It
is still amazing what is lost in the translation from actual event to media representation, even
though the phenomenon is now thoroughly routine and rarely remarked upon. The
printed and televised accounts of Bill Clinton’s rally at the Alamo last
Saturday, which I attended, did not mention former San Antonio mayor Henry
Cisneros’ earnest refusal of reality when he said, “The difference between
Democrats and Republicans in this election is very stark, very wide,” nor the
fact that Cisneros whipped up the kind of old-fashioned excitement that made
the president’s somewhat tired delivery seem even more so. Of course Clinton’s
missing fire was deceptive, for he exuded twinkly charm in the few seconds of
footage from his speech that were excerpted on the evening news a few hours
later.
Held on the narrow street in front of the old mission that is misleadingly
called a plaza, the rally could not have been attended by more than a couple of
thousand people. Some of them seemed to recognize their status as extras and
left a few minutes after Clinton began talking, apparently signalling that
sighting the celebrity-in-chief means a lot more than hearing him speak. The
politicians gathered on a platform that was erected just outside the outer
perimeter of the Alamo’s grounds, leaving several dozen yards between them and
the front of the Alamo so that the famous structure would register clearly in
the background on camera. The people attending the rally thus had to squeeze
into a space between the platform and the multi-tiered camera gallery that
could not have been more than 30 or 40 feet wide, and it was packed with the
Democratic party faithful whose tiny numbers were belied by standard visual
magic — on the news they registered as a teeming mass — while the B-list
rabble, people who spontaneously showed up, were confined behind low metal
fences on either end of the street. Even on the edge of the A-list crowd, where
I stood, it was like looking down a tunnel.
Clinton and the media have a compact which is seldom violated: He stays
relentlessly on message, and so do they. He talked about “the new politics of
common ground” versus “the old politics of division,” and got off a couple of
good lines about how happy the other side would be if they were running an
incumbent president in the current economic climate. “They’d be saying it is
morning in America. They’d claim the president could virtually levitate.” The
humor of this was more or less lost on the crowd, though it would have played
beautifully on television had anybody elected to use it.
Having heard it all before, journalists ignore this kind of thing in favor of
their horse-race handicapping, which is their standard spiel. The story that
ran in the Austin American-Statesman the next day, “Clinton uses Alamo
as setting in final Texas campaign,” by Ken Herman, was typical. It quoted
Clinton three times, on wanting to stand in front of the Alamo “on the last
weekend of the last campaign of my entire life,” on how the Alamo symbolizes
“the transformation of Texas, the transformation of America and the best hope
for the future,” and his asking “every person from Texas who believes it is the
worst economy in 20 years to vote for Senator Dole and every person who knows
better to vote for me.” The rest of the piece discussed the Democrats’ chances
for carrying the state, quoting Cisneros, Garry Mauro, Gonzalo Barrientos and
Victor Morales, who were on the platform, and George W. Bush, who was not.
Local and national television pieces were versions of the same thing.
None of the coverage I saw mentioned Henry B. Gonzalez, the respected
congressman from San Antonio who at 80 years of age is the Democratic Party’s
last living link to the New Deal era in Texas. Gonzalez spoke about the old
ideals of the party, recalling a time when the poll tax prevented poor people
in Texas from voting. Speaking quietly under the warm autumnal sun — it was a
lovely day — Gonzalez briefly embodied a past that Clinton and his ilk often
seem bent on betraying. Since Gonzalez didn’t shout into the microphone
� la Ann Richards, Henry Cisneros or Hillary Rodham Clinton, it
was almost impossible to hear him at a distance of 50 or 60 feet. This only
heightened the poignancy of the moment, and if you knew something about
Gonzalez and why his name is a byword for integrity in this part of the
country, it was almost unbearable. Finally the crowd virtually ordered him to
yield the podium, and the show went on.
