I
spent a sunny week-
end trailing my big sister, Cindy, at the National Issues Convention. She was
one of 459 delegates from across the United States who gathered at the
University of Texas January 18-21 for this “experiment in democracy.”
When reporters asked her what she thought of the event, she answered, “It’s
like camp. You’ve got your little groups, like the Woodchucks and the Magpies.
You go places on a bus. You all eat the same food. You have projects and events
scheduled for you. You’ve got counselors and you make camp friends.”
As an interloper, I viewed the conference more like a play within a play.
Imagine the characters of a human drama full of earthy details — I’m thinking
Arthur Miller — suddenly deciding to stage an existential French farce.
Within the small discussion groups, the atmosphere was earnest and sincere.
Delegates keenly tried to understand why they’d been flown in, put up in nice
hotels, and paid $350 to discuss their opinions. I watched the members of
Cindy’s group struggle to formulate questions for the presidential candidates
that “would make them squirm.” Ann, one of the moderators, urged the group to
ask questions which politicians couldn’t answer simply by “pulling a 3×5 note
card out of their head.” At the end of each of the three sessions covering
three preordained topics — “Reassessing America’s Global Role,” “Pocketbook
Pressures,” and “The Troubled American Family” — the 13 members in Group 15,
Cindy’s group, were mentally exhausted from working out a consensus on their
questions and carefully wording them to avoid pat answers. It was incredibly
sad to me and frustrating to them that not one of their questions was selected
when the delegates faced the candidates.
Then again, “faced the candidates” is a bit of a euphemism, since only one
Republican candidate, Senator Richard Lugar, showed up in person, with three
others — Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes, and Lamar Alexander — gracing the
conference via satellite.
Consequently, the first half of the three-hour live broadcast on Saturday
night was turned over to a warm-up act, a half dozen “experts” rounded up at
the last minute as filler. These were not the people the delegates wanted or
expected to question. They got long-winded, egghead replies from Lester Thurow,
a professor at MIT, and William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, on
heartfelt economic concerns; conflicting reports from Charles Lichenstein of
the Heritage Foundation and Donald McHenry from Georgetown University on global
policy; and the personal beliefs of Tom Andrews, president of People for the
American Way, and Kenda Bartlett, with Concerned Women for America, on family
issues.
If the televised portion of the convention wasn’t exactly enlightening, it was
entertaining, at least in the aforementioned farcical way. Observers were
cautioned to be quiet during the broadcast, but when host Jim Lehrer slipped on
“middle-class” and blurted out “the problems of the middle-ass,” we all howled
like school kids. When Alexander said, “I’ve been driving around the country
spending the night with people I don’t know,” the giggling continued. The mere
appearance of Gramm’s face peering out at us from the giant TV screen caused a
flurry of tittering. And Forbes’ perfected impersonation of an alien replicant
kept everyone in stitches. It was not an elevated political moment.
On Sunday morning, Vice President Al Gore presented a polished yet folksy
persona, despite the fact he was asked some incredibly stupid questions, mostly
off-camera, like “If you have to have a license to drive a car, why don’t you
have to have a license to get married?” These questions gave me hope that, yes,
this was in fact a representational cross section of the American population.
The stupid ones made themselves known in other ways as well, god love ’em. One
fellow in Cindy’s group threw a temper tantrum when he was told his wife
couldn’t accompany him to the delegates’ dinner Saturday night, tossing his
badge to the ground and threatening to sue the convention. It was even rumored
that one participant was so stupid that he told Gore at the end of the
telecast, as he shook his hand, “I have a gun.” I don’t guess he made his
flight home that afternoon.
For the most part, however, I was impressed by the poise and purposefulness
of the group of Americans that gathered in our town. Elderly homemakers, auto
mechanics, and school teachers faced down professional smooth talkers — on
live television, no less — with persistence and facts. One woman, after
receiving the stock answer as to why our troops are in Bosnia, hammered away
for a deeper response, noting there are more than 40 civil wars currently being
fought across the world: “So, why Bosnia?”
She was rewarded with a silly analogy about not being able to catch everyone
that speeds on the highway.
The feeling I got from the participants (and I’m not about to poll them) was
that they weren’t very impressed with any of the candidates, so maybe Bob Dole
and Bill Clinton were wise to decline. In the hotel elevator after Saturday’s
broadcast, one delegate posed the question, “Okay, if you had to vote for one
of those four guys right now, which one would it be?” “You mean if you held a
gun to my head?” asked Cindy. “Yeah, if that was the choice,” said the man.
The people in the elevator were silent. When Cindy stepped out on her floor,
she held the doors open a moment, thinking. Then as they closed, she turned to
the people and said, “Shoot me.”
This article appears in February 2 • 1996 and February 2 • 1996 (Cover).