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Across the partisan divide?

Thursday, January 4, 2007

I managed to avoid those annual journalistic rituals that go with calendar-flipping – the “best” and “worst” lists for the year just gone, and predictions for the year to come. But it’s inescapable that we have, like it or not, a new year, a new US Congress and (visually at least) a new Wall Street Journal. The question arises … is anything really different?

And oh yes, there’s to be a new Iraq policy. Same question arises.

George W Bush (above left) chose the new-look Journal in which to lay down his terms - what he called his “common sense principles” - for cooperating with the new Congress.

(Despite the Journal’s desire to appear different, its Editorial Page couldn’t lose its old pompous “above-it-all” air, using a conventional little slug in italics to explain its guest writer’s byline: “Mr Bush is the president of the United States”. That was just in case, I suppose, we imagined he was the president of something else. Oh, if only ...)

In the WSJ Op-Ed piece, this president claimed he wanted “a bipartisan consensus to fight and win the war”. And with an eye to the readership of the business community’s parish paper, he also claimed – a claim that took some gall, considering how his war spending has hiked the nation’s indebtedness to nearly 9 trillion dollars – that “we are better positioned to tackle the longer term fiscal challenge facing our country”, but he went on to simply reiterate his familiar refrain that “tax relief and spending restraint (sic) are good for the American worker, good for the American taxpayer, and good for the federal budget”.

By coincidence – or is it the media’s zeitgeist at work? - I read Bush’s claims just after I’d checked out a (for me) rather surprising contender for Best Picture according to some movie awards season speculation - Emilio Estevez’s ensemble piece, Bobby.

The film's politics are generally speaking those of a warm and fuzzy “save-the-world” kind, and Estevez, it must be said, is no Robert Altman when it comes to orchestrating overlapped storylines and performances. But he effectively builds much emotional momentum as the last day in the life of Robert F Kennedy (above right) hurtles toward its fateful end - and one dryly delivered and yet passionate observation stands out strikingly, amid the 1968 news archive coverage that Estevez uses of Kennedy visting some poverty-stricken homes.

In a steady, undramatized voice-over, the soon-to-be-assassinated candidate is heard critiquing the local paucity of jobs, even while the government provides job-training, because, he says, "of the cutbacks, because of the demands on our federal budget with the war in Vietnam ... people are being cut off and they have no place to turn, and so they are desperate ... It seems to me this is an intolerable situation, that reflects on all of us".

If such misdirected governmental priorities were to exist today (perish the thought!) they would indeed reflect intolerably on all of us, of any party.

THE BUSH APPROACH TO BIPARTISANSHIP HAD A LITTLE TRY-OUT over the holidays. Not that his approach is very new. Remember UN Ambassador John Bolton being appointed during a Congressional recess – only to be dropped when the new Congress made his reappointment impossible? Well, now Bush has quietly used this Christmas and New Year break between Congresses to install an unwelcome member on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, side-stepping a Congressional vote.

Bush’s choice calls up some echoes from the tawdry episode of his counselor Karl Rove’s friend, Kenneth Tomlinson. He was a zealously conservative member, you'll recall - and for some time was Chairman - of that same federally-funded Corporation. Tomlinson was exposed, as THE MEDIA BEAT chronicled at the time, as not just a fool, but a law-breaker too.

The new Bush place-man is a seventeen-year veteran TV sitcom producer, Warren Bell, who is noted – if that’s the word – for his work on comedy shows like ABC’s According to Jim. His predecessor, Tomlinson, had disgraced himself by, among other things, trying covertly to ferret out examples of liberal bias in public broadcasting (such as anchor Bill Moyers - well okay, maybe - but also, can you believe, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, for heaven’s sake?) The new appointee, seeking to quiet the echoes, himself now says: "I'm not an ideologue, and I'm certainly not Ken Tomlinson."

But before his nomination at least, Bell never exactly made a secret of his strong political sympathies. He has been a regular contributor to the right-wing National Review online – where he was proud to announce himself as "thoroughly conservative, in ways that strike horror into the hearts of my Hollywood colleagues”.

Bell also has, for what it's worth to the Administration that picked him, no experience whatsoever in public broadcasting.