Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman vowed Sunday to press his campaign against excessive sex and violence in Hollywood films, even as his party prepared for its political convention by staging gala fundraisers that collected millions of dollars from loyal supporters in the entertainment industry.
With police, protesters and delegates gearing up for this image-making city’s first political convention in 40 years, Lieberman pledged to support Democratic candidate Al Gore’s views even when they differ from his own, but served notice he would carry on with his efforts to persuade the film and music industries to clean up their movies and recordings.
“Look, I love the movies. I love music,” Lieberman said on “This Week” on ABC, which is owned by Disney. “But there is still too much violence, too much sex, too much incivility in entertainment, which makes it very difficult for parents, who are working so hard to give their kids values and discipline.”
The Connecticut senator, making the rounds of Sunday television talk shows as he prepared his first prime-time address to the nation later this week, said he and Gore agree on the need for the entertainment industry to rein itself in. In areas where they disagree, Lieberman said he is prepared to back the party’s standard-bearer.
“I know how it works,” Lieberman said on the “Fox News Sunday” program. “When he and I disagree, he wins.”
Lieberman’s remarks came as 4,370 Democratic delegates streamed into the nation’s entertainment capital, sipped drinks at lavish Hollywood fundraisers and anticipated a four-day made-for-television event designed to reintroduce Gore to the nation and boost his campaign.
Gore is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles on Wednesday, the eve of his acceptance speech, which is the climax of the convention. He campaigned Sunday in Ohio, following in the footsteps of Republican nominee George W. Bush, who made the nation’s industrial heartland the last stops before his own nominating convention in Philadelphia two weeks ago. The latest opinion polls indicated Gore trailing Bush by anywhere from 3 to 14 percentage points.
President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, both friends of Hollywood, are to address the convention on Monday’s opening night at the Staples Center, Los Angeles’ new sports arena. The president is expected to hail the economic progress of the past eight years and pass the baton of leadership to his vice president, while Hillary Clinton is hoping to give her own run for the Senate in New York a boost.
Bush relaxed Sunday at the Arizona retreat of his chief rival from the primaries, Sen. John McCain, then flew to Texas and his own ranch near Waco. The Texas governor plans to take most of the convention week off, then resume with a campaign raid into Gore’s home state, Tennessee.
In Los Angeles, there are no vacations for the 9,000-member police force, which went on 12-hour shifts in anticipation of major demonstrations for a wide variety of causes ranging from labor rights and the environment to anti-corporate power.
Thousands of demonstrators are expected in Los Angeles this week, hoping to use the intense concentration of media here, roughly 15,000 accredited journalists, to highlight their issues.
The agenda for Gore and the Democrats is to make the case for holding on to the White House, and to close Bush’s lead in opinion polls, which was beginning to drop even before the opening gavel.
“We can turn around these polls,” Clinton told Democratic activists and donors at a fundraising brunch in Malibu. “But it’s not the work of a day. It’s going to take every day between now and November.”
Later the president attended a fundraiser lunch at the home of singer and actress Barbra Streisand, an event expected to raise $10 million for Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock, Ark.
An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll indicates Bush leading Gore by a slim 44 percent to 41 percent, a statistical tie. The CBS, ABC and Newsweek polls have Bush ahead by about 10 points. A Time-CNN poll gives Bush a 14-point lead, about the margin he enjoyed at the end of the GOP convention.
The issue of personal and public morals, whether Clinton’s or those of Hollywood, has been something of a distraction for the Democrats in the days leading up to their convention, much the way the GOP’s debate over abortion dominated their convention run-up.
But some of the emphasis on morality has been deliberate and calculated, as Gore attempts the delicate maneuver of distancing himself from Clinton’s personal missteps while embracing the president’s policy successes.
“The convention will be an opportunity for me to introduce myself for who I am, not as a vice president who stands on a stage without saying too much,” Gore said in a television interview in Cleveland.
Speaking to reporters between campaign stops Sunday, Gore said of Clinton’s Monday night speech: “I’m not going to offer him any advice about how he talks about personal matters,” but the president “is likely to discuss the whys and wherefores of our economic progress.”
Asked whether, as president, Gore would seek Clinton’s counsel, Gore appeared to give Clinton no special status, lumping him with former President Jimmy Carter.
