Time Essay: The Political Show Goes On

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"Basically, show business is politics. And politics, with its media blitz, is very much show biz. The big difference is that politics is real, very real, and that show business is a fantasy world."

These words of novice wisdom come from Television Celebrity Phyllis George. She picked up her insights working in her husband John Y. Brown's campaign for the governorship of Kentucky. Now that the national presidential campaigns are lurching out of various closets and back rooms, everybody will get a chance to sample and even overdose on that admixture of reality and stagecraft that politics has become.

Even in its hardest reality, politics has more and more entailed a practice of the theatrical arts. Candidates recite words set down by craftsmen who for purely technical reasons are not called scriptwriters; they sell themselves with minimovies called commercials; they thrive on pseudo events—of which the Big Announcement is but one—contrived by people who work like stage managers; once in office they are quite as concerned with images as Fellini, though hardly for artistic ends.

Politics, moreover, has fashioned what has begun to seem like a permanent alliance with show business itself. In season, the same names that decorate the gossip columns and Variety begin popping up in political chronicles. Last week a squiblet on Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin turned out to be a note about a Boston fund raiser for Ronald Reagan. Singer Glen Campbell, it seems, is slated to give a benefit concert for John Connally. From the White House, via a guest list for a recent campaign dinner, comes word that supporters of the Carter-Mondale team include Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Cheryl Ladd, Leontyne Price, Andre Previn and Andre Kostelanetz.

Such news has become commonplace and so is usually received without reflection. But it must be time to wonder how the promiscuous mingling of politics and show business affects the public's capacity to distinguish between imagery and substance. The question is not idle when asked about a society in which Actor John Wayne and Comedian Bob Hope could wind up widely admired not only as entertainers but as political philosophers.

Indeed, the entertainment world itself has been displaying an ever-more-conspicuous political face. Jane Fonda fights nuclear energy. Robert Redford preaches environmentalism. Paul Newman turns up as an emissary to the U.N.—where Pearl Bailey also once sat. Ideology has begun blurting forth even at Oscar shindigs, injected in 1973 by Marlon Brando for the American Indians and last year by Vanessa Redgrave against Zionism.

Granted, show business folk have every right to politick. And politicians are entitled to use every self-serving gimmick that the law allows. Still, given the American tendency to worship stars, one may wonder whether eventually show business might be too casually accepted as an appropriate training ground for political leadership. The question is pertinent even if California's election of Actor George Murphy as a U.S. Senator is shrugged off as a typical West Coast aberration.