OPINION:
If there’s anything America doesn’t need, it’s another reality-TV show. “Dance Moms” and “Teen Moms” just wrapped up their season, but viewers who can’t get enough voyeurism can still peer into the lives of the “Real Housewives of New Jersey,” or see what it’s like working on a 153-foot yacht in “Below Deck.” If that’s not enough manufactured drama for an evening, viewers can tune to “Rival Survival” to watch two U.S. senators pretend to rough it on an island in the South Pacific.
Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, a Democrat, play the roles of politicians dumped on a deserted island to fend for themselves without the usual 30 staffers to get them through the typical workday. The political duo have been hitting the talk-show circuit to paint their weeklong adventure as fraught with danger.
“They didn’t actually drop us off on an island,” Mr. Heinrich explains on “The Late Show” with David Letterman. “That’s what we had in mind. They dropped us off in the ocean, and we had to swim to the first island. … We weren’t alone, there were sharks.”
Mr. Letterman had seen the previews and wasn’t playing along. “There seemed to be guys in a boat following you as you swam to the first island,” he observed. “So why didn’t you just ride in with the camera guys?” He pointed out that the representatives of two great outdoors states couldn’t even start a fire on their own, a prerequisite for actually surviving alone in the wild — or just on an overnight camping in the woods. No Boy Scout merit badges for these senators with tender feet.
The senators volunteered for these travails to demonstrate that Republicans and Democrats can work together, and Mr. Heinrich says the show “is not just a one-off.” More odd-couple pairings could be in the works. Snakes and squirrels, be warned.
Bipartisanship, alas, is about more than just sitting together under the palms sipping the milk from a coconut. Making deals by going along with Democratic schemes, as Mr. Flake has done as one of the “Gang of 8” to endorse amnesty, is easy and wins applause. It’s music still ringing in Mr. Flake’s ears. When Mr. Letterman asked about global warming, Mr. Flake endorsed the hoax lest he hear catcalls from a Manhattan audience.
Acceding to the demands of the left isn’t the sort of bipartisanship the nation needs. Unscripted bipartisanship is much harder, requiring work to identify areas of common ground that don’t require surrendering principles. The intellectual exercise of giving ground on unimportant matters to advance policy where it matters most isn’t the stuff of television. Everything else is just a contrivance for the cameras.
Reality shows are about raising the emotional stakes by voting contestants off the island or yelling “You’re fired!” in the boardroom. It’s about encouraging cat-fighting and backstabbing among participants. That’s the real-world stuff. If what these two senators do on the show reflects true collegiality — working together based on shared principles — it doesn’t make entertaining television, and television that doesn’t entertain is quickly voted off the channel.
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