February 1, 2001
Martin Sheen, Television and The Rhetoric of Public Policy

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

If you watched television news shows—particularly C-SPAN and CNN—the week of Jan. 15 you couldn’t avoid learning about the Senate’s confirmation process for cabinet nominees. In some cases, you could switch from channel to channel as five or more committees began grilling nominees.

If the people President-elect George W. Bush had picked to head the various departments of government were non-controversial, the treatment of the nominee was so courteous as to be largely meaningless. Watching those hearings could make one believe that the spirit of cooperation that was much touted during and after the ballot-counting in Florida really existed.

But when the nominees were controversial figures—people like former Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri or former Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton, it soon became evident that the lions were not laying down with the lambs, nor the elephants with the donkeys.

I caught some snippets on the fly of the Ashcroft hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee and it became clear that for all the high-blown public statements about partisan amity and cooperation, the Democrats at least were going to stick with their hard core people—even if they did lose in the end. Couching their remarks and questions in a somewhat courteous senatorial fashion, they went for Ashcroft’s jugular.

If the hysterical screaming of Sarah Brady and her cohorts, including the people at the so-called Million Mom March, could be rated a “10” for nastiness, the lordly senators like Ted Kennedy, Charlie Schumer and Dick Durbin only rated an “8.” But it was certainly clear that they were going to fight the Ashcroft confirmation and in the process picture him as the most heinous kind of politician for the television cameras, the general public and hopefully any weak-kneed Republican senators who might switch sides.

The “Moms” are pulling out all the stops to beat Ashcroft, including a so-called movie on their website, designed to generate letters of opposition to senators of both parties. And the kind of rhetoric they use should give you a clue, because they claim Ashcroft is “a man who won’t protect our kids from guns.”

As nationally syndicated columnist Ben Wattenberg predicted in an early January column in The Washington Post, “senators wavering on the Ashcroft nomination will be (are) targeted as anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-woman, pro-gun.”

Wattenberg went on to refer to the confirmation hearings as what would be called “blooding the army” in military parlance.

The hearings are, after all, the opening salvos in what will be a partisan battle stretching over the next four years, but especially the next two years. That’s because the liberal lions are incensed and determined to make the 2002 congressional campaign a costly, bitter struggle in an effort to regain control of Congress. They see the election of the Bush-Cheney ticket—coupled with narrow but continued control of Congress by the GOP—as representing a major new shift away from the extremist left-wing liberal social and governmental agenda. Bush’s appointment of conservatives to high cabinet posts, where they will be in a position to change public opinion as well as public policy, is seen as a major threat. The Democrats are afraid that the Bush Administration may be able to mold public attitudes as adroitly as the Clinton-Gore camp did over the past eight years.

And the liberal politicians will not be the only forces engaged in this campaign. The political cartoonists of the left will aid and abet the attacks on GOP policy and especially people like Ashcroft and Norton. They and the new president will be subjected to ridicule and extremism.

“West Wing”
But the left-wingers in the media and television industry may find this type of campaign cuts both ways. Some commentators have suggested that Martin Sheen, the actor who plays a liberal president on TV’s “West Wing” and who was so incensed that his brother’s voice was used in pro-gun National Shooting Sports and Hunting Foundation political commercials last fall, and the people who produce “West Wing,” may have cost Gore the state of West Virginia last November. If he had won that typically Democratic state, Gore would be the person inaugurated on Jan. 20.

In one episode last fall, “West Wing” dissed West Virginia with a script that suggested that Sheen’s character was shot by a fictitious hate group named “West Virginia Pride.” That show didn’t sit well in the Mountain State and a state senator even encouraged a boycott of NBC.

Apparently, voters in West Virginia made the connection between the fictional president and the Clinton-Gore camp, not only on guns but the ugly rhetoric they use in public policy debates. That link-up set the stage for the confirmation nastiness we are now observing.

I expect to see a lot more of that kind of shameful rhetoric in the coming months—most of it coming from the liberal camp.