BILL CLINTON HAS JUST WON a convincing victory. He takes to the microphone for his first Saturday radio address after Election Day. So, does he lay out a sweeping vision for the next four years? No, he calls for an end to liquor advertising on radio and TV. You sit there and think, “Bill Clinton is turning himself into Bill Bennett.” It’s usually Bennett who jumps on some social transgression and raises a public stink — violent rap lyrics or Roberto Alomar spitting on an umpire. But this time, it’s the president of the United States — not proposing legislation, not using the power of his office. He’s just raising a stink.
Of course, he’s doing something else as well. He’s constructing a more conservative Democratic social agenda, one built on parental anxieties. Clinton means to show that Democrats are on the side of the mothers and fathers who feel their ability to raise decent kids is threatened by corrupt outside sources — violent TV programming, tobacco, drugs, and booze.
The liquor industry imposed a radio advertising ban on itself in 1936 and a television ban in 1948. But over the past decade liquor sales have tumbled 25 percent, while the beer industry — long a staple of the airwaves — floats along, spending $ 600 million a year on commercials. The Seagrams company, the second largest distiller in the United States, has for years been nettled by the unfairness of the “beer yes, booze no” advertising regime and unilaterally lifted the ban this summer. Seagrams aired a TV commercial in Corpus Christi, Texas, in which a dog named Obedience School Graduate carries a newspaper to his master and is beaten to the master’s side by a dog named Valedictorian who is carrying a bottle of Crown Royal whiskey.
On November 7, the Distilled Spirits Council, the trade association for the liquor industry, announced it was ending the ban nationwide and instead was adopting guidelines intended only to keep hard liquor out of children’s hands.
The outrage industry went straight into hyperbole. “This means open season on America’s kids,” thundered George Hacker of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has been the most vociferous administration official. He regulates the broadcast industry, and he must love his work, because he’s rarely far from a TV camera. Hundt made a series of media appearances declaring the advertising would be a menace to kids and threatened punitive regulations.
The issue might appear a tricky one for Clinton. After all, Seagrams is controlled by the Bronfman family, led by strong financial backers of the president. Clinton and Al Gore attended a birthday party for Edgar Bronfman, Sr. earlier in the year, and the president has dined several times with Edgar, Jr., the Hollywood mogul. Junior gave $ 318,000 to the Democratic party this election cycle and has contributed to Bill and Hillary’s legal-defense fund.
But Clinton surely knows that Bronfman family members tend to keep their public interests politely elevated from the world of selling liquor. The Seagrams Company gives generously to both parties, and its Washington office is staffed by self-conscious conservatives who actively support free-market think tanks, conferences, and research projects. The Bronfmans rarely use their entree to lobby for company favors; they would consider it demeaning. The family uses its access to promote Jewish causes, not Seagrams business. (The one known exception came when Edgar, Jr. lobbied the president to ward off a liquor tax as part of Clinton’s original health-care plan.)
More important, perhaps, is the fact that several federal agencies have already endorsed the idea that beer and liquor are equivalent and should be considered equally harmful. Indeed, there’s a Machiavellian interpretation of the liquor industry’s move. It holds that the liquor people hoped to fuel such outcry that beer advertising too would come under scrutiny. If both liquor and beer ads were pressured off the air, the two products would compete on an equal footing.
It’s hard to believe the liquor people would actually plan such a carom shot. But, after the assault on tobacco, it’s not impossible to imagine the Clinton administration’s expanding its moral crusade to include the beer makers. The administration has been ambitious on this score. White House policy adviser Rahm Emanuel, who shepherded the liquor-advertising issue into the Oval Office, was instrumental in some of the other bricks in the New Democrat social agenda. He was one of the advisers who urged Clinton to advocate school uniforms in 1995 — one of the first examples of Clinton’s effort to seize the conservative mission of remoralizing society for the Democratic party.
The New Democratic understanding of the demoralization problem is shaped by an environmentalist metaphor: While the home is a clean area where parents are trying to raise decent kids, there are cultural polluters outside injecting toxic waste into children’s minds and bodies.
The Clinton campaign pushed a series of measures to punish polluters and help parents. Clinton promoted the V-chip so that parents could control the television programming allowed into their homes and influence the products churned out by Hollywood. He urged broadcasters to replace trashy television with three hours a week of educational programming for children. He lambasted the tobacco industry for allegedly pushing cigarettes at kids. He hit the liquor industry for tempting children, both over the summer and in his recent radio address.
The constant invocation of “children” wasn’t just poll-driven. The New Democrats operate in a milieu shaped by social libertarianism, the belief that communities don’t have the right to impose their values on individuals. Every moral issue must therefore revolve around children, since everybody believes communities have the right to impose values on kids. So the anti- tobacco campaign is undertaken in the name of children, as is the anti-liquor campaign. Conservatives are much quicker to say that community standards should be imposed on individuals, while New Democrats try to impose community standards on individuals through the back door, using children as a point of entry.
Clinton’s goal is a Bennett-like campaign to influence perceptions. But unlike Bennett’s efforts, Clinton’s re-moralization campaign has a liberal twist: It avoids judgments on the actions of individuals. His attacks on tobacco and liquor are not centered on the use of the products but on their manufacture and marketing.
Clintonites may lambaste tobacco executives, but they tend not to judge smokers themselves. Instead, they blame objects. They speak as if the moral taint adheres to the tobacco, to the liquor, to the handgun itself, or to the medium of advertising. There’s an echo here of the way the nuclear-freeze movement acted as if nuclear missiles themselves exacerbated the Cold War.
Conservatives tend to argue that objects are neutral and that people who refuse to practice self-discipline are the problem. Conservatives don’t say that tobacco and liquor themselves increase the likelihood of birth defects; it is undisciplined mothers who smoke and drink during pregnancy who increase the likelihood of birth defects.
Still, whatever the intellectual merits of this position, if Clinton pursues his sort of values agenda for the next four years, he may successfully inoculate the Democrats from the old charge that theirs is the party of permissiveness. It seems we’re all Puritans now; we’re just Puritanical in different ways.
by David Brooks
