American Politics Takes a Seat on the Celebrity Train

I have Warren Beatty to thank for getting my East Coast friends to call me earlier than usual, usual being when the first snow falls in the Adirondacks and Los Angeles begins to look suddenly tolerable on their culture versus climate scale.

“So,” they ask, as casually as they can, “is Warren Beatty really going to run for president?” and then, no matter what the answer, the next question is, “What’s he really like?” (They must think Angelenos run into Warren and Annette at Farmers Market the way New Yorkers run into Woody and Soon-Yi at F.A.O. Schwarz.)

To the second question, I profess indifference. To the first, like just about everyone else, I must profess ignorance.

Beatty’s performance this week in accepting the Eleanor Roosevelt Award as the Southern Californian who best exemplifies the former First Lady’s principles left us hardly more enlightened, except in this:

The director/actor with some evolved political ideas attracted nearly 200 reporters from around the world. How many do you think were there to chronicle his welfare reform concerns? And how many cared more that his wife once played the First Girlfriend in a movie? They got an earful--but not about his wife nor a run for the White House.

The same day in Washington, D.C., a real presidential candidate, who last week got only five newspaper reporters and three local TV crews to hear him expostulate on U.S.-China policy, found himself facing 40 reporters and eight TV crews.

Yet the candidate was not altogether pleased, because the media turnout meant that the first thing most Americans will have learned about conservative GOP contender Gary Bauer, former head of the benignly named Family Research Council, is that he is denying accusations of an “inappropriate” relationship with a campaign aide.

So here we are, at a culture crunch: The trivial keeps crowding out the serious. Sex always trumps substance. Justice Ginsberg is important, but Judge Judy is famous. Give us tales of thong underwear, not a committee hearing on sweatshops for garment workers.

It is the unwinnable conundrum: Politicians find it hard to get attention for their dreary Washington wonk-work, and they collect big headlines only when they deviate from that . . . and celebrities are annoyed at not being taken for serious thinkers, yet if they were not celebrities, who would show up to listen to their wonk-wisdom in the first place?

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The day of Beatty’s Beverly Hills remarks, Donald Trump wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he too is thinking of running for president--not from vanity, mind you, but because “I am convinced the major parties have lost their way.”

(If the parties are lost, it’s not for want of trying by The Donald and his ilk, who have laid down a glittering path of greenbacks for pols to follow.)

The presidency seems to be acquiring the look of a trophy job, the one career-capper that none of the other men in the big-bucks club can match. There are only so many guys in the world who get to wear the C-in-C Windbreaker. After you’ve done it all--made the big dough, won the gorgeous wife, bested the market or the media--how else to prove your superior worth?

In this Springer-ized culture, celebrities’ advantage over rubber-chicken career pols is that they have moved past embarrassment. Once a man has appeared on national TV in pink wrestling tights and a feather boa, as Jesse Ventura has, he is virtually bulletproof. Ronald Reagan, he of the Teflon epidermis, co-starred with a chimpanzee. It’s possible that voters could serenely envy and deplore Beatty’s rakehell past and admire his sober, uxorious present.

Time was that movie folks’ conduct was bound by the morals clauses in their contracts. Now it’s the pols, fearful of the wrath of the polls, who exercise caution in word and deed, and it’s the celebs who do and say as they damn well please. Beatty declared himself to be “an unrepentant, unreconstructed, tax-and-spend, bleeding heart, die-hard liberal Democrat.” Ventura, in a Playboy interview, characterized organized religion as “a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers.” A real pol would rather be exposed for cuddling with Miss America than say such a thing--oh wait, Bill Clinton did that, didn’t he?

So where is the midpoint between the unelectable and the unexciting? I suspect that what we really want is co-presidents, one for work and one for show, like a weekday suit and a Sunday suit--one for the brain-busting drudgery of Social Security COLA breakdowns and foreign loan restructuring, and one camera-ready with the smile, the savvy quip, the timely tear. Think Carter and Reagan, or Wilson and Harding, or FDR and FDR. Which suit, I wonder, would voters want Beatty to wear?

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com