Delayed Reaction
The Statesman continues mounting worthwhile investigative efforts, thelatest example being last Sunday’s piece by Diana Dworin on the City of
Austin’s bungling with its public housing stock, “Public homes for the poor
sitting vacant.” It was good stuff — deserving families on the waiting list
for upwards of a year while good apartments are vacant or occupied by drug
dealers and prostitutes — the kind of aggressive reporting that makes a local
daily’s reputation.
It is thus passing strange that a scandal of potentially mammoth proportions
has scarcely graced the paper’s pages. Early in October a federal jury in New
Jersey convicted J. David Smith, the former national sales manager of Gtech,
which operates the Texas Lottery along with lotteries in 27 other states and a
host of foreign countries, of orchestrating kickbacks to state-level political
consultants. Questions arose concerning Smith’s financial dealings with Ben
Barnes, former Lieutenant Governor of Texas, once the fair-haired boy of state
politics and now a powerful lobbyist. It emerged that Barnes’ lobbying firm,
Entrecorp, makes in the neighborhood of $3 million-plus a year for securing
Gtech’s lucrative Texas contract and keeping it on track, an incredible 4%
commission on Gtech’s Texas haul, which exceeded $135 million in 1995.
In early October The Wall Street Journal reported on Smith’s conviction
and the Barnes connection, followed within a few days by perfunctory coverage
in the Statesman. Then, around the 22nd and 23rd of October, the dam
broke. California newspapers reported the release of a report from Gtech, whose
California contract is worth some $400 million, saying that the state’s lottery
is among the worst-run in the nation. This was an obvious swipe at California’s
lottery director, Maryanne Gilliard, who had announced that Gtech’s contract in
that state would not be renewed. At the same time, a massive investigative
piece by Fortune magazine reporters Peter Elkind and Shaifali Puri was
published on the Internet, the product of a four-month investigation. “Rare is
the company that has faced as many allegations of baldly sleazy conduct as
Gtech,” they wrote, following that statement with 8,000 words of appalling
detail. Among their revelations was the information that a U.S. Attorney in
Texas, along with U.S. Attorneys in two other states, are investigating the
company.
By the time the Fortune article appeared on newsstands on October 30,
the Los Angeles Times had interviewed Gilliard, who said Gtech tried to
blackmail her, threatening to release the damning report. Gilliard also
recounted recent conversations with other state lottery directors who were
“just flat afraid” of the company.
The Statesman was silent. Then, also on October 30, the
Dallas Morning News reported that a federal grand jury had issued a
subpoena for travel records at the request of U.S. Attorney William Blagg of
San Antonio. A co-author of the story was Richard Oppel, Jr., son of the
American-Statesman editor-in-chief. The Statesman ran a story one
day later, “Lottery Commission turns over subpoenaed travel records,” by Ken
Herman, which included information about the Smith conviction but omitted any
mention of the California context or the Fortune epic.
All of this activity could amount to the opening gusts in a hurricane of BCCI
proportions, and Texas is one of the epicenters. No doubt the daily will be all
over the story any time now; they certainly have some catching up to do. In the
meantime, the Fortune article, “Numbers Crunchers,” which appeared in
the magazine’s November 11 issue can be found on the magazine’s website at
http://pathfinder.com/fortune
Mouth Almighty
Talk radio host Rollye James lost her job at KLBJ-AM last week after anill-advised satirical sortie into the subject of whether Bill and Hillary
Clinton should be shot. (She liked the idea.) An encounter with the FBI,
probably unpleasant, followed. This event, along with KVET commentator Paul
Pryor’s latest relapse, was covered by John Herndon in last Thursday’s
XL.ent supplement with his usual skill. A hilarious letter from a local
Republican Party hack appeared in the American-Statesman the next day,
asserting that Austin will suffer a “dumbing-down” of media quality should
nobody else in this market give James a job. Really.
James liked to carry on at great length about how much she hated it here, so
happy trails to her. And remember, friends, being a successful radio demagogue
is no cakewalk. It takes talent, skill, and a good working knowledge of those
touchy federal laws regarding threats on the life of a sitting president.
This article appears in November 8 • 1996 and November 8 • 1996 (Cover).