The End of the Party

Then Sen. Byrd’s train of thought jumped another track and he offered the Senate his cinematic tastes. He has lived in Washington for 49 years, he said, but in all that time, he has seen only one movie. It was a Yul Brynner film, and Byrd was so bored he walked out in the middle. It must have been truly boring, because Sen. Byrd, who stays awake through his own speeches, has demonstrated a high tolerance for tedium.

But historians will be transfixed by the question, Which Yul Brynner film was it that managed to draw Sen. Byrd into the movie theater in the first place? Many will guess it must have been The King and I, Brynner’s signature role. But remember that as the Senate’s self-appointed expert on ancient history, Byrd has a taste for things historical, so it seems at least as likely that he was lured by one of Brynner’s Cecil B. De Mille-type toga movies, such as Solomon and Sheba or even The Ten Commandments. In the latter, Brynner played the pharaoh Rameses, who went in for massive construction projects, just like Sen. Byrd.

After a few minutes, Byrd looked up from his little disquisition on the merits and demerits of movies versus public television. He wore a startled and quizzical expression, as if to say, “How did I get onto this? What am I doing here? What’s happening to me?” No one could blame him for his confusion. Because with the likely passage of campaign finance reform, American politics is truly entering a new phase. The debate on it was merely a harbinger of things to come.

A distinctive feature of the campaign finance debate was the near-total absence from it of the party leaders, Trent Lott and Tom Daschle. Senator Lott especially seems to view the whole issue as if it were some sort of gross body organ that had inexplicably been tossed onto his dinner plate. So the discussion was not scripted from the top. It was open, free-flowing, and unpredictable. And in that, it was a precursor of the way politics will be if this bill does become law. For, as opponent Mitch McConnell made clear in one of the best speeches of this or any recent Senate debate, the McCain-Feingold law is going to decimate the power of the political parties.

The parties are mostly funded by soft money, and without soft money, the party committees will be weak. That could mean an end to party discipline as we know it. Right now, the parties are like Hollywood studios. They and their campaign committees have huge pots of money they can commit to various projects and candidates at election time. But that money will be gone. Either it won’t go into politics, or, more likely, it will be funneled into politics through different channels. So members of Congress will not pay as high a price for flouting party discipline. We will see weird cross-party alliances, exactly as we did throughout the campaign finance saga.

Another notable feature of the campaign finance reform debate was the deafening cheerleading by the media. The public as a whole is largely uninterested in the issue, but the big editorial pages covered it as if it were the invasion of Normandy. The media played a huge role in pushing this issue onto the agenda. That too is a precursor of things to come. For this law gives the media awesome power. In the last 60 days before an election, only two groups will be allowed to mention the names of candidates on radio and TV without restriction. The candidates themselves will be able to mention their own names, and journalists will be allowed to mention them (as will guests the journalists invite onto their programs). If you are a union leader, or a business leader, or a member of an interest group such as the NRA or the ACLU, it will be extremely difficult — and in many cases illegal — for you to take out ads mentioning candidates’ names or showing their faces.

Eventually, that could mean that big business groups, labor unions, and interest groups will buy up media properties and manipulate them to support their agendas. If the only people who can freely express themselves are the owners of newspapers and broadcast stations, then it makes sense to buy a newspaper or a station to get your ideas out. But in the next election cycle or two, before that happens, the current crop of reporters may have enormous influence on elections. That will probably push politics in a slightly liberal direction, and could outweigh the influence of the parts of the bill, such as the raising of the hard money limits, that favor Republicans and conservatives.

But it will also have a more immediate and profound effect. If free media become more important than paid media, then candidates will have to get even better at attracting free media attention. First, they’ll have to get more hysterical. And, while the campaign finance debate was generally intelligent and substantive, it included some scary foreshadowings.

For example, Illinois senator Dick Durbin rose one day to talk about the stakes involved. He too was moved to offer his opinion of the quality of television programming. First he misquoted Newton Minow’s comment that television was a “vast wasteland,” then he deepened his critique, likening TV to the Cambodian holocaust: “Television has become a killing field. A killing field, because the people who run the television stations, the networks and local broadcasters, have forgotten the bottom line: their responsibility to the American people.” As Tucker Carlson noted that evening on The Spin Room, Durbin could be accused of exaggeration: “A killing field. Go behind any television station. Big pile of skulls.” But that’s the kind of rhetoric it will take to get free coverage.

Second, candidates will have to build up melodramatic story lines. The coverage of this debate was dominated by a series of story lines: McCain vs. Bush, the relationship between McCain and Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel, the supposed villainy of Sen. McConnell. Senators will practically have to hire screenwriters to come up with dramatic story lines if they want to get TV and radio attention.

