, the Chicago Fire Department's walkie-talkies, the radios in ambulances and police cars, signals at O'Hare and Midway airports, or anything else that normally uses Chicago's air, the locals being squeezed tight by the week-long media blitz.
Hacker is a busy man.
"Do not let them go up on that frequency!" he yells into a speaker, having gotten some conflicting messages from his remote observers on the floor. "That is the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. They will knock out the DNC," he says urgently. A foreign press operation has popped up on the spectrum analyzer, a small, box-like device that produces maps of the sky. They are trying to transmit in the same air the DNC is using to let its staffers talk to each other over radios in the hall.
"No matter what you do, you have things popping up," he says. He gets a liaison to the offenders on the line and informs him that they'd best watch their step. Then he looks at the screen on the spectrum analyzer and sees things settle back into relative calm. A jagged green line, the media's heartbeat, is showing no unexpected spikes.
"Wiping out the DNC," he says, grinning. "I would have heard about that one real fast."
A runner from MTV wanders in with a radio asking for a frequency. He's wearing a Charlie Brown shirt and baggy shorts and looks about 12. Hacker checks his computer, consults the spectrum analyzer and assigns MTV a strip of air. The runner seems pleased. His frequency is written on a fluorescent green sticker for him and affixed to the hand-held radio he's brought in. Hacker sends him off to the hall.
"Wireless mikes eat up a lot of spectrum because the receivers are so poor," Hacker muses. An empathetic nod seems in order.
The crowding of the sky is only going to get weirder, Hacker predicts, with the ever-newer technology being used by the broadcast media. As transmissions change and grow more complex -- and more groups like the political parties seek to cater to television -- the air is becoming more valuable and more contested, and Hacker's job is getting more difficult.
"We have to be weathermen. We have to be radio gurus. We have to see into the future. We have to be the anteaters who root out the problems," he says. HDTV, for example -- the next generation of television technology -- will use vast chunks of bandwidth and may render the current wireless radio carriers "second tier users."
Four years from now, at the next conventions, the need for more and different transmissions of more and different kinds will demand more airspace than is possible today, when viewers are already leaving TV convention coverage as fast as they can.
Politics is eating the sky.
Marc Herman comments on politics for National Public Radio and MSNBC, and is the political correspondent for Might magazine..