Viewpoint: Republicans and 'the dream'

By David Paulsen

September 29, 2008

Back in the 1980s, when Sen. John McCain was entangled in the Keating Five scandal that cost American taxpayers a few billion dollars and some banks, I was producer and writer of the TV show Dallas. It took place in Bush-Cheney-land. We, too, drilled for oil, corrupted folks, screwed them out of money and livelihoods and ... there was The Dream. It came to mind the other day after something said by Mr. McCain's chief lobbyist - I mean campaign director!

Midway into the eighth season of Dallas, after Pat Duffy, Len Katzman and I all left the show, Dallas took a precipitous drop in ratings. Management asked the three of us back - Len as exec, me as producer and Patrick in his role as Bobby Ewing. Therein, however, lay a problem. The character Bobby had been killed. Millions had seen him struck by a car, then saw him die in bed. How do we bring him back?

I won't bore you with the mental gymnastics we went through, but a solution finally appeared. Pamela, we decided, would wake up one morning, find Bobby in the shower, and tell him she'd had this dream.

Which brings me to the McCain gang.

One of them came up with the mind-bending notion to proclaim to the world that the Republican Party is new. That it didn't begin in the 1850s but, rather, when Sarah Palin came in.

"Genius," exclaimed the other lobbyists - uh, advisors - their eyes brimming with rapture. "That way we can claim that the past eight years never actually existed. All that ugliness with What's-his-name and his Veep, the wars they 'fibbed' us into, the deaths of our soldiers, the economic paralysis they're leaving, housing crisis, banking crisis, the fact that McCain voted with George 90 percent of the time? None of it will be blamed on us. Wiping out the Bush-Cheney years means the war in Iraq, which shouldn't have happened, didn't. Ted Stevens' Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere? Didn't happen either, and the PTA Mom-Mayor couldn't have been 'for' it before she was against it (which she was, of course), and she never took those millions for Wasilla (which she did). We could loudly state that nothing occurred in those eight horrific years that could sully our reputation - not if the party didn't exist. Not Tom Delay's treachery, not Jack Abramoff's payoffs, the billions in cash swallowed by JR's, (I mean Dick C's) Halliburton.

"And I'll bet the public won't notice. Rove split them up to where they don't notice squat…. like McCain's so-called health plan to counteract the pretty good ones offered by the Dems. John's could have been written by Pfizer or Merck. Was it? Don't remember. By the way, you won't catch me blaming him for forgetting he supported the administration's handling of the war, telling us we'd be out in a flowery jiffy, that his encouragement for the surge came up only after he and GW assured us Mission was Accomplished - with, by the way, the very few troops John had argued for at first. The campaign won't even have to debate that the surge wasn't really a success, in that we don't have a political solution. And we won't have to address all those dumb issues about a woman's having rights or gays getting married. None of the scandals'll have a Republican leg to stand on. Because none of it ever happened. Our party is only one week old. The Bush years? Just a dream."

Our Dallas dream worked. Of course, we weren't sending soldiers off to die for our oil, or destroying our nation's economy or foreclosing on the homes of those who can least afford it.

Still, Karl Rove's "new" Republicans may have something if America doesn't wake up and demand more than the slogans and lies they're offering. Dallas' public wanted more than more pretty faces. They wanted a change in the story line, and we gave it. Today's real world needs a change of story line even more.

David Paulsen, a Baltimore native, is a TV writer and producer in Los Angeles.