How the Celebrity-Industrial Complex Hinders Democrats

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, September 30, 2022

 

Rarely have I appreciated paragraphs in Politico as much as these, in a piece by Calder McHugh looking at how Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams have largely flopped this cycle:

 

Their anointment as the future of the Democratic Party — young, dynamic and erudite — led to glossy magazine profiles and soft press coverage that may have burnished their national profiles, but did little to advance their prospects among voters who weren’t already inclined to support them.

 

O’Rourke announced his candidacy for president in 2019 with an Annie Leibowitz-shot Vanity Fair cover. Abrams was the subject of a Vogue profile that asked whether she can ‘Save American Democracy.’ A Washington Post piece styled her like a superhero, with a cape, and asked whether she’d be vice president despite never holding elected office above the Georgia House of Representatives.

 

Insert all the correct-answer sound effects from game shows here. What it takes to wow the editors of Vanity Fair and Vogue is not what it takes to win a majority of voters in Texas or Georgia or a lot of other states. Sooner or later, a southern Democratic Party rising star faces a time for choosing* where he must decide which group to prioritize.

 

If you’re a Democrat who wants to win a statewide race in a red southern state, you would be wise to study the playbook of Louisiana governor Jon Bel Edwards. Edwards is (relatively) pro-life and (relatively) pro-gun. By not antagonizing socially conservative Louisianans on those two key issues, Edwards earned himself a lot of leeway to enact the progressive policies he wants elsewhere. Vogue, Vanity Fair, and most national, left-leaning publications are unlikely to ever run a glossy, glowing profile of Edwards.

 

But you know what Edwards gets instead? He gets to run the executive branch of the Louisiana state government from the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge. It’s a nice consolation prize for never quickening the pulse of Anna Wintour.

 

Besides the big mainstream-news institutions — the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Time magazine, etc. — there’s an adjacent series of cultural publications: Vogue, Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, the New Yorker, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, and a few others.

 

Those publications want Democratic heroes to celebrate. They’d like to be David Maraniss, writing profile pieces about the then-little-known Bill Clinton in 1992, or William Finnegan, writing a New Yorker profile of a relatively unknown state senator back in 2004, with the prescient quote, “In Republican circles, we’ve always feared that Barack would become a rock star of American politics.” The subtext to a lot of the glossy covers and lengthy profiles featuring these Democratic Party figures is, “We’ve found him! This is it! This is the guy! This is the one you’ve been waiting for!”

 

These cultural publications are staffed by people who live in New York, who largely went to good schools, and who are almost always way further to the left than the average American. Their interest in actual policy varies a lot, and they often have a wildly unrealistic sense of how legislation actually gets passed; they may not have taken many political-science courses, but they’ve watched a lot of episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Perhaps most importantly, their sense of what is good, intriguing, and worthy of being saluted is often out of whack compared to the tastes of the overall American electorate. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has misled a lot of candidates over the years.) They are the kinds of people who can get genuinely excited about Kirsten Gillibrand and convince themselves that she’s the Next Big Thing in national politics. (In the end, all Americans wanted was some ranch dressing.)

 

In other words, the kinds of people who decide which Democrats deserve the glossy-profile treatment don’t think like the general American public, and they really don’t think like the electorates of southern states.

 

O’Rourke and Abrams are in the Great Southern Democratic Hope Hall of Fame, alongside Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Jaime Harrison in South Carolina — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-leaning state but who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national-media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.

 

Now, if the place you represent has enough Democrats, you can court and embrace the glossy-magazine world all you like. If you represent a heavily Democratic House district in New York, you can appear on the cover of GQ. First ladies can appear on the cover of Vogue with minimal fuss. But appearing on the cover of Men’s Vogue didn’t do John Edwards any favors. (Admittedly, he had a lot of other problems.)

 

The glossy magazines can’t make you a senator or a governor, but they can make you a celebrity. And being a Democratic Party celebrity is a pretty sweet role to play. You’re on television all the time, you often get at least one lucrative book deal, and teaching gigs and the speaking circuit usually come calling. The only catch is that celebrities don’t do as much as elected officials do. Celebrities say a lot about what should be done; legislators vote on legislation and governors are the chief executives of their states. Celebrities look like they’re influential because they get a lot of attention, but they can’t change what the federal or state governments do.

 

Also, celebrity status is a gradually diminishing asset. When’s the last time you heard about Michael Moore? Keith Olbermann? Year by year, you slide from the A-list to the B-list to the C- and D-lists, and finally, you just slide into the cacophony.

 

*Yes, Reagan’s on my mind, as the National Review Institute held its Buckley Prize Dinner at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last night. It was awesome.

 

The House Republicans’ Commitment to America

 

House Republicans have laid out their agenda, what they’re calling their Commitment to America. They have four broad themes: An economy that’s strong, a nation that’s safe, a future that’s built on freedom, and a government that’s accountable.

 

The policy agenda is . . . varied, and not exactly awash in details, but just about every item will be popular in most districts:

 

·         Cut the time it takes to obtain oil- and natural-gas-drilling permits in half.

·         Move supply chains away from China.

·         Fully fund effective border-enforcement strategies, infrastructure, and advanced technology to prevent illegal crossings and trafficking by cartels.

·         End catch-and-release loopholes.

·         Require proof of legal status to get a job.

·         Support 200,000 more police officers through recruiting and retention bonuses.

·         Crack down on prosecutors and district attorneys who refuse to prosecute crime, while permanently criminalizing all forms of illicit fentanyl.

·         Establish a Select Committee on China.

·         Advance the Parents’ Bill of Rights.

·         Expand parental choice so more than a million more students can receive the education their parents know is best.

·         Defend fairness by ensuring that only women can compete in women’s sports.

·         Improve access to telemedicine.

·         Provide greater privacy and data-security protections for Americans.

·         Equip parents with more tools to keep their kids safe online.

 

Some right-of-center folks might want a more specific agenda; a lot of this consists of goals, rather than concrete policies.

 

The Contract with America had more specifics, but it’s easy to forget that the Contract with America didn’t pledge that everything would become law; the aspiring House Republican majority could only promise to bring the proposals to a floor vote.