1/09/00 4:25 p.m.
R.I.P for George
And you know what? Good riddance.

By Jonah Goldberg, NRO Editor-----------------------JonahEMail@aol.com

t seems that, at last, the era of celebrity politics is returning to normal. By normal, I mean that beautiful people in New York and California admit that they are wildly liberal; and unattractive but smart people in Washington have contempt for them. Just this week MTV announced that it won’t host a lavish inaugural ball for George W. Bush as it twice did for Bill Clinton. Last Saturday, Fleetwood Mac staged a surprise farewell at the White House for Bill and for the era of pop politics.

But there is no better sign that the invasion of the beautiful people has ended than the demise of George. The publisher of the magazine launched by John F Kennedy Jr. five years ago is finally shutting it down. Always in danger of folding, George was kept alive after Kennedy’s tragic death in a plane crash in 1999 as a kindness to his family.

John F. Kennedy Jr. was clearly a good guy. But I could not be happier that the era of George is over. The post-mortems say the magazine died because it failed to achieve its goals. This has it exactly backwards: George failed because it achieved them. Kennedy said he wanted a “post-partisan” political magazine that trivialized ideological differences, treating politicians and intellectuals like any other celebrities. Pols are simply “fascinating people” who’d be comfortable with Bruce Willis and Courteney Cox on a Barbara Walters special.

It’s not surprising that the glamorous son of our most glamorous president — appearing on “Most Sexy” lists and magazine covers — could think ideological differences are trivial. For him and his magazine, a celebrity was a celebrity. He saw Arnold Schwarzenegger and (Uncle) Ted at Thanksgiving dinners and Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Cindy Crawford at cocktail parties. As far as George was concerned, everyone was famous for being famous. Who cares if they disagree on politics?

He invited Larry Flynt to sit at his table at the White House Correspondents Dinner, as if the vile man were just another celebrity. One issue of George featured an interview with Madonna, and another with Fidel Castro. George’s editorial approach leavened Warren Beatty, campaign-finance reform, and the top ten inaugural gowns worn by first ladies into the same “fascinating” stew. Such cynicism was passed off as buzz. For example, in one issue, JFK Jr. posed nude. In the same issue he wrote an editorial letter criticizing his cousins Michael and Joseph as “poster boys for bad behavior.”

Kennedy can be forgiven for believing George would be a hit. After all, he was tapping into something very real in the culture. Perhaps because Bill Clinton blurred so many other lines (between wrong and right, between truth and lie, between pants up and pants down) we forget how much he blurred the line between Tinseltown and Washington. As David Carr of Inside.com observed recently, “When JFK Jr. first observed President Clinton on national TV playing sax or revealing his underwear choice, he was on to something — that celebrity and politics were merging.”

Indeed, Hollywood set up a base camp at the White House. Clinton took calls from Billy Crystal, Christopher Reeve, Richard Dreyfuss, et al. — as if he had reason to. The producer of both Clinton’s campaign video and the sitcom Designing Women was immortalized in a photo jumping up and down with Markie Post on a bed in the Lincoln bedroom. Clinton brought Sharon Stone to a summit meeting in Vancouver and later held a conference on health care for Barbra Streisand and friends. When Barbra learned that Sharon visited the President more often than she herself did, she reportedly fumed: “What does Sharon Stone know about policy?”

Nothing, of course. But neither do the rest of them, which is fine in the movies, where faking it is everything. Superman can’t really fly and there is no Star Fleet Academy either (this bums me out greatly). Movie stars and other pretty celebrities are very good at pretending to care and know about politics. But the reality is that most of politics requires years of toil in extremely unglamorous fields.

More importantly, politics is as much about disagreement as it is about agreement. Politicians and activists generally become famous because they stand for something. And to say that there’s as little difference between Jesse Helms and Ted Kennedy as there is between Madonna and Britney Spears is not just ludicrous, it’s pernicious — since it suggests that political differences don’t matter.

Especially in the wake of the 2000 election, the last thing we want is a magazine that cynically says politics is just showbiz. Which is why I think the success of NBC’s West Wing is such a healthy sign, its insipid liberalism aide. Where George said that actual movie stars were serious political thinkers in their own right, West Wing returns us to the idea that, at best, they just play them on TV.