THREE TEARS FOR THE DEMOCRATS!

By JEFF GREENFIELD

Until the Dick Morris story turned the press into a gaggle of schoolchildren hearing the bells of the ice cream truck, the talk of the convention concerned the maudlin tone of the convention speeches. "This isn't a convention," went a common refrain, "it's Queen for a Day." There's no doubt that this year Democrats gave us not only a balloon drop and a confetti drop but a treacle drip of steadily increasing dosage as well. I found myself cheerfully ascending to high dudgeon--until it hit me that we in the television business bear much of the blame for this corruption of public speech.

The objection is simple: Christopher Reeve is an inspiring figure of rare grace and courage, but what exactly is the political point he is making? (If he is objecting to the paucity of federal research on spinal injury, that's a point against the Clinton Administration.) Keynote speaker Evan Bayh no doubt still feels the loss of his mother's death from cancer. You cannot be human without empathizing with his grief. You also cannot help asking what that loss has to do with making a case that Democrats deserve the presidency. Did George Bush deserve election because he lost a young child to cancer?

It is fair for Vice President Gore to link his concern about tobacco with his sister's death of lung cancer. But the problem with so relentless a tug at the heartstrings is that it precludes real argument. "I have suffered so much," the speaker is really saying, "that if you contest me, you deny the power of my feelings."

True, no group more richly deserves to be so assaulted than the tobacco industry, which has filled cemeteries by linking cigarettes with images of health, sophistication and sexuality. But what of an emotional wallop delivered on behalf of causes you may not agree with at all? Suppose another candidate told a story about his sister, driven to suicide after losing her business to the persecution of the Federal Drug Administration, and thus argued for the agency's abolition? Or take a real instance: when the Bush campaign in 1988 speared Dukakis with the story of a horrible crime committed by a murderer let out on furlough, the tactic was condemned as demagoguery. Why? Because the validity of an argument is not proved by the emotional intensity of the proponent.

But consider where these politicians learned this style of presentation. Every afternoon we see TV shows offering nothing approaching discourse but instead ersatz therapy sessions in which the guests discuss how they feel about abuse, betrayal, incest, the behavior of their children or parents. Prime-time newsmagazines offer stories of high or low human drama, stories that "will touch your heart," such as family members coping with loss.

Politicians sensed TV's special emotional potency very early: in 1952 Richard Nixon saved his vice-presidential campaign against charges of financial wrongdoing by declaring that his wife wore "a respectable Republican cloth coat" and defiantly vowing to let his kids keep "a little cocker spaniel dog" named Checkers. Now political operatives watch the declining ratings for the traditional convention format and conclude, rationally enough, that the public's taste has changed, that it wants to "feel" the data rather than think about them. And, in the spirit of those Hollywood bigwigs they so roundly condemn, they are more than willing to endure the raised eyebrows of the press if the polls and focus groups say such emotional manipulation is simply giving the public what it wants.