"All politicians are pieces of shit, I hope they all fucking rot and die. It's a useless system, filled with hypocrisy. I loathe everything about America and politics, but it's the only thing going." - Al Goldstein, publisher, SCREW
Okay, so we all know Al's basically right. But in comparison to the process for much of the rest of the world, America's in pretty fair shape. As the presidential race holds major implications for the future of the adult Net, this follow-up to our profile of George W. Bush, Jr. ["BUSH-whacked," Jan/Feb '00], takes a closer look at the major players from the Republican, Democratic, and third parties.
"Why?" you ask.
Simple. Though most of these candidates have dropped out of the race, many of them will still offer their opinions in the press. They will raise issues that the remaining candidates will have to address. They will run for other offices at the federal, state, and local levels. They will become mayors and governors, senators and representatives.
They will still have the power to affect our jobs and our lives.
The Best Choice?
"Of all of the candidates [from] the Republican and Democratic parties, a Bill Bradley presidency would probably bode best for the adult industry," said Greg Piccionelli of the intellectual property law firm Brull, Piccionelli, Sarno, Braun & Vradenburgh (www.brupic.com). "Bradley tends to be liberal on social issues, including freedom of speech issues, and consequently, he - unlike some of the other candidates - would, I believe, pretty much have a hands off, laissez faire attitude towards the Internet when it comes to free speech matters such as non-child pornography [between] consensual adults, and access to plain vanilla sexual materials." Piccionelli adds that, as a New Jersey senator, "Bradley, to my knowledge, did not introduce any kind of restrictive legislation with respect to erotic materials."
But the Super Tuesday primaries likely sounded the death-knell for Bradley's candidacy; history has shown time and again that any sort of success for a write-in candidate has the proverbial "snowball's chance" of success.
Should Bradley now decide to run for a lower office or to try for the presidency in the future, his campaign would definitely bear watching.
Al Gore: The Next Best Choice?
Given the Clinton administration's lack of online adult prosecution, plus the fact that Vice President Gore publicly (some would say embarrassingly) took credit for Internet development (and is related to Gore Vidal, author of such sexually charged works as Myra Breckinridge and Caligula), one might expect him to be lenient on the industry if he's elected.
But it ain't necessarily so.
David Wasserman, of the Florida law firm Wasserman & Walters (www.firstamendment.com), says early approaches by the adult industry to Clinton's presidential campaign were politely rebuffed, "because although they'd love our support, their opponents would beat them over the head if they accepted adult campaign funds. Mainstream politicians do not want to get involved with the adult industry, and others shy away from it."
Piccionelli's partner, first amendment veteran Robert Sarno, also said he did not know what a Gore presidency might mean for the adult Net. "Gore is very sympathetic to the Internet, and has called himself 'Father of the Internet,'" said Sarno, "but on the other hand, the Internet now has gotten a lot of negative publicity because of the proliferation of the adult business and access of that information to children. I think Gore is going to be somewhat sensitive to the idea of being tarred and feathered by people saying, 'He's the father of the Internet, and look what's coming down the road here: all of this pornography.'"
In January, Gore came under attack for alleged frequent pot smoking in the '60s and '70s; thus, Sarno says, Gore may need to adopt a more conservative stance to deflect criticism from the right. Sarno also notes that Gore's wife, Tipper, had been an advocate for regulation of the music industry. "She was very upset by so-called obscene lyrics in rap music, and wanted to do something about policing that.
"Both she and Al are not fans of the adult industry," continues Sarno. "They come from a religious sociological background which is pretty elitist, and they are opposed to anything that may impact children. And they see the Internet as an access which is dangerous for children." Consequently, Sarno speculates that Gore may feel compelled to police the Internet and possibly even go after the adult industry "to prove that he's not, so to speak, in bed with it. I suspect that even with Al Gore, the likelihood is you're going to get more rigorous enforcement of obscenity law than there was during Clinton's presidency."
