Suffocating in an Ocean of Advertising - 27 October 2000

Only a week more to go when you'll hear rising through the skies of the United States what the 18th Century called "an universal shout". It will be a vast shout of relief.

On Tuesday 7 November the presidential hullabaloo will die down, the air - and I do mean the television air - will be made clean of the boastings and denunciations, and both sides will have reduced their appeals to quick, extremely expensive, 10-second lies about each other.

So a week from Tuesday I expect we shall all feel the blessed that a small boy feels at the end of a Sunday sermon.

And for a time too there will be a lull in the endless denunciations of special interests and soft money, innocent-sounding phrases which in fact describe the means whereby political campaigns - from the presidency to the humblest state office - are financed.

Let me, at the start, tell you what the law is and why there is a national outcry at the way it's being flouted.

The law says that anyone may contribute a thousand dollars - no more - to the political campaign of a candidate - a person.

But anyone - an individual, a corporation, any group with a little or lots of money - can contribute any amount of money - thousands, millions - to a political party for its running expenses.

You don't need to read The Pickwick Papers that "running expenses" is a broad term including printing handbills, manufacturing buttons and bows, driving voters to the polls, wetting their tonsils and, most of all, paying out under the counter large sums of party money for a given candidate's election.

This used to be a distortion of the system. It's now the system itself. And Senator John McCain - remember him? - says it's corrupt and that both parties are guilty.

There was a time when a single case, using a large party contribution for a candidate's campaign, was a sin and a scandal and candidates have actually retired in shame and disgrace.

But shame and disgrace are very hard to achieve in politics nowadays, as in any other branch of sport.

What has turned a single act of delinquency into a system is television - the most powerful advertising medium of our time and it costs the earth.

Now the phrase "special interests" has a bad odour in both parties because for decades it has been used as a synonym or code word for big business which in the national folklore has come to be associated with the Republicans, even though a century ago - when the Republicans were the progressive party - it was Theodore Roosevelt who attacked "men who hide behind the breastworks of corporate organisations, malefactors of great wealth."

Thirty years after him it was Franklin Roosevelt who turned the Democrats into the great reformers. And he called his cousin's malefactors "plutocrats" and "economic royalists" who were keeping the country mired in depression by resisting the New Deal's wholesale borrowing of money to finance massive public works.

So it was then, in the pit of the Depression, that the Republicans became associated with the rich, even though to this day you can travel thousands of miles in the Midwest and the prairie where the only dependable political loyalty is that of the farmers to the Republican party.

But a special interest can be any group that acquires a lot of money in order to publicise some point of view, some political issue.

One of the wealthiest lobbies in the country is a national association of retired persons, which means people who are eligible for Medicare, the great provider for the medical troubles of everybody - rich or poor - over 65.

From the dues alone of 30-odd million members they have quite a slush fund which they have used powerfully in this election to make both candidates for the presidency extend Medicare to take in the cost of prescription drugs for the elderly.

The advertisements that this group finances are so frequent and ubiquitous you get the idea that prescription costs for the old were the only thing the election is about.

Now the Democrats have trouble with the definition of a special interest and Vice President Al Gore has an awkward problem.

He is solidly backed and paid for, in television ads, by one of the most moneyed special interests in the country - the schoolteachers' unions.

This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for Mr Gore to join the rest of the people, of every political stripe, in deploring the decay of the public schools and their disgraceful rating among the schools of the other industrial democracies.

All Mr Gore can do is to parrot President Clinton's promise to produce by 2004 the finest public school system in the world.

To which Governor Bush can only say: "What country is he living in? Never mind the best - let's work to get a halfway decent system."

So from long habit of identifying special interests with the Republicans every liberal Democrat hates to have to recognise any special interest on his side.

But a special interest can be fairly defined as any group that has enough money to put a 15-second political smear on national television.

And as I moaned at the beginning we've been suffocated in an ocean of advertising.

I'm sorry to say that the pounding emphasis on political advertising in these last days of the campaign only stresses an unfortunate fact about American television on which there's been little, if any, domestic comment. I mean the continuing increase in television advertising of all sorts in the past few years.

It has risen, I'd say, in direct proportion to the advance of the economic boom.

There's a parallel boom, almost literal, an increase in the volume and bulk of street traffic.

Now, of course, it's normal gossip wherever you live - in Brussels or Blackpool or Bangkok - to have complained for years "the traffic seems to get worse every week".

But finally a transport statistical bureau has produced a graph showing the simple fact of growth matching prosperity, in simpler words: more people buying more things, more trucks and vans, planes, trains, to carry the goods, more people eating out, more people wanting better flats, a private house.

And so in spite of our boast of almost non-existent inflation in real and eatable goods there is whirling inflation in property which means in rents, which means in restaurant prices and on and on. And therefore a livelier encouragement to people who sell anything to advertise more.

The other weekend I was watching a golf tournament on one of our networks and it used to be that the Federal Communications Commission, which is the government policemen in television and radio matters, used to limit advertising to eight minutes an hour.

I don't know whose authority they're acting under or flouting but in one hour of so-called golf there were 32 minutes of golf and 28 minutes of advertising.

And it's now a regular thing, after 10pm, to catch an old movie, which the late Leslie Halliwell tells us runs for 92 minutes, but it's now a two-hour programme.

I ought to say that we still have here the public television network - 300 stations - which take a minimum of advertising and several other networks that play movies continuously and have no ads at all. How they finance themselves - they have no public subscription - I don't know.

On this matter of how pestiferous television advertising has become a very unexpected voice was recently heard from, and a courageous voice it is.

I don't recall ever before a foreign statesman's regretting the influence of America on his country for his reasons.

Now, of course, anti-Americanism in many forms has been a staple lamentation in every European country since the end of the First World War when Uncle Sam was, for years, a grasping Shylock - and the manufacturer of shoddy shirts with soft collars - and the inventor of domestic horrors which we would never touch - cocktails, paper napkins, paper towels, frozen foods, supermarkets, plastic wrappers, parking meters, dial telephones.

In fact a standard European sequence of behaviour has been to deplore an American invention as vulgar, then to adopt it, then to enjoy it and then to maintain that it's a local invention.

But the sad, regretful words of Mr Václav Havel, the first non-Communist President of Czechoslovakia, were in quite a new strain.

He is not anti-American, in fact he is pro-American and a civil rights champion and he's made clear his admiration for much in American life - its defence of liberty, its achievements in scholarship, in the arts, in what has been called the high tide of American medicine.

But he regrets that his own country has taken on American style in advertising - television advertising. By which he means something quite definite and most people would say, I think, quite harmless.

It is the picture one gets of the average American household in television breakfast cereal ads.

He's thinking of the almost determinedly cheerful family of four - white of course - manly father, twinkly pretty clean wife, two children - one sassy but cute little boy, one golden-haired, adorable, chubby girl - all congratulating each other on having discovered Snapple Crackle Woozies or some such delicious dish.

Mr Havel thinks it's a mistake to misrepresent the tougher more difficult variety of American life where more than half the mothers work, where 25% of householders have a mother and no father, where - as in California - there are more Asians, Hispanics and blacks than whites.

The bland, fatuous image of home life is what Mr Havel is sad about. He says it diminishes the stature of a great nation.

Well Britain was shocked to hear itself called by Napoleon "a nation of shopkeepers". Will America be equally shocked to hear that its picture postcard ideal of the American home is unworthy of the real thing?

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