Politicians whose lives are extended soap operas, like the Clintons and the Kennedys, will have a huge advantage. There was a perfect little soap opera moment during last week’s debate that illustrated the sorts of sitcom-like episodes we’ll be seeing more of.

At one point senator Ted Kennedy rose to condemn something called the Hatch Amendment, the substance of which has been lost in the sands of time. Throughout the debate Sen. Kennedy, like his liberal neighbor Paul Wellstone, displayed an ability to work himself into fits of high rhetorical fervor that were completely unrelated to the words that were coming out of his mouth. Imagine somebody reading a menu, going through the appetizer section in a calm sweet voice, and then suddenly and for no apparent reason reading the entree options in a full rage, with spit flying and veins bulging.

That happened in the middle of Sen. Kennedy’s speech in opposition to the Hatch Amendment. All of a sudden, a storm came down from the mountains, and Sen. Kennedy, whose jowls were buffed to an impressive shine that morning, started spewing vitriol at the suggestion made by the senator from Utah. It was not only a misguided amendment. It was an evil amendment. It was a dumb amendment. It was a poorly crafted amendment.

That really starched Sen. Hatch’s collar. He rose to respond, his face white with rage (which for Sen. Hatch is pretty white). “I don’t need lectures from the distinguished senator from Massachusetts,” Hatch bellowed a few times. Hatch sees himself as a tough fighter. He may look like a goody-goody, but he actually came up from nothing and had to fight for everything he’s achieved. He was going to stick it to the spoiled rich boy; for a second it looked like there might be some Chappaquiddick reference coming round the bend.

But he couldn’t keep it up. Hatch and Kennedy are actually close friends, and Hatch’s anger was subsiding quickly. “I pay tribute to Sen. Kennedy. He represents his special interests very well. I wish we had someone on our side who could do that,” said Hatch, his insults scaled down to the backhand variety. “I love the senator as few in this body do,” Hatch continued. Then Sen. Kennedy strode across the floor (to the extent that Sen. Kennedy can stride) and gave Sen. Hatch a hug right in the middle of his speech. Senator Hatch started crying. He wiped a tear from his eye. This was the most emotional male hug since La Cage aux folles, and really a more graphic display of Sen. Kennedy’s private side than many of us want to see. Many instinctively reached for their sick bags. But it is exactly the sort of Moment of S — (as the screenwriters call it) that can get you on the evening news.

Now, it would be a mistake to romanticize the current situation and make the forthcoming change in our politics out to be some sort of fall from grace. The decline of the party apparatchiks is not necessarily a terrible thing. Will the Democratic party be better or worse off if Terry McAuliffe has less influence? Probably better off. The party leaders are often hacks, subservient to corporate interests, who try to impose a mind-numbing uniformity on the parties. On the other hand, party governance does have its uses, as everybody since Edmund Burke has pointed out, and a Congress full of freelancers could be a disaster. It’s hard to say right now whether the pre-McCain-Feingold world or the post-McCain-Feingold world is better for democracy.

Moreover, the declining importance of soft money donors and the rising importance of the people who control free media is not necessarily a dreadful development either. Under the current system, politicians spend huge amounts of time being money whores. They often spend several hours a day hitting up big donors. Under McCain-Feingold — I’m assuming for purposes of this article that it won’t be struck down in the courts, a huge assumption — they will spend less time as money whores and more time as media whores. They will have to spend more time, as Sen. McCain does, flattering journalists and reporters and less time catering to lobbyists. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. Pick your poison.

Two things are sure: This law will change the rules, and people who are desperate to be politicians will continue to do whatever it takes to get and keep their jobs.

Strangely enough, while these people may be inexplicable freaks on one level (who would want to live that way?), they are quite impressive on another level. For all its egomaniacal digressions and sitcom moments, the campaign finance debate was conducted at quite a high level. John Edwards of North Carolina was smart. So was Mike DeWine. So was Fred Thompson. So was Russ Feingold. Some of the best speeches were made by people who do not have the best reputations. For example, New Jersey’s Robert Torricelli, who’s famous for dating Bianca Jagger and being the subject of a growing fund-raising scandal, gave a series of extremely intelligent speeches. Every time Mitch McConnell rose he had a new bit of argument or information to share with his colleagues. This was in contrast to the Democratic floor manager, Chris Dodd, who operated under the principle that if an argument is worth making badly, it’s worth making badly over and over again.

The good arguments didn’t always win. I can scarcely remember seeing as one-sided a debate as the one that preceded the vote on “non-severability” (whether the whole bill should be voided if any part is struck down by the courts). The debaters in favor of non-severability crushed their opponents, if you judged strictly on debating points, and yet the amendment lost. At least it’s comforting to know that while politics may be a bog, and we may be on the verge of trading in an old bog for a new one, at least there are still impressive people who for some odd reason are willing to devote their lives to this messy business.

David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.