The circle is now unbroken. The snake bites its own tail. Reality is now TV is now reality. Politics is now entertainment is now politics.
On the West Coast, a movie star (once again) is running for high office. From New York (where HBO offices are located), we have the new series "K Street."
One of the spokes of L'Enfant's Washington, real-life K Street is studded with think tanks and influence peddlers. The show itself, however, is what you might call a surreality show. The subject is politics - specifically, the "process, the stuff no one sees, the hustled conversations, glad-handing, on-the-fly trading of horses, quid for quo, scratched back for scratched back.
Executive producers George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh have political celebs play themselves, actual politicians and pundits: Sens. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., Don Nickels, R., Okla., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah; U.S. Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., presidential candidate Howard Dean, as well as spin-merchants Mary Matalin, James Carville, Paul Begala, Michael Deaver, and a lot of people famous only in the tank of thinkers.
Clooney has said that there is no writer for the show. The creators scan the news and let the news be the plot, then fit real people into fictional situations based on the fact-of-the-moment. And it's shot on location - the St. Regis hotel, the Grooming Lounge hair stylist shop, Union Station.
In the first episode, Dean is coached by Begala for the first debate among the Democratic candidates. Then footage from the actual debate is run as part of the show. It's unnerving to see reality, surrounded by fiction, made to become fiction.
All of this is very clever. For many viewers, however, it also brings up an old discontent - the extent to which politics is theater. This discontent takes the form of three common complaints:
Politicians, to cadge votes and gain favor, prostitute themselves to the public eye! It's lowering, demeaning, a whoredom. Politicians should maintain a decorum and dignity equal to their station.
It's so corrupt! Politics (such is our pretense) should be above the contempt of the lowest-common-denominator marketplace, while TV and film are drenched with it.
Our leaders shouldn't playact! They should be transparent and sincere. People want to feel, at least, that when a leader says, "I want to do X for reason Y," we are hearing the closest thing that leader can say to the truth.
But politics always has been theater. Exhibit A: The Roman Colosseum, constructed in part to distract the mob from the oppression of emperors. Closer to hand, we might recall the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the closest thing to mass media events available in 1858.
The first televised president was FDR, during the pivotal New York World's Fair of 1939. But the first American leader to have a true love affair with TV was Eisenhower. The camera discovered it loved him in June 1945, when he returned a conquering hero to New York and took in a Yankees game. The first politician to air a TV ad (1950) was William Benton, a senator from Connecticut. Two years later, Eisenhower became the first presidential candidate to use television advertising.
So if TV and politics sometimes behave as if they've been sleeping together for half a century, it's because they have.
The last thing politicians can be is either transparent or sincere. If they were, we'd hate them for it. It's not that we can't handle the truth - federally allowed levels of rat hair in baby food, for example - it's that we don't want to. No matter what we say, we American voters elect people to buffer us from the actual conduct of government. We want made-for-TV politics.
"K Street" shows us the insides of the sausage, the dirty conversations no leader wants to share and few constituents care to know. One thing to say for the show: While full of humor, it treats this stuff as adult business. It lets the most powerful people in the world be their own commentary. You cannot say this show trivializes politics.
Leave that to the politicians. That's the final irony: "K Street" takes politics seriously, while the real-life professionals seem bent on rendering it nearly meaningless."
©2003, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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