Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
After four days of visiting with Democrats in Los Angeles, you begin to think American politics and Hollywood go well together.
By DIANE ROBERTS
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 20, 2000
The Florida delegation hotel is located in that circle of hell reserved for citizens of a state governed by one of the Shrubbery. Rumor has it the Texas delegation is camping in a couple of unair-conditioned Quonset huts on Redondo Beach.
But it's not so bad here at the LAX (make your own pun here) Hilton. You have the opportunity to learn the difference between a 747 and an L-1011 just by what they sound like at 3 a.m. Every morning you breakfast on branapple-mulch muffins the size of soccer balls as Florida's most important Democrats -- all four of them -- deliver inspirational half-time speeches to nice people in donkey hats and donkey T-shirts, donkey socks and, for all I know, donkey thong underwear. They hail from Panama City and Plant City, Treasure Island, Jupiter and other fascinating parts of the galaxy.
I stumble into the beige-on-beige ballroom just as our senior senator is singing one of his own compositions, something involving a complex poetic conceit about being a "Graham Cracker." Searching desperately for something stronger than hotel coffee, it crosses my mind that Joe Lieberman has never jammed with Jimmy Buffett.
After a bus ride of only two hours, during which we pass the time chanting with Congresswoman Corinne Brown "1-2-3-4-5, Florida Democrats don't take no jive!" we reach downtown Los Angeles, a glamorous place of barbed wire, bars (in all senses) and fashionably dressed riot cops. The convention is being held in the Staples Center -- Staples as in paper clips, not Pop and Mavis, not Respect Yourself -- which normally (if that word can be used in L.A.) functions as a place where basketball is played. Now huge sausage casings holding the red, white and blue balloons which will be dumped on Al Gore's head Thursday hang from the rafters above a vast stage. Outside and around the back, where the television cameras and most of the delegates never see them, several thousand demonstrators chant against genetically modified food, genetically modified livestock and genetically modified candidates. Few members of the Party of Social Justice go near the chain-link compound, but when they do it's like that old National Lampoon cover -- the one where the Yuppie stares in the magic mirror at his past Hippie self in shock and horror -- and vice versa.
But by 7 p.m. (prime news time in the East Coast markets) that lump on the head from Chicago in 1968 that still gives you a little trouble, those nights reading Garcia Lorca with the Weather Underground, that tie-dye fashion crime are all forgotten in the new Realpolitik of the 21st century. And its poster child, Bill Clinton, the man on whom long hair looked like a wig even during the Summer of Love, is rocking the house one more time. Fleetwood Mac belts out, Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, the delegates raise signs that say "Thank You President Clinton" and dance in the aisles. One more time.
Al Gore has never stopped thinking about tomorrow. He had eight years of tomorrow. I sit at Everest-height in the Staples Center, about eye-level with various enshrined Lakers jerseys, watching the big screen where Stephen Hawking, world-famous, wheelchair-bound cosmologist, is endorsing Gore. Delegates eye each other: He can't VOTE, can he? Isn't he British?
But hey: Stephen Hawking is a tomorrow kind of guy, a theorizer of twists and knots in time. Unlike the 99 percent of Americans who bought his book then left it lying on the coffee table (there was math in there), Al Gore read Hawking and probably understood him. Gore's a nerd, a swot, an overachiever, the boy on the front row who always raised his hand, the jock who wasn't afraid to be good in chemistry.
Gore's Harvard roommate Tommy Lee Jones -- the drawling, craggy actor who looks as if he knows how to do genuine backwoods things (wrestle an alligator, set a still, filet a possum) -- revealed in his speech what I believe to be the key to Gore's character: that is, Star Trek.
The series is practically an allegory of the last eight years of Gore's life: Capt. Kirk, a handsome, womanizing, big-talking front man gets all the credit for saving the universe while the quiet, cerebral Mr. Spock must always, despite his superior powers, defer.
Delegates are still recovering from the Kennedy-fest. Fights broke out in hotel bars over whether Caroline looks more like her mother or her daddy. Bets were taken over how much Jamesons Teddy had sucked before he bounded onstage to stroke the progressive wing-tip of the party. The latest polls don't show even a dead-cat bounce. A gaggle of Florida delegates, draped limply over the Hilton's bar (where a glass of grocery store Chardonnay costs six bucks), cheered themselves up by comparing the musical talent at the Republican and Democratic conventions.
"All they had was that jerk Lee Greenwood," said a guy in a T-shirt with a mean-looking donkey on it that read, "Open a can of Whup-Ass! Florida Democrats Rock."
"Yeah," said a lady with dream-whip hair. "And KC and the Sunshine Band. That's pretty pitiful."
"We had Stevie Wonder," said the Mean Donkey guy, "and Los Lobos, and that gay girl -- Melissa Ethridge."
"Yeah. We have better actors, too. Yeah, Dylan McDermott."
"He is too cute," said another lady in an AFL-CIO cap. "And Jimmy Smits and that guy in that show . . ."
"All they have," said the Mean Donkey guy, "is Charlton Heston and that Southern guy in the Senate who always plays the sheriff."
Imagine this: The Dems have all these Hollywood pals who say they support Gore (despite that little trouble between Tipper and Frank Zappa back in 1985, despite Joe Lieberman and his Silver Sewer awards) because of their stands on choice, on big tobacco and on gun control. Clearly we will soon see a new breed of action movie coming out of the studios: Antonio Banderas goes to whip out his gun in some mean border town but (whoops!) he forgot the 5-day waiting period. Melanie Griffith (who will play Tipper in the miniseries while Keanu Reeves gets the Al part) leans back against silk cushions, preparing to look sexy, and whips Nicorette gum out of her beaded satin bag.
As the jazzman-political observer Gil Scott-Heron said, way back in paleo-Reagan times: "This ain't really a life, it ain't nothing but a movie."
Politics in America is a movie. This convention took place in a city that looks more like its future-projected self in Bladerunner with a little Triumph of the Will thrown in (some L.A. cops really do wear jackboots). William Baldwin appears on ABC news playing a solemn activist. A couple of wrestlers (they must be Republicans), the Rock and she-counterpart Chyna, draw bigger crowds than Sen. Bill Bradley. Karenna Gore is compared to Gwyneth Paltrow. And now Al Gore has his own movie -- two movies! -- one made by Spike Jonze, the guy who made Being John Malkovich, about a door into an actor's head, and one made by Tipper with lots of footage of Al with long sideburns and Al in uniform. It's Platoon (privileged young Ivy League man volunteers for 'Nam) meets Metropolitan (two pretty young preppies fall in love at a formal dance) mates with The Candidate (handsome but stiff young man runs for office).
The Staples Center lights go dim in anticipation, the delegates get their Gore pennants ready to wave, like this is the Big Game (Everybody's All American -- football hero and Steel Magnolia wife travel life's potholed highways together). A hush falls over the throng (The Greatest Story Ever Told -- charismatic young man offers wisdom and path to heaven). Al Gore strides like Rocky up to the stage. He is ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.
Diane Roberts writes for the St. Petersburg Times opinion pages.