Talkin' 'bout regeneration: politics, pop culture, and teen spirit

Reason, March, 2004 by David Weigel

After dispensing with all of his party and power lunch anecdotes--and there are many--Goldberg offers two solutions to reverse the Dems' decline. First, embrace celebrities. During the 2000 presidential campaign and the 2002 midterm elections, he observes, Barbra Streisand lobbied the party to be more aggressive, but they didn't heed. In the end, he writes, "It was the 'professional' Democrats whose strategy for 2002 failed and the 'Hollywood' push for a clearer and more principled Democratic message that proved to have been right."

Goldberg's second solution is marketing. Democrats, he holds, are too intellectual and too boring. "How did we get these fucking zombies as our candidates?" he asks. Progressive activists can be even worse, he thinks, because they don't hone in on one critical issue and put all their muscle into getting it "on the cover of Time magazine" In an interview with me, Goldberg cited the Fox News crew, Ronald Reagan, the late campaign strategist Lee Atwater, and George W. Bush as examples of demagogues who did it right. "There's more sarcasm on the right and less sophistication about issues," he said. "It's attractive. Democrats have policies, sure, but they present them in such a boring way!"

Convinced of the righteousness and appeal of Democratic policies, Goldberg skips over whether those policies might be the problem. Instead, for him, it's all about effective advertising. He believes that a majority, especially a majority of young people, will rally a round, say, abortion rights, affirmative action, and soak-the-rich taxes as long as they're slickly packaged via pop culture. Thus, Goldberg's Big Idea is a progressive reconquista of pop culture. Embrace Bill Clinton's "boxers or briefs" MTV interview, and be irreverent. Join forces with the hip-hop stars whom Al Sharpton is taking for granted. Paint the other side as the heirs of crusty 1950S DJs who wouldn't play "black" music.

It's a bold concept, but would it work? In April 2003, Pearl Jam fans booed frontman Eddie Vedder when he impaled a mask of George W. Bush on a microphone stand. Vedder took time between songs to say why he opposed Bush and the war on Iraq. He was booed again, and a clutch of fans walked out of the stadium. If you follow Goldberg's reasoning, this never could have happened. After all, left-wing politics had long been part of Pearl Jam's shtick: In 2000 Vedder and guitarist Stone Gossard even toured with Ralph Nader to back his presidential campaign.

Rolling Stone reporter David Fricke asked Vedder if he was surprised that he had Republican fans "considering that historically the music represents non-Republican values--sex, drugs and mutiny." Vedder laughed, saying, "That myth got knocked down for me when I learned that Johnny Ramone was a hard-core Republican."

Which is to say that however much politics and pop culture may have gone together in the past (and that's debatable), they've never been joined at the hip. Musical preferences have never been a particularly strong predictor of politics. Goldberg reveals as much. He mentions that the Beatles' greatest hits album, One, released in 2000, sold big after two presidential candidates "ran against the sixties." But he writes that "the continuing popularity of the Beatles ... does not mean that everyone who bought the One album bought John Lennon's egalitarian political ideals or George Harrison's meditative spirituality.