You’ll Have To Overlook Lack Of Celebrities, Special Effects
Everyone is ripping the campaign finance hearings in the U.S. Senate because they lack drama, because they have failed to turn up a “smoking gun,” because they are … well, boring.
As the first round of hearings drew to a close last week, the reviews poured in: Thumbs down.
You’d have thought the political pundits were critiquing the latest summer movie release, or maybe a new TV sitcom. It was weird: Here was the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee dealing with crucial matters of public policy, and the committee’s efforts were being evaluated on the basis of entertainment value.
But that’s what we’ve come to in this country. Politics and show business are interchangeable. Is Bill Clinton the president, or does he just play one on TV?
Clinton’s money people raised cash for the president’s 1996 re-election campaign as if they were arranging financing for a big-budget movie. Apparently nobody cared where the money came from or who delivered it, just as long as there was enough to cover the cost overruns.
And if you like the movie analogy, how about this: The chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee is Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., whose pre-Senate resume features a number of film roles. If you were looking for someone to inject a little show biz into a congressional hearing, why not a movie actor?
As an actor-politician, it turns out, Thompson is no Ronald Reagan. As a committee chairman, for that matter, he’s no Sam Ervin, who ran the Senate’s Watergate hearings back in the ‘70s. No Hollywood casting director could have conjured up a more prototypical Southern senator than Ervin.
But so what if Thompson is more dynamic on the sound stage than he is in the hearing room? When he’s trading barbs with the likes of Clint Eastwood on the silver screen, it’s his job to entertain. When he’s investigating allegations of corruption of the American political system, his job is to inform and enlighten.
If most Americans aren’t giving Thompson’s hearings their undivided attention, perhaps the problem has less to do with Thompson and his hearings than with Americans and their attention span.
Thompson recessed the hearings Thursday and then turned up on “Nightline” to defend his work. Cokie Roberts was filling in for Ted Koppel and wanted to know if the hearings would be more exciting when they resume in September. She also wanted to know if the committee would be able to validate its existence by proving someone guilty of a crime.
“We’re not conducting a trial,” Thompson explained. “It’s an investigation.”
Thompson, who served as minority counsel to the Watergate committee that investigated the many sins of Richard Nixon, reminded Roberts that even the Watergate hearings were criticized as boring until star witness John Dean arrived on the scene. Thompson also could have pointed out the Watergate hearings didn’t prove anyone guilty of a crime; the convictions for Watergate-related crimes were obtained by prosecutors in federal courtrooms.
Maybe it’s just bad luck that Thompson has been unable to produce a witness with the star quality of a Dean or an Oliver North, the steely-eyed Marine who commandeered the Iran-contra hearings in the late 1980s and parlayed his testimony into a career as a professional celebrity.
But drama or no drama, star witness or no star witness, Thompson and his committee have conscientiously gone about the business of examining the fast-and-loose approach to campaign financing that undeniably degraded the electoral process in 1996. These hearings may not be exciting, but they are important.
Clinton’s supporters might be inclined to dismiss Thompson’s efforts as merely a gambit by partisan Republicans to discredit a president they were unable to defeat at the polls. But if the president of the United States did something wrong, shouldn’t all Americans want to know?
And if he didn’t, shouldn’t we want to know that?
These hearings are serious business. They are the people’s business.
Not show business.
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