Kerry Embodies New Left Ideals; John Kerry's harsh rhetoric and his views on both cultural issues and the war on terror are reminders that he remains a son of the sixties

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 1, 2004

Byline: John Berlau, INSIGHT

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has smooth answers for the problems of health care, the economy and just about every issue on the minds of voters. Yet he has been afflicted with a complete loss of words concerning a stunning event about which many Americans can't stop talking. What is striking, and some say telling, is his silence about the raunch-filled Super Bowl halftime show.

Thousand of families in Kerry's home state had tuned in to watch their home team, the New England Patriots, compete for the professional football championship against the formidable Carolina Panthers, only to be embarrassed during the MTV-produced halftime show when pop singer Justin Timberlake ripped away a piece of singer Janet Jackson's costume to reveal her naked breast. Hundreds of thousands of angry letters have been sent to CBS, to MTV and to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is investigating the matter. Yet Insight received no reply whatsoever to its repeated calls to the Kerry presidential campaign asking what the candidate thinks about the incident.

Kerry is not alone among a Democratic field that has been virtually silent about the halftime spectacle. The exception was former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who called it "no big deal" and marched on to further primary defeats. After all, the media centers pushing the entertainment envelope toward meaningless sex and vulgarity are located in the "blue" states that voted Democratic in 2000. Kerry's refusal to speak out against the event is not playing well in either the "red" states that voted for Bush or the swing states. With the country divided politically and culturally, some on the right are calling the 2004 election the "sixties' last stand," featuring John Kerry (in the role of Gen. George Custer) leading the blue troops, and George W. Bush (as Sitting Bull) leading the red troops.

"Everybody is talking about this, but Kerry is avoiding it for one reason or another," notes Rebecca Hagelin, vice president of communications for the Heritage Foundation and a columnist for WorldNetDaily.com. She speculates of Kerry: "He knows that if he wants to be the nominee he needs Hollywood funding" and doesn't want to risk offending the industry. "It seems to me to be a political calculus on his part," says Jim Tonkowich, managing editor of the Wilberforce Forum for the Renewal of Culture. "Whether he thought it was offensive or just no big deal, his brain told him it was a lose-lose situation. [He thought], 'No matter what I say, I'm going to get slapped by someone.'"

The growing vulgarity and coarsening of popular culture doesn't have to be a Republican or even a conservative issue. The late politically liberal entertainer Steve Allen wrote many books and articles about what he called the slide "down the moral sewer." Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), who just dropped out of the presidential race, also has held Hollywood accountable for excessive sex and violence. But many Democratic activists see criticism of the anything-goes message of the entertainment elites as prudish. For instance, former Clinton aide and liberal journalist Sidney Blumenthal referred to Lieberman in his column on the liberal Website Salon.com as a "scold."

And Kerry naturally is taking into account the concerns of his party's left-wing base. Indeed, in a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, a premier entertainment trade publication, the Massachusetts senator finessed his answers about the moral content of today's entertainment while, ironically, making clear his moral outrage at the rise of conservative media. When asked by the magazine if the media have "gone too far with their depictions of sex and violence," Kerry ducked. "Look, are there movies that I find objectionable on a personal level?" he replied. "Yeah. But you don't have to go see them. I think an honest appraisal suggests that it is not the government's place, nor will it ever succeed in eliminating something people want to do or see." He added, "I think a lot of politicians tend to blame Hollywood and other people for some things that they are unwilling to take reasonable measures to deal with on a public level."

Then, in the same interview, Kerry abandons his straddle between libertarian and libertine to threaten the preferences of those who wish to resist the prevailing Hollywood wisdom by listening to conservative talk radio or viewing Fox News. Kerry makes clear that he supports reinstating something like the old FCC "fairness doctrine" of the sixties, which if reinstated would force radio and TV stations to provide free response time to the popular paid programming of conservative talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh or commentators Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. "The loss of equal-time requirements, I think, was a blow," Kerry lamented. "I was for equal-time requirements. Because I think what's happened is that we got networks that are almost providing a single point of view, and I don't think that is wise. The competitive instinct between entities and the bottom line makes the courage to carry counterprogramming very difficult for people, and the trend appears to confirm that."