By Mary Mostert
August 25, 1998
Some years ago I concluded that movies out of Hollywood were a mammoth waste of my time and money and quit going to see them. However, with questions being asked in White House news conferences on "Wag the Dog," my assistant, Lisa, decided I needed to see it and brought me a rental video of it.
So, I sat down and watched it. Folks, it's downright scary. It takes to a logical conclusion the political system that has evolved in America in the last thirty years.
The worst aspect of our current political system, that we argue about in campaign finance reform, is never mentioned. But, it is amazingly well portrayed in Wag the Dog. We see a lot of hand-wringing about the amount of time candidates spend to raise money needed for a modern campaign, about the dangers of candidates being "bought" by monied interests, about lobbyists buying the candidates' votes, etc. But, I believe the worst part of our present system is exactly what "Wag the Dog" illustrates - the combined efforts of political "handlers," Hollywood, and media people who have made a profession out of manipulating both the public and the politicians. They are the ones who ultimately pocket the millions of dollars used in political campaigns.
For those who do not know the plot of "Wag the Dog," the plot revolves around a presidential election. Two weeks before the election, the incumbent president is accused of being alone "for not more than three minutes" in a room off the Oval Office with a young girl. The president, when the story breaks, is off to China on a State visit and his staff bring in a stereotype of Bill Clinton's favorite spin-doctor and political strategist Dick Morris to solve the problem.
Confronted with the facts and the threat of the story breaking that night on the networks, the strategist cooks up the notion that the only solution is to create a diversionary war someplace to get the voters mind off the presidential sex scandal. Is this beginning to sound familiar?
It gets worse. The strategist concludes a real war is not necessary, and decides to produce a war and flies off to Los Angeles to confer with a Harry Thomasson stereotype - a Hollywood producer friend and supporter of the president. The bulk of the movie involves the production of a fake war, and the media's handling of the fake war.
The main "character" of the movie, the president, actually is never seen as the producer and the analyst and a staff of "creative" folks - musicians, writers, photographers, computer enhancers and the like create a fake war with Albania. The fake work is dutifully reported by all the network news groups and voters forget about the girl, decide "not to change horses in mid-stream" and re-elect the president. (Incidentally, in the middle of World War II, during the fourth term election campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his slogan was, "don't change horses in mid-stream.")
Unfortunately, the Hollywood producer is so proud of his lifetime masterpiece that he wants to let the world know what he did. Naturally the strategist can't afford to let him do that and to find out what he does to stop him, go rent the movie.
After watching the video I thought of the young reporter who asked the question almost immediately after President Clinton announced the bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan, "Some people have remarked that this is a 'Wag the Dog' bombing to keep our minds off Monica Lewinsky. Do you have a comment on that?" Naturally, that was not a question the White House wanted to hear and the reporter was duly scolded. Older reporters noted that the question was asked "before the smoke cleared" from the bombs. Secretary Cohen, when someone asked him a similar question, was quite upset by the question.
Was it really all that stupid a question for the young reporter to ask? I don't think so. Fifty years ago I was the Mid-South correspondent for a national political magazine. The stories I wrote for the magazine were written only after I had personal knowledge of an event through interviewing participants, observing actions, and then writing a story about what I have actually seen and heard. Very little of that is done today.
All day Monday we heard about another dramatic revelation that is about to be made public concerning the Clinton-Lewinsky matter. It involves, so we are told, testimony given by Monica Lewinsky to the grand jury last week, after Clinton's non-apology in which he declared his relationship with Monica as "not appropriate."
I sort of expect that burst Monica's bubble and she realized, possibly for the first time, that Clinton considers her expendable. He admitted in his Monday night speech that his first concern was is own "embarrassment." The affair has obviously wrecked Monica's life, but Clinton showed no concern for that, of course, just anger at Starr and the notion that none of this was anyone's business but his, Hillary's and Chelsea's business.
The end result of that apparently was Monica went back to the grand jury willing, nay, determined, to tell the whole story and cook Bill Clinton's goose. Last week Monica became the woman scorned and willing to tell the grand jury everything.
On Wednesday of last week Bill Clinton, who had done nothing about the 1996 Khobar Tower bombings that killed American soldiers in Saudi Arabia two years ago, and who tacitly agreed to allowing a fundamentalist Muslim arms dealer, probably Osama Bin Laden, to ship weapons from the Sudan to Bosnian Muslims through a UN blockade, all the sudden took a strong stand. He agreed to bombing two countries that harbor terrorists. In the Khartoum, Sudan bombing, a pharmaceutical plant that we are told produced half the medicines used in the Sudan was destroyed.
It was common knowledge, at least on the Internet, that Bin Laben was behind the Khobar bombing, yet it is still being "studied." No action was taken on other situations where Americans were in danger. So, perhaps we can say, action that should have been taken before suddenly looked attractive to the president. Why the sudden change of heart? It was an obvious question under the circumstances.
