by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the vice-presidential debate I watched the next two
shows on PBS, including the next episode of The Contenders: 16 for ’16, “The Visionaries,” which was helped structurally by
the fact that it was about two people — Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson — who ran
in the same party in the same elections (1984 and 1988) — and it helps that
Hart, Jackson and Walter Mondale are all still alive and agreed to be
interviewed for the program. (It’s also sad to compare what they looked like
then with what they look like now.) Indeed, Jackson had an executive producer
credit on the show — and his credit was printed in red instead of white so it
would stand out — making me wonder if the mysterious “OZY Media” that’s listed
as the producing studio for this series is a Jackson enterprise. The show
depicts Gary Hart’s 1984 campaign (which I supported) as a campaign for the
future over the past; though Hart wasn’t anywhere nearly as radical as Bernie
Sanders, he was similarly an insurgent candidate whose base of support was
among young people, and at a time when the computer revolution was just beginning
(Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, founders of Apple, were among his friends and
advisors on technology issues) Hart was talking seriously about what the U.S.
government would need to do to make sure we exploited these new technologies
for maximum public benefit.
The show also said that, contrary to the impression
I had at the time, Mondale’s nomination was not a done deal when the Democratic convention started
in San Francisco that year — Hart actually proposed a deal with Jackson by
which they would block the nomination of Mondale by joining forces (the
implication was that Jackson would have been Hart’s running mate), but Jackson
egomaniacally demanded that the only way he would consent to an alliance with
Hart would be if Hart withdrew from the race and supported him — and Hart said that was ridiculous because he had
come to the convention with 1,200 delegates and Jackson had only 300. So they
didn’t ally, Mondale won the nomination (thanks largely to the early pledges
from appointed superdelegates — the superdelegates were put in place after
George McGovern’s landslide defeat to make sure the Democratic Party never
nominated a Left-wing insurgent again, and so far they have worked as intended)
and then got creamed by Ronald Reagan in the fall. (Next week’s Contenders episode deals with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan
— and Reagan will be the first person depicted here who actually won the
Presidency.) The show also depicts the fiasco of Hart’s 1988 campaign,
particularly the total meltdown that occurred after the Miami Herald put him under 24/7 surveillance to find out if he
was having sex with a woman other than his wife (Hart mentions in his
contemporary interview that it wasn’t a big secret — he had his wife had gone
through two separations and he had openly dated other women while he and his
wife were living apart). It’s clear that Hart didn’t think his sex life would
be a career-ender — he says he thought we were still living in the age of
Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, whose infidelities had been
deliberately ignored by the media because they thought it was none of the
public’s damned business — and he was an early victim of the coming-together of
the tabloid media and the “mainstream” media, which blurred all lines of taste
and made politicians’ private lives fair game. (Then again, the modus
vivendi under which FDR and JFK could carry
on sexually and not be reported on hadn’t always been in effect; in 1884 Grover
Cleveland’s illegitimate child became a big campaign issue but he, like Bill Clinton
in 1992, survived the revelation and won anyway.)
The Jackson segment of The
Contenders wasn’t as interesting — I never
supported Jesse Jackson for President (though I covered a rally he had at the
Organ Pavilion in 1988) and part of what put me off about him was the sheer
venom of his rhetoric: the all-out assault on the senses that works in a Black
church simply didn’t come off well on the political stump. I also ridiculed the
pretentiousness of his claim to be creating a “Rainbow Coalition” of marginalized
and disaffected groups; at the time I would joke about “Jesse Jackson and His
All-Black Rainbow.” If one can argue that Jesse Jackson paved the way for
Barack Obama (though one of the subjects of the first episode of The
Contenders, Shirley Chisholm, had paved the
way for both of them!), one can also argue that to get elected the first Black
President one had to have a calmer, more even, less obviously emotional and
hortatory rhetorical style. The night Obama won and gave his acceptance speech,
it occurred to me that Obama compared to Martin Luther King, Jr. the way Miles
Davis compared to Louis Armstrong: softer, subtler, more urbane and without the
pulpit-derived flourishes that could make a Black person a moral leader but not
a credible politician. It’s not clear just how Hart or Jackson would have fared
in a general election if they’d made it that far, though my suspicion is the
Reagan juggernaut was just too formidable and whoever the Democrats put up in 1984 would have lost to him
(though Mondale’s loss proved to us unrepentant McGovernites that the Democrats
could lose just as badly with a boring old-line centrist as they could with a
progressive), just as Reagan had enough coattails to get the not particularly
inspiring George H. W. Bush elected in 1988 against the equally colorless
Michael Dukakis.
