Bai: How politics became entertainment
The Front Runner, Jason Reitman’s new cinematic recounting of Gary Hart’s ill-fated 1987 run for the White House, doesn’t exactly feel like a political drama or morality play.
While the movie depicts how the Colorado senator’s campaign collapsed after his extramarital affair with model Donna Rice, screenwriter Matt Bai — also the author of All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid — says the movie and his book are slow to either condemn Hart or the lurid reporting that torpedoed his attempt.
“(Reitman, co-writer Jay Carson and I) all share the same core sensibility: People are complicated, and situations are complicated. We’ve got enough [people] in politics and enough in art that tell you what to think,” he says by phone.
Reitman’s movie in 2009, Up in the Air, explored downsizing without declaring solutions, and 2005’s Thank You for Smoking depicted Washington lobbying without overt condemnation. Carson advised U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean before consulting on the Netflix series House of Cards. Somehow they got along “seamlessly” with Bai, who has written for The New York Times Magazine and currently writes a regular column for Yahoo!
“To me the movie is almost like one of those choose-yourown-adventure books. I’ve had multiple people tell me when you see it more than once — and believe me, I’m happy to have people see it once — once you’ve seen it multiple times, you can take different perspectives and experience it differently.”
Initially, it seems obvious that Hart (played in the film by Hugh Jackman) demonstrated questionable judgment in his brief extramarital relationship with Rice, who was half his age. Nonetheless, JFK and FDR both had affairs in office, and Rice, unlike White House intern Monica Lewinsky, didn’t work for the senator.
While the now 81-year-old Hart had to abandon his run for the Oval Office (he and his wife Lee are still married), other candidates since then have still been elected despite having committed more serious transgressions.
Mark Sanford was re-elected to Congress after losing his job as governor of South Carolina for his trip down a nonexistent Appalachian Trail that led to a mistress in Argentina. A damning audio recording of Donald Trump admitting to grabbing genitals did little to hurt his aspirations either.
So why haven’t politicians behaved themselves better since Gary Hart’s disgrace?
“I tend to look at this a little differently than others do,” Bai says. “People look at the trajectory of candidates since Hart and what they’ve overcome in terms of scandal, personal issues and privacy, and they say, ‘Well, nobody cares anymore. People have done worse than Hart, and it doesn’t seem to matter.’
“I think that’s exactly the wrong way to look at it. What you really have to focus on is the process after Hart because the process determines the candidates that you get and the candidates that succeed. In that moment in 1987, we start to treat our political candidates like we treat our celebrities and our entertainers. When you create a process that treats people like entertainers, you will get entertainers as candidates.”
Bai explains how media theorist Neil Postman prophesied the blurring of news and entertainment in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. All the Truth Is Out cites how Clinton used his sax playing to woo voters on The Arsenio Hall Show. Later, Barack Obama used an appearance on Between Two Ferns, Zach Galifianakis’ parody talk show, to plug his very real health care plan. Even George W. Bush appeared next to an impersonator on national television.
While Hart later appeared on an episode of Cheers, it’s hard to imagine a man who spent most of his time developing complicated policy positions delivering them between punchlines. As The Front Runner and All The Truth Is Out There demonstrate, Hart had a better understanding of how the collapse of the Soviet Union would end up than the people who got elected. He rejected both copious public spending and limited government in favor of training to deal with technology changes that made the industrial jobs of the previous decades antiquated.
That’s tough information to slip between punchlines.
Hart also had trouble communicating the challenges of international relations, when the press was more concerned about his affair. To find out what Hart had to say about how he’d deal with the remains of the Soviet Union, you won’t hear it from the recordings and transcripts of the news conference where he had to talk about his affair. It’s only in Bai’s book because he and former Hart aide Mark Seitz had to extract the speech from a WordPerfect file on Seitz’s hard drive.
In addition, while baby boomers flocked to Hart’s campaign and a Gen X-er like Bai documents it, Hart himself came from a previous generation where private lives remained private. Many asking about his personal life at that news conference had similar foibles, but Hart didn’t understand that the Mad Men-era mores that enabled his rise to the Senate weren’t coming back.
“One of the things that people remember about Hart is that how could he have been so dumb, and it’s such a perplexing question because he’s so smart,” Bai says.
“There’s always a school of thought that he’s self-sabotaging, that he wanted to be caught. I think that’s one of the ideas that the movie and the book explores is how did a person with this kind of intellect and political acumen get caught on the wrong side of history? A big part of the answer is that he was a guy who was caught between moments. He had a foot in the last era and a foot in the next one. His experience in life and in politics had taught him that private lives generally remained private. Even though people warned him that was changing, that was not part of his experience.”
The movie also documents how the media itself went through enormous changes because of technology. While the Miami Herald photographer in The Front Runner laments his images will take a whopping eight minutes to develop, videotape enabled footage to go live almost after it was shot. Hart and his subordinates weren’t ready to deal with stories that used to take weeks or months to develop.
“And there was the satellite dish, which was a bigger deal, creating the 24-hour news cycle,” Bai explains. “And just as important, you had the legacy of Watergate, which was 12 years earlier and created not just a new career ambition for journalists who had been drawn to the process by (Bob) Woodward and (Carl) Bernstein but also rightly put the focus on world leaders. And also there were evolving attitudes about women’s rights and morality and public life from the left and the right.”
Curiously, there is also something of an upside to politics as entertainment. For example, on Last Week Tonight John Oliver can discuss something as esoteric as American infrastructure issues in thorough detail for 20 minutes, but he’d probably lose viewers if he weren’t funny as well.
“It bothered me that probably my favorite interview I ever gave for the book was to Jon Stewart,” he says.“It was one of the smartest interviews I gave on the book tour. But it’s always gnawed at me, and I admire what these guys do, it is a manifestation of politics as entertainment. It’s a very big sign of how politics and entertainment are intertwined. There’s a lot of Americans getting their news from entertainment programming, and there’s some entertainment programming that’s doing a creditable job of scrutinizing politics than the news is.”