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For the last few days, I've been culling through news articles on the Presidential race, perusing the candidates' Web sites, and skimming the numerous books out on George W. Bush and Al Gore. In this, the most issues-oriented campaign in years, the candidates have staked out positions on everything from crime to helping the disabled to "abstinence education." In fact, they've posted veritable gigabytes of information laying out their ideas on just about everything.
Yet neither candidate seems to have any cultural policy at all: Neither gives the slightest hint of what he might do to support the creation and enjoyment of art, music, and literature in our society. Figuring out what -- if anything -- the Presidential election will mean for the arts is a guessing game.
But whoever wins, it looks like we're in for little improvement over the arid Clinton era, which was characterized by funding cuts and moralistic attacks from the Right and a President in the bully pulpit whose tastes ran to Big Macs, TV sitcoms, and Hollywood blockbusters.
SPIT CUP. Not that I have anything against such fare. It's just that I think the President should promote both high and low culture. Most often, Presidential commitment to the arts is measured by a willingness to fund the National Endowment for the Arts, public television and radio, and other such programs. But it also should involve a personal commitment to the arts, support for arts education, and a strong belief that the arts shouldn't be censored.
At first glance, Bush and Gore both have the potential for being another John F. Kennedy, the last President who really promoted the arts from the White House. Both, like Kennedy, are Ivy Leaguers: Bush has a BA in history from Yale (as well as a Harvard MBA, making him the first MBA ever to run for President), and Gore majored in government at Harvard. Neither candidate seems to have a personal passion for the arts -- but then neither did Kennedy, who is said to have poked fun at Jackie's "culture evenings" behind her back. Still, the glittering soirees the Kennedys held for artists like the poet Robert Frost and the cellist Pablo Casals raised the high arts to a level of honor in our society they haven't held since.
But it's hard to see Bush or Gore following Kennedy's lead. Bush was put off by what he considered the pretentiousness of Harvard and has long cultivated a sort of down-home philistinism. He chewed tobacco in college, carrying a "spit cup" around to class with him. Today, he mainly reads the Bible, along with occasional mysteries. Asked by Talk magazine last year what he considered his biggest failing, Bush replied that he doesn't like to read long books, especially books on policy.
HANDS-OFF LEARNING. Gore is more of a techno-wonk than a culture vulture. Oh, he likes to watch public television. But his favorite profs at Yale were science-oriented, even though he briefly considered majoring in English and becoming a novelist. He tends to focus on technological fixes to problems, and so it is with promoting culture.
The strongest statement I could find by Gore in favor of the arts in education, for instance, is the following on his Web site: "Al Gore is working toward a 21st Century where a child can reach across a computer keyboard and read any book ever written, see any painting ever painted, and hear any symphony ever composed." Nothing there about how kids might learn to write the great books, paint the great paintings, or compose the great symphonies.
In fact, neither Bush nor Gore makes the teaching of the arts a central tenet of improving the nation's schools. Gore's highly detailed "Education Blue Book," proposes many technical fixes, from putting more computers in classrooms to ideas about how to reduce violence. But he says nothing that I can find about what he thinks the content of the coursework should be.
Bush does, but in a way that would make any true aesthete squirm. In a speech last year in New Hampshire, he argued that education should have a strong moral component, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. to the effect that "intelligence plus character -- that is the true goal of education." Bush goes on to suggest that "virtues are taught by studying great historical figures and characters in literature. Consideration is encouraged, and good manners are expected."
UNRULY CHARACTERS. I'm not sure which historical and literary characters Bush would hold up as exemplars of good manners, but I'm pretty sure they're not the ones you'd choose for a challenging curriculum. Great historical and literary figures tend to be unruly. Just think of randy old Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to say nothing of Alexander Portnoy of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint.
I'd give Gore the nod on the issue of government arts funding. I don't generally favor government subsidies, but I'm strongly in favor of underwriting the arts, at least at a higher level than we do now. It's important for the same reasons that funding quantum physics and "orphan" drugs that don't benefit large numbers of people are important. These are difficult endeavors that don't offer much financial reward -- which means the free market probably won't pay for them. But we're diminished as a society if we allow them to dwindle.
Gore, even if faced by a Republican Congress, would probably use his veto power, as Clinton has done, to forestall further deep slashing of arts funding. If Bush gets in, the deep tax cuts he's proposing will make arts funding a sure target. That's true in spades if the Republicans also win control of Congress.
CONTENT CZARS. But the distinction ends there. The Democrats are probably at least as likely as the Republicans to try to influence the content of art for political reasons. As Veep, Gore pressured Hollywood to not glamorize cigarette smoking, even while assuring movie execs that "it's not Washington's job to tell authors and artists what to put in their movies and television shows." His wife, Tipper, also waged a high-profile campaign to make rock 'n' roll and rap lyrics less violent and sexually explicit.
Joe Lieberman, Gore's running mate, sounded like one of Bush's Christian Right backers on Meet the Press recently. "We don't want to get to the point [of legal restrictions on the entertainment industry]," Lieberman said. "But if the entertainment industry doesn't begin to voluntarily draw some lines themselves and stop some of the worst promotion of violence, sex, and incivility, then there's another group...who, I'm afraid, will look for legal restrictions."
Lieberman's "other-groups-will-force-our-hand" logic is too Nixonian for me. He's on a slippery slope here, especially when you consider that word "incivility" he so unobtrusively added to the entertainment industry's list of alleged sins. It's instructive to recall that the French government once considered Impressionist paintings so "uncivil" that it wouldn't allow more than a few of them into the Louvre's collection.
TENOR OF THE TIMES. A Bush Administration also might be prone to trying to influence the content of art for political reasons. For one, Lynne Cheney, wife of GOP Veep candidate Richard B. Cheney, is a real Kulturkampf veteran. She's certainly literary: She did her PhD dissertation on "The impact of Immanuel Kant on the poetry of Matthew Arnold." But her approach to the arts as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the agency that awards educational grants, under Presidents Reagan and Bush was distinctly conservative. She outraged many academics with her attacks on the leftist bias she perceived in the arts and arts education. She rejected grant proposals that dealt with liberal theories such as feminism or multiculturalism. And she argued for a core curriculum based on the great books of Western culture. I shudder to imagine her reaction to, say, to the elephant-dung-studded painting of a Madonna that got New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani so exercised when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum last year.
The most distressing thing about all this is that Gore and Bush simply reflect the tenor of our times. In today's Washington, politicians rarely bother to attend the gala concerts at the Kennedy Center for which they receive tickets -- they pass them on to staffers instead. The arts are considered too effete for most politicians to risk being their champion. That's odd, when you consider that John McCain (surely the bravest and least effete of all the candidates) regaled fellow prisoners-of-war in the Hanoi Hilton with long passages from Rudyard Kipling he knew by heart.
It would take a bold leader to counter current trends. Alas, as far as the arts are concerned, we don't seem likely to get one.
Peterson is a contributing editor for Business Week Online. Follow his Moveable Feast columns every Tuesday, only on BW Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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