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Get Four
|  | SEPTEMBER 24, 2004
By Thane Peterson The Candidates, Culture, and Cash President Bush hasn't exactly starved the arts, but there's a good chance a Kerry Administration would be more generous During every Presidential election, I find myself hoping in vain that the candidates will speak out strongly in favor of supporting the arts. It's an especially crucial issue this year, given that hard-strapped state governments have cut their support for arts organizations by 40% in the last three years. Even Dana Gioia, President Bush's hand-chosen and relatively conservative head of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), says there's a national "crisis" in funding. Given the lack of specific proposals offered by either President George W. Bush or Senator John Kerry, it's hard to say exactly what each candidate would do to support the arts. But, by culling through speeches, campaign promises, and voting records, and extrapolating from the two candidates' personal profiles, I've tried to make some educated guesses. My take: As is often the case in Presidential politics, style may trump substance. And this is one issue where the candidates' wives are at least as important as their husbands. "Over the entire history of funding for the arts, the support has very frequently come from the first lady's office," notes Bill Ivey, a former NEA head who is now director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. LITERARY LAURA. Kerry wins kudos from groups such as the nonpartisan Americans for the Arts, which promotes the arts and art education, for his Senate voting record. For instance, he opposed the deep cuts in the NEA's budget voted in by GOP lawmakers in 1996. Kerry's campaign position, as laid out on his Web site, is mainly to promise support for the NEA and National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as for arts education in the schools. That pretty much mirrors what Bush has done while in the Oval Office. While cutting -- or threatening to cut -- most nonmilitary discretionary spending, the Administration has been quietly making modest increases in cultural funding every year since he took office. For fiscal 2005, Bush has recommended boosting funding of the NEA again, by 15% to $139.4, and of the National Endowment for the Humanities by 20% to $162 million. He also recommended $55 million in additional funding for state arts organizations and rural communities with little access to the arts. Unfortunately, these proposed hikes are likely to be scaled back by Congress, which is grappling with the huge deficits caused by the weak economy, Bush's tax cuts, and the war in Iraq. We probably have Laura Bush to thank for much of the Administration's largess in cultural funding. President Bush is an outdoorsman who acknowledges that he isn't a big reader, likes to be in bed by 9 p.m., and prefers sporting events to symphonies and operas -- hardly the profile of a cultural sophisticate. His wife, on the other hand, is a former librarian who is steeped in world literature -- her all-time favorite reading is the difficult "Grand Inquisitor" passage from Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov -- and cares passionately about the arts and arts education. "HOT" TERESA. Mrs. Bush usually doesn't speak out on policy issues, but she has made an exception when it comes to cultural affairs. In January, for instance, she held a press conference with Gioia to lobby for an increase in the NEA's budget (see BW Online, 07/27/04, "Beyond the 1990s' "Culture Wars" "). She has also publicly lobbied for other cultural initiatives, such as funding for the nation's beleaguered libraries. And early in her husband's Presidency, she earned the respect of artists by organizing several remarkably sophisticated White House literary salons honoring Truman Capote, Langston Hughes, and Edna Ferber, among others. If artists and writers respect what Laura Bush has done as first lady, they love the idea of Teresa Heinz Kerry taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Heinz Kerry was born in Madagascar, earned a degree in South Africa in Romance languages and literature, and trained in Geneva as a translator before moving to the U.S. She speaks five languages fluently: Portuguese (her first language), Italian, Spanish, French, and English. Many artists I've spoken with find Heinz Kerry's cosmopolitan background and tart tongue attractive. "I'm enthused by Teresa," says the novelist Jonathan Franzen. "She's hot." More to the point, Heinz Kerry is a seasoned arts administrator who has long been a major supporter of the arts in her role as head of the Pittsburgh-based Howard Heinz Endowment and Heinz Family Philanthropies, which she became chairman of after the death of her first husband, Senator John Heinz, in 1991. "They're one of the biggest supporters of the arts in Western Pennsylvania, so there's a legacy there," says Philip Horn, executive director of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
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