Bush and The Republican Hard Right
Wasserman says the GOP "always had an uneasy alliance between financial and social conservatives - those who want a policy eliminating abortion, take adult materials out of the hands of the people, and to make it criminal. Because Reagan and Bush, Sr. felt they had to cater to them, they basically made a deal: if you give us support in our election, then we'll support your agenda."
The Republican right wing appears to be moving Bush rightward. Pat Robertson and his ilk seem to be less ideological and "more pragmatic," and hence can support Governor Bush in 2000, according to Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Tackett, who spoke on an Iowa Public TV forum. There, Bush scored 41 percent of the Republican votes in a six-man race. That figure impresses some, while others deem the plurality lackluster, given the fact that Jr. raised more campaign donations during the primary process than any presidential contender ever.
Significantly, the combined votes for the social conservative candidates - publisher Steve Forbes (30 percent), former ambassador Alan Keyes (14 percent), and fundamentalist Gary Bauer (nine percent) - surpassed Bush's total with 53 percent of the ballots cast in the Iowa caucuses. Thankfully, the adult community could breathe a sigh of relief when Senator Orrin Hatch, Bauer, and Forbes dropped out of the race, following their poor showings in the early Primaries.
Hatch, who reflects the conservatism of his Mormon constituency and beliefs, was the architect of the so-called "synthetic kiddie porn law," which "criminalizes sexual depictions of even adults, if they are depicted as minors, or in situations which can be construed to be sexual situations involving minors," states Sarno's law partner, Greg Piccionelli.
Although their campaigns did not reply to repeated phone calls from us, Keyes is a reactionary who, like Family Research Council ex-pres Bauer, served in the Reagan regime, and is considered an implacable foe of Internet erotica. Steve's family values, however, are complicated: after publisher Malcolm Forbes' death, Steve's father was outed as gay (which his son doesn't deny).
The departure of Hatch, Bauer, and Forbes from the race makes the social values factor even more of an important variable. (Despite his eloquent rantings and ravings and mosh pit exploits, Keyes is virtually unelectable.) After McCain's New Hampshire triumph by 19 percent over Bush, G.W. tilted increasingly rightward, speaking at a South Carolina school which bans interracial dating, and painting McCain as a moderate and himself as a "real" conservative, in a desperate effort to court the hard right. With McCain having turned Net porn into a campaign issue, if a strong fundamentalist surge continues, a further shift right by a G.W. - anxious over losing a key segment of the Republican base to the Buchanan Reform candidacy - is a strong possibility.
The Reform Factor
Despite the nationally-televised blowout between party factions in February, the Reform Party, with Pat Buchanan as its candidate, can still impact the election - just as in 1992, when Texas billionaire Ross Perot won the Reform Party ballot-status and federal matching funds with 19 percent of the popular vote, the highest third-party tally since Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose run in 1912.
"The Reform Party in the past has been relatively neutral, and maybe even libertarian, on personal issues. Buchanan is not that type of animal," says Sarno. "He's very beholding to the conservative right, the moral majority. He's a devout Catholic. Pornography is anathema to him, and would be one of the things on his hit list."
Wasserman fears Bush, Jr., mindful of his father's upset by Buchanan in the '92 New Hampshire primaries and by Perot in the general election, will follow lockstep in these right wing footsteps. The free speech attorney believes Bush's desire to keep social conservatives in the Republican "big tent" was behind the frontrunner's conciliatory statements regarding Buchanan shortly before the latter's departure to the Reform Party late last year. Following Buchanan's defection, Bush took a harder line on abortion, and declared during a TV debate that his favorite philo- sopher was Christ. Perhaps most telling of all, Bush beat McCain handily in the conservative-dominated South Carolina primary.
"Buchanan is taking out the garbage for the Republicans," says Libertarian Mark Selzer. "He represents the extreme fringe wacko element within the Republican Party: anti-semites, neo-Nazis, the real ugly part of the Republican Party, and he's taking them into the Reform Party."
