WASHINGTON, Feb. 29 (UPI) -- Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has smooth answers for the problems of healthcare, the economy and just about every issue on the minds of voters. Yet he has been afflicted by a complete loss of words concerning a stunning event about which many Americans can't stop talking.
What is striking, and some say telling, is his silence about this year's raunchy Super Bowl halftime show.
Thousand of families in Kerry's home state had tuned in to watch their home team, the New England Patriots, compete for the professional football championship against the formidable Carolina Panthers, only to be embarrassed during the MTV-produced halftime show when pop singer Justin Timberlake ripped away a piece of singer Janet Jackson's costume to reveal her partially obscured breast. Hundreds of thousands of angry letters have been sent to MTV and CBS, the network that broadcast the show. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating the matter. Yet Kerry's campaign has made no statement on what the senator thinks about the incident.
Kerry is part of a Democratic field that has been virtually silent about the halftime spectacle. His refusal to speak out against the event is not playing well in either the swing states or the "red" states that voted for George W. Bush in 2000. With the country divided politically and culturally, some on the right are calling the 2004 election the "'60's last stand," featuring John Kerry (in the role of Gen. George Custer) leading the blue troops, and George W. Bush (as Sitting Bull) leading the red troops.
"Everybody is talking about this, but Kerry is avoiding it for one reason or another," says Rebecca Hagelin, vice president of communications for the Heritage Foundation.
"He knows that if he wants to be the nominee he needs Hollywood funding" and doesn't want to risk offending the industry, she says.
Jim Tonkowich, managing editor of the Wilberforce Forum for the Renewal of Culture thinks Kerry's silence is a political calculation. "Whether he thought it was offensive or just no big deal, his brain told him it was a lose-lose situation. (He thought), 'No matter what I say, I'm going to get slapped by someone.'"
The growing vulgarity and coarsening of popular culture doesn't have to be a Republican or even a conservative issue. The politically liberal Steve Allen, creator of NBC's "Tonight Show," wrote any number of books and articles about what he called the slide "down the moral sewer." Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., has likewise sought to hold Hollywood accountable for excessive sex and violence. They are in the minority. Many activist Democrats see criticism of the anything-goes message of the entertainment elites as prudish.
Kerry is naturally taking into account the concerns of his party's left-wing base. In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he finessed his answers about the moral content of today's entertainment while, ironically, making clear his moral outrage at the rise of conservative media.
When asked by the magazine if the media have "gone too far with their depictions of sex and violence," Kerry ducked.
"Look, are there movies that I find objectionable on a personal level?" he replied. "Yeah. But you don't have to go see them. I think an honest appraisal suggests that it is not the government's place, nor will it ever succeed in eliminating something people want to do or see." He added, "I think a lot of politicians tend to blame Hollywood and other people for some things that they are unwilling to take reasonable measures to deal with on a public level."
In the same interview, Kerry abandoned his straddle between libertarian and libertine to threaten the preferences of those who wish to resist the prevailing Hollywood wisdom by exclusively listening to conservative talk radio or watching Fox News Channel. He made clear he supports the reinstatement of something like the old FCC "fairness doctrine" that forced radio and TV stations to provide free response time to the popular paid programming of conservative talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh or commentators Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.
"The loss of equal-time requirements, I think, was a blow," Kerry said. "I was for equal-time requirements. Because I think what's happened is that we got networks that are almost providing a single point of view, and I don't think that is wise. The competitive instinct between entities and the bottom line makes the courage to carry counter programming very difficult for people, and the trend appears to confirm that."
To conservative media experts, Kerry's reference to "networks that provide a single point of view" was a coded reference to Fox News. They warn that Kerry's chilling comments are a threat to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and apply it not only to radio but also to cable television programming.
Although some conservatives initially opposed the Reagan administration's repeal of the policy in 1987, thinking the liberal electronic media would shut out their voices even more effectively, cable TV and the newly freed markets of the airwaves responded to public demand with conservative commentators such as G. Gordon Liddy, Limbaugh and Hannity, providing a counterbalance to what conservatives call the establishment liberal media. When Democrats tried to bring back the Fairness Doctrine in the early years of the Clinton administration, the conservatives led their millions of listeners in a successful letter-writing campaign.