“If there’s a subject where he can contribute advice, of course, along with President Carter, who I talked with just the other day,” Gore told The Associated Press. “I don’t anticipate that being a regular occurrence, but why would I rule that out?”
Despite his running mate’s criticism of Hollywood, Gore campaigned at a children’s hospital in Cleveland with actor-director Rob Reiner, who has become a child health-care activist in California.
Reiner said there were initial “trepidations” among the Hollywood elite about Gore’s choice of Lieberman as a running mate. But he termed those concerns “knee-jerk reactions” and said those in the entertainment industry support Democrats because of the party’s stand on other issues, such as the environment and abortion rights.
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While the Democratic platform supports a woman’s right to an abortion, the party signaled its openness to differing views, inviting Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony to deliver a special mass for convention delegates at the Wilshire Grand Hotel. Mahony, an ardent abortion foe, urged delegates to have compassion for society’s most vulnerable, including those “threatened both in the womb and in our neighborhoods.”
Lieberman has made a major issue out of Hollywood morals, joining forces with conservative Republican William Bennett to award Silver Sewer awards to media outlets they deem the worst “cultural polluters.” He said he would give up that gimmick but would maintain the pressure on Hollywood because he and Gore “have an understanding” on the issue.
“The average family feels as if it’s in a competition with a lot of this stuff … coming out of the entertainment industry,” Lieberman said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “Government has to be on the side of standing with those people to help them because they feel helpless against the big entertainment industry.”
At the same time, Lieberman said he has no problem with the ticket accepting money from Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, even though the Gore campaign’s objections forced a Democratic fundraiser from the grounds of the Playboy Mansion.
The Gore campaign, seeking to prevent any deviation from its convention script, pressured Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) into relocating a fundraiser from the Playboy Mansion to a jazz club at the Universal Studios entertainment complex. Asked whether the Democrats should return the $16,000 donated by Playboy Enterprises, Hefner and his family members, Lieberman demurred.
The amount, “for better or for worse, in the reality of today’s funding, is minuscule,” Lieberman said.
In the 1999-2000 election cycle, the television, movie and music industry ranks fourth among corporate donors to the Democratic Party, behind lawyers, securities firms and the real estate industry. For the Republican Party, the entertainment industry ranks 11th.
But the GOP hasn’t done all that poorly in Hollywood. Bush and his party have collected $4.4 million from the entertainment industry, while Gore and the Democrats have raised $6.8 million, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Despite the thousands of journalists in town, the three major television networks again are planning limited live coverage. ABC plans five hours of broadcasts from the convention hall, CBS fewer than five hours and NBC three hours. Prime-time coverage is expected to slightly exceed that given to the Republicans, mainly because of interest in the speeches by the president and first lady Monday night.
The convention’s opening night theme is to be “prosperity and progress.”
On Tuesday, the second night, the party features its traditional, liberal leaders and causes with a speaker’s list that includes Caroline Kennedy; Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.); former Sen. Bill Bradley, Gore’s primary challenger; and Jesse Jackson. The keynote address is scheduled to be given by Rep. Harold Ford Jr., an African-American lawmaker from Gore’s home state.
Despite the Hollywood atmosphere, the program is light on celebrities, with television actor Jimmy Smits being the main big name on Wednesday night, before Lieberman’s acceptance speech.
In Texas, Bush said he has no plans to watch the Democratic convention, allowing that he doesn’t get cable television. But he did say his press aides would keep him updated.
The Bush campaign has made much of Clinton’s behavior in the White House, particularly his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Texas governor closes every speech by pledging to restore honor and dignity to the presidency.
Lieberman acknowledged that one element of his selection as running mate may have been to inoculate Gore from attacks about morals in the White House. But he said the attacks have been misdirected.
“You know what, the Republicans seem to be campaigning mostly against a guy who’s not on the ballot this year, not on his record because the record is so great, but because of the personal mistakes that he made,” Lieberman said on NBC. “That’s not fair to Al Gore. Nobody who knows Al Gore can rightly associate him at all with that behavior.”
As for the ethical questions raised about Gore’s fundraising tactics in the 1996 campaign, Lieberman said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program, “He’s already learned a lesson. … I know how badly he feels about the things that happened in 1996.”
The vice president signaled that his acceptance speech will delve into policy details.
“My numbers add up. My budgets will balance. My proposals fit together,” Gore said.