Citizen McCain: "Moderate" Republican
Though he "suspended" his campaign after losing to Bush on Super Tuesday, Web-savvy John McCain, senator from Arizona (an E-voting trendsetter), has heavily influenced - and very likely will continue to influence - the race for President.
McCain attacked the adult Net in December in response to the first question of a Des Moines TV debate with the Republican contenders. Replying to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw's query about the role video games, Hollywood movies, and the gun industry played in the Columbine massacre, McCain cited another purported "pernicious influence" over the youths who carried out the school shootings: pornography online.
Changing the subject, McCain invoked the alleged example of a young boy who, circa 1998, logged onto adult entertainment on a computer in a Phoenix library, and "walked out and molested a four-year-old boy. There is an influence. We need to know what it is, and we need to know why we're robbing our children of their most precious treasure, and that's their innocence." The former Vietnam War POW called for filtering software to eliminate porn from public schools and libraries wired to the Net.
In a December 22 press release, Senator McCain cited a news report on South Carolina's Greenville County Library, where "a group of men, including a convicted sex offender charged with distributing obscene material to a minor, regularly sit at the library's nine terminals to view pornography for hours and participate in sexually oriented chat rooms." He charged that the library also provides "minors with unrestricted access to porno- graphy Internet sites. The librarian's viewpoint that it's solely the responsibility of the parent to guide their children through the Internet at public libraries is absurd," he said
McCain's anti-porn remarks appeared to be aimed at voters in states key to the electoral process: Iowa, which held its caucuses January 24, and South Carolina, a pivotal primary state with a heavy concentration of veterans, which voted February 19. And while McCain hasn't denounced South Carolina's use of the Confederate flag, Arizona's senior senator has proposed The Children's Internet Protection Act, now pending before Congress.
McCain propagates a "war hero" image in his new autobio-graphy, political ads, and media reports, but playing devil's advocate, the ex-POW has not apologized for being a foreign aggressor who participated in the bombing of women and children before he was shot down over Hanoi. McCain also makes much of his "maverick" status, largely due to his campaign finance reform stance. It's also worth noting McCain was one of the disgraced "Keating Five" senators linked to the costliest savings and loan debacle in history. (Prior to imprisonment for his role in the S&L scandal, Charles Keating led Citizens for Decency Through Law, and was involved with the Meese Commission, which attacked porn during the Reagan-Bush years.) And in contrast to McCain's anti-establishment pretenses as an "insurgent," he has a typically conservative-Republican voting record.
Libertarians and Libertines
"I don't know what happened to Democrats, who used to defend civil rights. It doesn't seem to be the case any more," says Mark Selzer, chair of the Libertarian Party's (800-ELECT-US) Central Los Angeles branch. "You have people like California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who's trying to censor the Internet. I don't know what happened to them - the Democratic Party has lost its soul." On the other hand, he calls Republicans, who advocate government deregulation of the economy, but strict regulation of private lives, "very inconsistent in everything they say."
Selzer, the Libertarian candidate for California's 42nd State Assembly district, says the Libertarian Party "strictly adheres to the Constitution. It says 'freedom of speech,' and a Libertarian president would do everything he could to preserve freedom of speech for everyone. That would include anything that is considered pornographic by some people. The Supreme Court definition of pornography is something with no socially redeeming value. I personally do not feel films with sexual content have no redeeming qualities. The Libertarian Party opposes any kind of regulation or taxes on the Internet."
Indeed, prominently displayed on the home page of the official Party Web site (www.lp.org) is the phrase "Stop Internet Censorship." In 1995, the party protested the Communications Decency Act, which it called unconstitutional, by turning its Web pages black. The Web site for the Libertarian Association of Massachusetts includes a "Don't Tax the Net!" banner, which readers can click on to sign a petition. The party also claims it has had language specifically supporting freedom of online communication as a part of its platform since 1991.