Some liberals and Democrats feel emboldened because of recent congressional rollback of proposed FCC regulations regarding media ownership, says political strategist Jeffrey Bell. Even some conservatives, such as Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center, have joined in the fight against the FCC's proposal to lift the ownership caps for broadcast networks. The FCC wants to raise the percentage of the American audience a network can reach through the stations it owns from 35 percent to 45 percent.
In a compromise, Congress fixed the cap at 39 percent as liberals clearly expressed their intention to prevent conservative Fox News from acquiring yet more power. Kerry told the Hollywood Reporter he was "against the FCC decision" to allow expansion of markets. Many opponents of the FCC proposal to raise the cap to 45 percent are calling their successful attempt to stop it a "first step," with the next steps including restoration of the Fairness Doctrine to provide counterbalance to the conservative commentators.
"I do think they lament the rise in conservative talk radio, and they want to get back to a time when, if somebody said something conservative on the air, you had to provide equal time, which made it impossible to have that kind of programming," Bell says.
Now, Bell adds, Kerry's words in the Hollywood Reporter, which make clear he "certainly does" want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, may be just the thing to get Bush's base riled.
"If people think that government regulation is going to close down their options to listen to talk radio or cable, then I think they're not going to be very favorable to Mr. Kerry's point there," he says. "The Democrats' base is motivated. Things like this could make the Republican base just as motivated, if he's trying to take away people's ability to listen to the type of broadcast they want to."
Encouraging acceptance of permissiveness in media and entertainment while attempting to put restrictions on the airing of conservative views seems to many on the right to be a legacy of the New Left from the 1960s. They see Kerry as one who has been very much a part of that culture.
After honorably serving in Vietnam, Lieutenant Kerry joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In the early 1970s, in congressional testimony and in his book "The New War," he accused American GIs of systematic atrocities, cruelties and war crimes. He made a public display of throwing medals over a White House fence, later claiming to have thrown only his ribbons or someone else's medals when his own turned up on display in his office.
Since Kerry repeatedly has politicized the Vietnam War and joined in the Democratic smear that questioned Bush's National Guard service, critics say he has opened the door to making the personal political. Thus, he should not be surprised if issues concerning his divorce, his marriages to two rich women, alleged infidelities with young women and his dating of Hollywood sexpots like Morgan Fairchild drift into public discussion. He is, after all, an icon of the '60s.
Certainly Kerry's New Left background still shows in the coarseness of his attack on supporters of the war and his ascribing of sinister or racist motives to his opponents.
A '60s man in every aspect of his rhetoric, Kerry defended his vote to authorize presidential use of military force in Iraq to Rolling Stone magazine by saying, "Did I expect George Bush to f-- it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did."
Of course, politicians are not saints, and in 2000 candidate Bush referred to New York Times reporter Adam Clymer as a "major league a--hole" when he didn't know any microphones were monitoring him.
What makes the Kerry vulgarity different is that it had all the marks of being planned to make him seem daring to a young audience. Kerry spokesman David Wade told the New York Post that use of the word reflected the fact that Bush's Iraq policy "makes John Kerry's blood boil." But a presidential scholar for at the Brookings Institution criticized the Kerry expletive. "It's so unnecessary," Stephen Hess told the Post. "In a way it's a kind of pandering to a group he sees as hip."
Reflecting its blue-states base, coarseness in language is increasingly common at Democratic Party events.
At a fundraiser for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in New York in December, "pro-Dean comics took the stage ... and competed to see how often they could use the F-word in the same sentence," reports the New York Post's Deborah Orin.
Kerry is also said to pander to the style and febrile hysteria of the '60s through leering suggestions that Attorney General John Ashcroft is a racist tool of a WASP elite.
At a September debate of the Democratic candidates in Baltimore, Kerry opened with this canned zinger: "I look at this audience and there are people from every background, every creed, every color, every belief, every religion. This is, indeed, John Ashcroft's worst nightmare here." Many have criticized Ashcroft and parts of the USA PATRIOT Act that he defends, but it is quite another thing to impugn his motives or to label him a racist.
