Rads
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.--John McCain's speech at the Reagan Library was
well-attended by national political reporters--more than he had seen since
Monday, when he made his official announcement in New Hampshire. But the
journalists hadn't flown out to Los Angeles just to see McCain. They were in
town hoping for an announcement that will be far bigger news if it ever
occurs--that of Warren Beatty's
candidacy. At a benefit dinner for the Southern California branch of
Americans for Democratic Action, Beatty was scheduled to tease a massive
international press corps about the possibility of running--I mean receive the
Eleanor Roosevelt Award and deliver a speech. Anyhow, it sounded like too glam
an event to pass up, so I ditched McCain--about whom more tomorrow.
The Beatty event, held in a huge ballroom in the Beverly Hilton Hotel, was
sort of like the White House Correspondents Dinner but with the actors and
political reporters kept apart. We caught only distant glimpses of Jack
Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman. Also in attendance were Penny Marshall, Rob
Reiner, Larry Flynt, and Faye Dunaway. Courtney Love teetered in and out on
preposterous stiletto heels, flaunting a strategically situated rip in her
blouse (which was pretty much see-through anyhow).
Events like this remind you of what limousine liberalism was like, circa
1972. When I arrived, the warm-up program was already underway. Lila Garrett,
the president of the organization, was saying something about how NATO was not
a defensive alliance but a structure of oppression. "Keeping up a permanent war
economy requires a permanent war," she noted. Garrett calls the bombing in
defense of Bosnia and Kosovo a "78-day reign of terror."
Elsewhere in the country, Bill Bradley represents a more liberal alternative
to Al Gore. Here, Bradley is viewed as just another centrist sell-out.
Hollywood liberals still nurse a grudge against him for voting in favor of aid
to the Contras in the 1980s. Sure, Bradley is for extending health-care
coverage to the uninsured to the tune of $65 billion a year--but he's not for a
single-payer system. Sure, he's for campaign-finance reform--but not for full
public financing of all federal elections. This explains the Hollywood
enthusiasm for Beatty, and Beatty's interest in the race.
The event began with an elaborate tribute film, which might run verbatim as
a Republican attack ad against the Democratic Party one day. It had clips of
Barbra Streisand, Willie Brown, Sean Penn, Barry Diller, Paul Wellstone, Goldie
Hawn, George McGovern, Dustin Hoffman, Arianna Huffington, and Jesse Jackson
and others, praising and joking about Beatty, interspersed with clips from
Reds and Bonnie and Clyde . Michael Ovitz appeared in a
Bulworth outfit of wraparound shades and a black knit cap. Roseanne
called Beatty a "fine piece of ass" and threatened to run against him for
president. Rob Reiner offered to be Beatty's running mate. The only really
truly funny bit was Garry Shandling's cameo. "Listen, if you run and get
elected make sure you get your name above the title of the country--Warren
Beatty in the United States of America," he said. The most astonishing
bit, to me at least, was the wrap-up by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. With a schmaltzy
violin score in the background, Schlesinger called on Beatty to "keep up the
debate and save our party's soul."
As a performance, Beatty's address was overlong and uneven. Parts of it were
relatively clever, such as the peroration in which he offered advice to an
imaginary "drum majorette" who felt she had something to contribute to the
American political debate. This was a nice metaphor for his own flirtation with
a campaign. Some of Beatty's jokes weren't bad. "I've been on a listening tour
of my house for the past six weeks," he said. Another good one was his question
about the Bradley-Gore race: "What's this insurgency of a centrist against a
centrist all about?"
But most of the speech had an Ishtar -like quality. Beatty's
hemming-and-hawing style of delivery gets tiresome pretty quickly ("I want to
thank the Americans for Democratic, uh, Action"), as do his repetitive screeds
about the special interests, the corporations, and the plutocrats. You do have
to marvel at the ability of Prada-clad celebrities to sit at a $500-a-plate
dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel and decry overpaid CEOs and rich people in
general as if they were an alien species. Beatty referred to his critics as
"those moneyed, honeyed voices of ridicule."
Beatty's speech was delivered too late in the evening to receive extensive
coverage in the papers today. But if you watched it on C-Span, you did learn
what his political views are. Like most of those in the room, he is a
wooly-mammoth liberal, pining for the days of Hubert H. Humphrey. Beatty said
he was accepting the award as "an old-time, unrepentant, unreconstructed,
tax-and-spend, bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend liberal Democrat." That about
covers it. He also said he thinks the domestic policies of Lyndon B. Johnson
were all good programs that didn't get a fair shake because of the Vietnam War.
Beatty is annoyed that the Democratic Party has become, in his view, a copycat
GOP. "We don't need a third party," he said. "We need a second party." He wants
to recognize Cuba, pass single-payer health-care insurance, install public
financing of elections, and spend more money on every social problem ever
discovered. Beatty did not mention anything about being pro-life, which Matt
Drudge claims he is since becoming a father. That's about the only thing he
could have said that would have got him booed by this crowd.
It is certainly true, as Beatty says, that there is no one currently in the
presidential race who represents an orthodox liberal position. Where Beatty is
mistaken and perhaps a bit delusional is in attributing the failure of his
ideas to corporate power and corruption. He described our political system as
"a slow-motion coup d'etat of big money interests over the public interest."
This is the same paranoid view he articulated, much more wittily, in
Bulworth . The movie never really took off. Based on last night's
indications, neither will the campaign.