Now we are getting a spin that "all the presidents" had illicit sexual relations but they were not reported. One of the reasons that they were not reported is that none of us old time reporters could verify the political rumors that were always rife. We would only reported stories when we could get the facts. Illicit sexual relations are pretty hard to prove.
Now Clinton spin doctors are simply making up stories about past presidents, especially presidents who can't argue because they are dead. Dwight Eisenhower and FDR, we are told, were no better than Bill Clinton. They, too, chased women. The story about Eisenhower has grown through the years, since someone observed he had a female driver, in spite of an adamant denial of the driver. FDR, who could not walk, being paralyzed from Polio from the waist down, is now accused of "pursuing" numerous young women.
We actually have a lot of information in writing these days that never existed in the rumor days. I have had a low opinion of Bill Clinton since I read Paula Jones' affidavit in which she describes what happened when she was brought up to then Governor Clinton's hotel room by a state trooper. Having been chased around a desk or two myself in my youth by vice presidents in an office, her description of how she reacted to the situation rang true to me. It's a shame that the feminists and reporters who ridiculed Paula and her story never bothered to read any of the court documents. If they had, and had then reported on them, the nation might have been saved the Monica Lewinsky debacle.
If the media where more interested in news, rather than in Hollywood production tactics, we would have not been listening to thousands of hours of speculation about the Clinton-Lewinsky matter before Ken Starr completed his investigation and before we knew what was in that report. Speaker Newt Gingrich keeps trying to tell the nation that. Sen. Orrin Hatch urged people to wait until they had all the facts. They are pretty much ignored. We, as a nation, are totally engrossed in opinion. Often talk shows discuss "news" from TV, or newspapers which has no factual basis - merely opinion - or the "facts" that are supposedly there are wrong. Heated debates then take place over both sides of a non-existent story.
And that, in my opinion, is the really scary thing about "Wag the Dog." It, or a form of it not only CAN happen in our current immoral political culture, but already HAS happened. Remember statements made about Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America?" An Urban Institute study announced that "More than a million children will be thrown into the street," if the Republicans Welfare Reform were enacted which would limit adult welfare benefits to five years. As a result, Welfare Reform was passed twice by Congress, and vetoed twice by President Clinton as he quoted make believe "statistics" - designed, as was the "War" in "Wag the Dog," to manipulate public opinion, rather than inform.
The day before the California Primary vote in June I received an even higher number of calls than usual from people wanting to ask me who to vote for. Invariably they tell me they don't know one candidate from another and figure I do, because of my job. Today, because of the huge amount of political money going into the system, no candidate can expect to have his views reported in the news. What has happened is that, because of all the money, newspapers no longer report on the news pages what candidates are saying. They report very brief statements, and then comment. Why? Because they want the candidates to buy ads. Nearly all candidates that I know, of all political persuasions, lament the fact that they cannot get their message out. Regardless of the amount of money they have, they cannot communicate their ideas and their experiences in a 30 second to one minute sound byte produced by a Wag the Dog professional writer.
No amount of financial regulation will solve the finance problem because the real problem is voter manipulation. As in "Wag the Dog" what we are getting is Hollywood production tactics and spin. Once upon a time, when candidates rode their districts on horseback, or walked door to door, or by whistle-stop train tours, the public heard the candidates - not the canned attack ads that are written and produced by the exact type of people that "Wag the Dog" portrays - the "creative" types who, as one scene in the video portrays, often have never even voted themselves. Today districts are so large, and lifestyles are so different, that walking door to door is impossible in most elections.
However, I believe there is a solution in the technology we now have. I believe that the only meaningful "Campaign Reform" will get rid of the spin doctors and the manipulation of voters and the strategists, and let us voters again get to actually KNOW the candidates. Contrary to what we are hearing on a daily basis on Geraldo Rivera and other shows, not all politicians are alike and not all of them cheat of their spouse.
With that in mind I created a Website to try out my idea. I want to restore the kind of dialogue that took place among political candidates before the Hollywood types took over the campaigns. I wanted a system that is centered around the needs of the voter - not the money of the candidates and their professional handlers. Increasingly, most candidates have their own Websites. On http://www.originalsources.com we are putting up all the races for governor, senators and members of the House of Representatives as the primaries take place in each state. The Websites of candidates running in those races are put up side by side allowing them to "debate" the issues 24 hours a day over the Internet seven days a week in the homes and offices of the voters.
No money is involved. It is free to the candidates, and, naturally, free to the voter. Voters can e-mail the candidates and ask them questions. If the candidates don't answer the questions, you don't have to vote for them. Candidates should answer questions - not their handlers and strategists. It's just my little contribution to you, the reader because I think there has to be better way of picking leaders than Wag the Dog. So, check out Candidates in your state. If they aren't up yet, they will be as soon as we have access to Primary results.
The best way to avoid the kind of mess the nation is in today is to find good people, find out what they believe, vote them in, and give them support when they need it, and vote them out when they mess up. That, after all, is what the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution thought would happen.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com.