Ye Olde Town Gimmick

By ANDREW FERGUSON

The now famous Town Meeting that CNN broadcast from Columbus, Ohio, last Wednesday, when an unhappy trio of Administration foreign-policy advisers squirmed while cranks and crackpots fumed and bellowed, was by any measure a disaster--catastrophic as diplomacy, unlucky as public relations and worthless as a means of preparing the country for war. That's too bad, of course, but look on the bright side: the Ohio calamity may do away with "national town meetings" once and for all.

Real town meetings--I mean the old-fashioned kind in which a town's voting population meets annually to bicker, gossip, elect councilmen, vote on bond issues--are anachronisms today, surviving only in a few eccentric backwaters of Ye Olde New England. But the pseudo town meeting, as developed by the President and his imagemakers, is a ubiquitous political gimmick, practiced by candidates nationwide. Perfected in the President's 1992 campaign, the format is familiar to anyone unlucky enough to own a TV. A television studio--or a hall outfitted like a TV studio--is filled with a carefully screened audience. A local television anchor, his hair perfectly in place, serves as master of ceremonies. The candidate, or President as the case may be, wanders the stage looking thoughtful, pensively wagging his wireless microphone. The people speak, the candidate listens. And then he responds with perfectly scripted spontaneity. Concerns are addressed, issues are aired, dialogue is facilitated. And the public is snowed.

The format is now so firmly established that it has been included in the last two rounds of presidential debates. In both '92 and '96, the Clinton camp insisted on it, and no wonder. The most painful moment in either campaign came in watching George Bush and Bob Dole struggle feebly to adapt themselves to this alien venue. Bill Clinton glided through the town meetings, reveling in the chance to display his almost superhuman empathy. But Bush and Dole were older gents, from a generation that considered reticence a virtue and self-exposure a weakness--not, in other words, town-meeting material. They had the stunned look of cavemen thawed out from the frozen tundra and suddenly dropped into a Las Vegas casino. Bush, you'll recall, even glanced at his watch, wondering when the nightmare would end.

The traditional town meeting has its roots in the agora of ancient Athens, a place for sober, if contentious, deliberation. The Clintonized town meeting has a rather less noble lineage. It is the offspring of Phil Donahue, who, true to his format, once wore a dress to enliven the proceedings. The President hasn't gone that far--not quite. But who can forget his town meeting on MTV in 1993? "Boxers or briefs?" asked a budding Walter Lippmann in the studio audience. The President could have turned the question aside. "Madam," he might have said, "that is a private matter between me and my interns." Or better: "Young lady, I am the President of the United States, and you should be ashamed of yourself." But of course he did no such thing. He answered the question, looking, to his credit, suitably embarrassed.

Critics may puzzle over why the President debased himself and his office in this way, but it's no great mystery. The Clintonized town meeting is inherently undignified, debasing by design. It is built on a series of lies. The President (or candidate) pretends he is gleaning valuable information as some questioner drones on about mortgage rates. The questioner pretends he knows as much about mortgage rates as the presidential advisers who are paid to study them. Everyone gathered before the President pretends that each of them is like him and that he is like each of them. Here in our happy democracy everyone's opinion is equally valuable, everyone's question is equally informed, and every crotchet and quirk is equally worthy of the President's time. This is populism of the most romantic sort. And it is thoroughly bogus, a conjurer's trick: the appearance of substance with nothing substantial underneath.

But in Ohio the trick got out of hand. The old-fashioned town meeting has fallen from favor because it was disorderly and unpredictable--ill suited to the kind of dispassionate reflection government is supposed to require. In a real town meeting the balance tends to tip toward the fellow with the loudest voice--the crank with the thickest sheaf of mimeographed papers under his arm. The Founders had a horror of direct democracy for this very reason, and the system they devised was meant specifically to calm the passions, quiet the mob and channel its energies, and create a space for sober decision making by people the voters had chosen to make decisions for them.

After Wednesday's rude awakening in Ohio, the Clintonites may have a better understanding of this rationale. My God, for a minute there it looked like a...like a real town meeting! With luck, they'll be having no more of that. They now know, if they didn't before, that those who live by the gimmick may perish by it too.