on the theories of the sixties philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman explained that the dominant media in any given society didn’t just convey news and ideas neutrally, but in fact defined the very concepts of news and ideas in its time. During what Postman called the Age of Exposition, which saw America through its birth and lasted well into the twentieth century, all of our metaphors and frames of reference had come from the printed word. When political candidates debated issues, for instance, as Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas famously did in 1858, they debated in what were essentially entire paragraphs and essays, because this was the only way they knew to receive and impart information. But that era had now given way to the Age of Show Business, in which television was the undisputed king of media. (At the time of Postman’s writing, at the dawn of cable and before the Internet, some ninety million Americans were said to watch TV every night.) And in a television-dominated society, Postman theorized, news and politics had to be entertaining in order for anyone to really pay attention.
“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television,” Postman wrote. The mere fact that TV news shows called themselves “shows” at all, Postman pointed out, hinted at the way they were transforming the expository culture of journalism. He went on:
No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to “join them tomorrow.” What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the “news” is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say. Everything about a news show tells us this—the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials—all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping. A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis.
Postman noted the list of political figures who had now achieved the status of TV celebrity. Senator Sam Ervin, the hero of the Watergate hearings, was doing ads for American Express. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger were popping up on Dynasty. George McGovern was hosting Saturday Night Live, and New York mayor Ed Koch (also an SNL host) was actually playing a fight manager in a made-for-TV movie. “Would anyone be surprised if Gary Hart turned up on Hill Street Blues?” Postman wondered. (Actually, Hart’s star turn came the year after Postman’s book, on an episode of the sitcom Cheers.) The problem with all of this, he believed, was that Americans were bound to lose hold of the distinction between those who were supposed to be doing the country’s serious business, on one hand, and those who were supposed to make them laugh or cry or buy mouthwash, on the other. Soon policymakers would be nothing more than characters in a national soap opera.
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” Postman warned, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
There isn’t much about Postman’s attack on the show business society that isn’t accepted as plain fact today. But in the 1980s, when most Americans still trusted their evening news anchor and their congressman to explain and grapple with serious issues, his argument was provocative and, viewed now through the prism of time, visionary. In fact, in many ways, the 1988 campaign—occurring just as political consulting was becoming a millionaire-making industry, and just before Americans and their media had really gotten savvy about what these consultants were trying to do—marked the nadir of televised politics. When it was over, Americans would remember only three things about the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis: the silly image of him riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet; his flat answer when asked about the hypothetical rape of his wife; and the racially charged ad that claimed he had let a convicted killer, Willie Horton, go free on furlough. Each was an enduring image made specifically for television, the stuff of cheap drama or sitcom farce, and none had very much to do with governing the country. (It probably isn’t incidental that just over 50 percent of Americans bothered to show up at the polls on Election Day—the lowest voting rate in a presidential election in more than sixty years.)
All of these disparate, emerging forces in the society—a vacuum in the political debate, changing ideas about morality, a new generational ethos and new technologies in the media, the tabloidization of every aspect of American life—were coming together by the spring of 1987. The vortex was spinning madly and gaining speed. If Gary Hart hadn’t been the first to get sucked into it, someone else—Bill Clinton, surely—would have found himself there before long.
And yet, it was Hart who was about to lead the way into the modern age of political destruction, consigning himself to disgrace and infamy in the process. And this was more than a mere accident of history. If anyone had been designed to attract the vortex, to pull all of its currents together in a single violent tempest, it was Hart. On the issues of the day, Hart could see around corners with more clarity than any political figure of his time, or for some time after. But when it came to this shift in the way the society vetted its leaders, he remained disastrously, even willfully clueless.
To his younger supporters, Hart was emblematic of the generational shift that was reshaping America—and not a moment too soon. The rebellious teens of the sixties were just now moving into middle age, with all the angst and self-absorption that had characterized their youth. (The second most popular sitcom in America, after The Cosby Show, was Family Ties, in which two former hippies struggled with their Reagan-loving teenage son, played by Michael J. Fox.) They had, in many ways, remade the popular culture already, creating an entirely new template for social justice through movies and TV, literature and music; Cosby himself was a transformational figure, drawing a huge number of white Americans into the story of the emerging black middle class. But when it came to political leadership, the Man still wasn’t getting out of the way. By the dawn of 1987, President Reagan was seventy-five (and finally starting to look it), and his main Democratic foil, House speaker Tip O’Neill, was seventy-four. Reagan’s likely successor among Republicans, George H. W. Bush, was a comparatively sprightly sixty-two. Someone had to kick open the door to Washington and let the sixties generation come rushing through. And even before his thrilling run in 1984, Hart had been first in line.
After all, wherever politics—and Democratic politics specifically—had been headed in the two tumultuous decades before 1987, Hart had managed to lead the way. In 1969, when Hart was an unknown Denver lawyer with some ideas about reforming the electoral system, George McGovern picked him to serve on the commission that would institute the primary system for choosing Democratic nominees—an innovation that transformed presidential politics almost immediately by taking power from the old urban bosses and handing it to a new generation of activists, including women and African Americans. A few years later, McGovern, seeking to take advantage of the new primary system, tapped Hart to assemble and run his improbable, antiwar presidential campaign. McGovern overturned the party establishment on his way to the nomination (and a crushing defeat in the general election), and Hart became famous as the young, brilliant operative in cowboy boots, straddling the motorcycle of his new pal, Hunter S. Thompson.
Gary Hart, at right, as Senator George McGovern’s campaign manager in the 1972 presidential election: thirty-five and a celebrity CREDIT: KEITH WESSEL
Hart got himself elected to the Senate just two years later, making him, at thirty-eight, its second youngest member. (Joe Biden, who got there in 1972, was six years younger.) Some older colleagues expected the glamorous ex-strategist to fashion himself as a left-wing revolutionary. But Hart was from the burgeoning West, where
