SACRAMENTO, CA -- As the Democrats meet this week in Los Angeles, the chattering classes are aflutter about Vice President Gore’s selection of Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate. But when Gore Vidal turned up in Los Angeles Sunday afternoon at a gathering of “progressives” broadcast on C-SPAN, it became clear that the Vice President had missed an enormous opportunity. If he had picked the esteemed political novelist (who is a distant cousin of Al Gore, by the way), then the ticket would have been “Gore-Vidal.” What could be a more perfect fit for Al Gore than the novelist skilled at reinventing the past?

The selection of Lieberman is supposed to help Democrats fill the gap that pollsters say is most on the minds of Americans: moral values. This suggests that a revolution in American politics is nearly complete. Way back in 1967, James Q. Wilson wrote: “In many places, especially the Northeast, our political institutions (happily) do not allow [moral values] to play much part in elections. Parties, led by professionals, instinctively shun such issues, feeling somehow that public debate over virtue is irrelevant (what can government do about it?) and dangerous (nobody can agree on what virtue is or that your party has more of it).” And Pat Moynihan remarked at about the same time: “Family is not a subject Americans tend to consider appropriate as an area of public policy.”

Nowadays, of course, the family and moral virtue are seemingly the only focus of policy discussion. Which makes all the more amusing the cancellation of the Democratic fundraiser at the Playboy mansion. When the trouble first arose over the prospect of bunny money, the explanation for Al Gore’s discomfort was obvious. But when Joe “Mr. Clean” Lieberman joined the ticket, it became a public relations nightmare for a campaign that is struggling mightily to put distance between itself and our Playboy president. Canceling the event not only allows Democrats to project the right “image” (even though they are keeping prior campaign contributions from Hugh Hefner), but also assures the re-election of Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, the host of the canceled Playboy party whose swing district in Orange County will now surely embrace her as a maverick.

A further irony is that Hugh Hefner may not have always been so attached to liberal orthodoxy. Back in 1961,
private citizen Ronald Reagan wrote a strong letter to Playboy magazine protesting its decision to publish a
feature article by Dalton Trumbo, one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten” Communists. Hefner’s long reply to
Reagan is in the Reagan archives at the Hoover Institution and makes for interesting reading. Hefner goes on at length about how much he admires Reagan and sympathizes with Reagan’s views about big government.

What this episode implies is that Reagan was a Playboy reader at some point. In his first campaign for
governor in 1966, Reagan used to say that “Keeping up with Pat Brown’s promises is like trying to read
Playboy magazine while your wife turns the pages.” People used to accuse Reagan of making up stories, but
in this case maybe he was speaking from experience.

-- Steven Hayward