Jerry's Kid: I am Candidate Springer's whipping boy

National Review, August 11, 2003 by Jonah Goldberg

Springer's spokesman Dale Butland tried to get back on message. No, no, "he's not calling them hicks," Butland said. "It's the elitists, not Jerry Springer, who think everybody in Middle America is a slack-jawed yokel hick." According to Butland, there is simply no difference between a pimp and a plumber, between a hooker and a housewife. And to say there is one makes you an elitist. Such nonsense also overlooks the fact that "Middle America" voted for George W. Bush, not for the politicians who share Springer's views. Remember that whole Red America vs. Blue America thing?

Springer might have a number of reasons for picking me to run against. First, with his astonishing ego, he might actually believe it's true that he is a uniquely qualified champion of the common man (which means he's too stupid to qualify as a senator, even a Democratic one). Second, perhaps he's trying to redeem himself for a reputation that has remained tarnished since he paid a hooker by check when he was on the Cincinnati City Council-though, since he makes no apologies for his past, it's unlikely. Third, he might think that denouncing a guy named Goldberg is a savvy move for a Jewish sleaze merchant trying to adopt a populist mantle in Middle America (especially when you note that Springer has no original public-policy ideas, and that his would-be Democratic opponent is also very liberal).

But the most dismaying possible explanation for Springer's decision to pick an objectively dumb strategy is that it works. Springer spent much of the last decade making millions ($6 million a year in salary) by denigrating and exploiting severely damaged people. Here are a few examples of show titles from his rich oeuvre: "Our Brother Is Our Pimp," "KKK Moms," "I Stole My 12-Year-Old's Boyfriend," "My Wife Is Sleeping with My Aunt." Springer began by mixing the outrageous with the serious, but soon realized there was more money to be made by defining the lowest common denominator to the lowest low possible. So while his show once interviewed serious people and then segued to asking homeless people what they thought of U.S. intervention in Somalia, Springer's real success came when he started staging fake marriages for dying children and asking viewers to help find a truck- stop hooker's lost teeth (last seen on the dashboard of a john's car). At the end of every show he'd offer some "final thoughts" in order to splash the veneer of respectability on a freak show that asked viewers to laugh at fat strippers and celebrate the loss of shame as a socially useful development.

In other words, the media's old detente in the culture war has been broken. It was once a rule that liberals would "defend to the death" the right of execrable people to say whatever they wanted, but would stop short of actually approving of it. But ever since the Lewinsky scandal, the national media have decided that it is inappropriate to judge anybody, ever, on so-called lifestyle issues (unless those issues prove conservative hypocrisy). Larry Flynt became a hero; George magazine even invited him to the White House Correspondents Dinner. We all once would have agreed that Jerry Springer had every right to be rich and famous-but also that such "success" would come at the cost of social approval. That his bid for the Senate is being taken more seriously, and with more respect, than the objections to it is a sign that at the national level it is no longer considered acceptable that there be any deleterious consequences whatsoever for one's choices.