The Libertarians are the fastest-growing political party in the country, and its candidates have been elected or appointed to some 300 offices around the U.S., from state legislator to city councilmen to district attorneys to mayors. The party will choose its Presidential nominee at a July convention in Anaheim; he is expected to be Harry Browne, who also ran in 1996, tallying 463,000 votes.
Selzer admits he's consumed pornography, and urges the industry to take action to defend itself from attack. "More people in the adult business need to start being aware there's a huge number of people out there trying to actually arrest them, and put them into jail, and take away their right to express themselves freely," he warns. "They do need to get involved with politics - that means the Libertarian Party, the only political organization that supports their right to do what they're doing 100 percent. I would encourage anyone in the adult industry to not only register to vote as a Libertarian and to vote for Libertarian candidates, but also to become party members and give money to the candidates, because we will go to bat for you out there - and for anyone who's expressing themselves in a way others may find offensive, and not hurting anyone else doing it."
While Wasserman says he is not officially registered as a Libertarian, he espouses its philosophy. "I think we ought to help low-level Libertarian candidates in different areas. But at the pres- idential level, I don't think a Libertarian can get elected, at least currently, because people don't understand what a Libertarian is. Face it, most Americans would rather sit at home and watch HBO or an adult movie than find out what's going on in politics."
Goldstein calls Americans "a bunch of slaves," while Selzer insists: "Not voting means other people are going to make decisions for you. You should have a say in what you do."
Sarno finds some third parties "politically interesting. I think I share some of the attitudes of the Libertarian Party, about lack of government intrusion into personal lives. Unfortunately, politically, they're marginal. They have very little impact on the ultimate result."
And Goldstein, who also identifies himself philosophically as a small "l" libertarian, dismisses the party as "amateurs. They have no money because they don't know how to sell out to the lobbyists."
Long Shots
In late 1999, liberal Democrat Warren Beatty was floated as a potential presidential contender. Beatty used his bully pulpit to move the Democrats left, just as his fictitious Senator Bulworth did in the 1998 political satire of the same name. But by early 2000, Beatty had reportedly removed himself from contention for the Democratic nomination - although he may continue to play a role as the Democratic Party Conscience; at the Academy Awards on March 26, Beatty received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, giving him a platform at one of the most televised events in the world.
"I'd really invite him, and people like him, to join into the election," said Sarno. "In a sense, he has nothing to lose. He can assume the moral position of articulating issues that are significant, without worrying about the political downfall or impact. He'd raise the tone of the election, by forcing the other candidates to address issues Americans really want addressed, but politicians tend to skirt."
"I, of course, like some of his views, and the infusion of energy that he would have into the presidential process," said Wasserman. "But I'm also a realist. He likely cannot get enough support to get elected and would only detract from someone else who is favorable to our positions. He can only do to someone who is libertarian-minded what Ross Perot did to George Bush in 1992."
In 1996, with a female American Indian as his running mate, consumer advocate Ralph Nader ran for president on the Green Party (www.greenparties.org) ticket, finishing fourth with 700,000 votes. Greens have been elected to offices such as the Santa Monica and Hawaii city councils, but Sarno calls the environmentalist, left-leaning party "a hard choice. Because on the one hand, you'd think they'd be very friendly to free choice. But on the other hand, there are a lot within that movement with a very strong social agenda. Somebody once talked about the 'fascism of the left,' where they believe certain things are politically correct, and because they have that attitude, they are willing to regulate that. The result can be a decrease in personal freedom. I'm not quite sure the Green Party would necessarily be a friend of the pornography industry."
The Bottom Line
No matter who is elected, the adult industry will almost certainly continue to do battle with social conservatives and other anti-porn extremists for years to come.
But as Wasserman points out, there is strength in numbers. "The Christian Coalition is a much, much smaller organization than you probably have surfing on the Web on any given day. Yet they're organized and get people out to vote, and that's why they have an impact disproportionate to their numbers." Instead of campaign donations, Wasserman advocates another strategy: "We need to attack our enemies. It takes dollars to do so, organization and planning."
Or, to paraphrase the old radical slogan: Don't moan, organize!