While campaigning in South Carolina in late January, the former activist for Vietnam Veterans Against the War claimed the fight against terrorism should be only "occasionally military."
Kerry insisted in that campaign stop that the response to Sept. 11 should have been "primarily a law-enforcement and intelligence operation that requires cooperation around the world -- the very thing this administration is worst at."
Even so, '60s throwback or not, it isn't entirely correct to characterize Kerry as "antiwar." He supported military intervention in Haiti and backed the war in Kosovo during the Clinton administration, about which he wrote in a 1999 Boston Globe op-ed, "There is cause enough for American intervention on the basis of security issues, our commitment to NATO, and overwhelming humanitarian needs. ... Kosovo is not another Vietnam -- unless we decide to make it so, for lack of resolve or a willingness to submit to the terror of (Serbian leader Slobodan) Milosevic and leave our humanitarian mission unfinished."
Columnist Charles Krauthammer recently addressed this apparent inconsistency in a lecture at the conservative American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner.
The honoree at the event, Krauthammer asked, "How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks?"
"They don't have an aversion to the use of force. They have an aversion to the use of force for pure national interest," he said. In other words, Eurocentrics such as Kerry and his cohorts still believe the United States is too immature to fight a war if European countries object.
Kerry's views really haven't changed that much since as a candidate for Congress he told the Harvard Crimson in 1970, "I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations." When the Crimson recently republished those remarks, Kerry's campaign had no comment other than to note that the senator has tended to support the autonomy of the U.S. military in recent speeches.
On both cultural issues and the war on terrorism, the consensus now is that the United States is about evenly divided. But this may not be the case.
The '60s' ideas and values are no doubt still a powerful influence on popular culture, largely manufactured and sold by the blue states, yet there still appears to be a moral consensus even beyond the heartland of the red states that puts Kerry and many Democrats outside of the American mainstream.
A recent University of Michigan survey shows 63 percent of Americans "strongly favor" the recently enacted ban on partial-birth abortion -- a Bush-backed ban that Kerry voted against. And in a January poll conducted by Zogby International on behalf of the conservative group Focus on the Family, 96 percent of U.S. parents said abstinence was the best sexual option for teens, bringing to mind the adage that a conservative is yesterday's liberal who now has a teenage daughter.
It may be that the Super Bowl halftime show was a cultural watershed. Up to that point, networks had been asking, "How dirty can we get? How close can we get to HBO without crossing the line?" Lowell "Bud" Paxson, chief executive officer of the family-oriented PAX TV network, tells Insight. Now, he and others say, parents are pushing back.
Recent evidence suggests that Americans are rewarding artists who do hold themselves to a higher standard.
Norah Jones, a singer and pianist who beautifully combines country, jazz and soul, has sold 8 million copies of her album "Come Away With Me," even though it doesn't contain one dirty word or explicit description of a sex act. Timberlake, by contrast, sold 3 million copies of his recent album. Jones, whose new album "Feels Like Home" was just released, also shies away from Britney Spears' skimpy outfits and Kama Sutra poses.
The highest-grossing movie in recent weeks is "The Return of the King," the third in a trilogy of films that, like the J.R.R. Tolkien novels on which they are based, celebrate valor in a just war. In fact, movie critic Ted Baehr notes that PG-rated movies now consistently outperform R-rated films at the box office.
One more sign of America's positive turn in entertainment from discordant pop culture is singer Beyoncé, the one entertainer to come out of the Super Bowl universally praised. She wore a crisp white suit, was escorted by a top Marine general, and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." In interviews before the game, she talked about how thrilled she was to have the honor.
The moral outlook of the '60s may play a significant role for voters as one of the era's personifications, John Kerry, runs for president. Says Julia Hughes Jones, an independent-minded ex-Democrat and Arkansas state auditor whose 1993 conversion helped put the state in Bush's column in 2000, "People are looking for somebody who has a sense of morality and who has a sense that character is important."
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(John Berlau is a writer for Insight magazine.)
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(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
