Demanding Democracy.

University of Notre Dame Press, $10.95, 149 pp.

In 1990, Robert Schmuhl, a professor of American Studies at Notre Dame, published the concise and lively Statecraft and Stagecraft: American Political Life in the Age of Personality. In that book, Schmuhl argued that the "lines between statecraft and stagecraft have faded to the point that the two now blur together." The decline of national political parties, the demise of "smoke-filled rooms," and the rise of television as the central medium of political communication all resulted in powerful "linkages between public policy and public performance." Ronald Reagan, our actor-president and master of stagecraft, was the logical product of these developments, rather than their cause.

Roaming broadly over the scholarly literature in political science and mass communications, Schmuhl contributed substantially to our understanding of the contemporary American political system. For better or worse, he argued, politics had adopted the techniques and values of show business. And the task for the modem citizen was to find ways to participate in the production rather than to serve as a passive audience for it.

Robert Schmuhl has now returned to the same subject in Demanding Democracy, but he has found that the script and style of the political show have changed substantially. More specifically, the candidates in the 1992 presidential campaign reformulated their stagecraft to respond to the demands of an engaged and demanding public. In place of the carefully staged spectacle and mud slinging of 1988, the candidates held town meetings, answered phone calls on the "Today" show, bantered with Larry King, debated questions posed by ordinary citizens, and broadcast thirty-minute infomercials. It was still stagecraft and public performance (recall Clinton's shades and sax on "Arsenio Hall"), but in comparison to the recent past much of it was both relatively substantive and basically independent of the old stage managers, the news divisions at the three major networks. The public demanded more democracy and dialogue, Schmuhl argues, and the candidates responded with variants of audience-participation stagecraft.

Schmuhl is a clear and persuasive writer, and he brings to his subject the erudition and breadth of a generalist. But one pitfall of his approach (and, by the way, of the kind of interdisciplinary scholarship he represents) is that erudition can at times give way to banality. Fully half of Demanding Democracy, for example, is devoted to an account of the 1992 campaign that very rarely delves any deeper than the contemporary accounts offered in the weekly newsmagazines. Schmuhl is much more insightful when he turns from description of the changes manifested in 1992 to his analysis of what these changes mean for the future of American democracy.

For Schmuhl the more direct communication between candidate and voter during the 1992 campaign is closely related to the explosion in the number of media outlets and even the variety of modes of mass communication that is currently taking place. Limitless interactive TV, narrowcasting market strategies, computer bulletin boards, 900 numbers, talk radio, and who knows what else in the coming decades offer both tremendous opportunities and daunting challenges not only for political stagecraft, but more importantly for the quality of national statecraft. As America becomes ever more racially and ethnically diverse, Schmuhl argues, we must endeavor to use the new media not to fracture an already disjointed polity, but rather to inform and mobilize a public that is hungry for community and for meaningful public dialogue.

The enormous dimensions of that challenge are reinforced by Patrick M. Garry's examination of these same phenomena in Scrambling for Protection: The New Media and the First Amendment. While Schmuhl is concerned primarily with the political ramifications of technological change, Garry turns his attention to the important legal questions involved. What, Garry asks, is a reasonable definition of "the press" as we head into the twenty-first century? Is Commonweal, for example, functionally different, and therefore legally and constitutionally distinct, from a computer bulletin board posted on the Internet? Is electronic mail personal communication only or is it, in some of its manifestations, pretty similar to a daily newspaper? What is the difference, if any, between the national TV networks and a local public-access channel sent out to cable subscribers? Providing satisfactory answers to these questions, Garry argues, is a necessary prerequisite to applying the First Amendment to the actual circumstances of modem public communication.

Garry believes not only that these new media are legitimate elements of the press, he also believes that the bulletin boards, list services, and 900 numbers of today are much closer to the type of participatory and opinion-based press of the eighteenth century that the First Amendment was designed to protect, than are the monopolistic corporations that control daily newspapers and network television today. Garry wants constitutional protections extended to these media because he believes history requires it and because he believes the future of American participatory democracy depends on it.

One does not have to share all of Garry's sometimes romanticized notions of the value of the new media (in fact, such romance is hard to sustain after an hour or so of reading some of the participatory, opinion-based dialogue found on the Internet) to recognize the importance of the questions and challenges he poses in his book. Using the same computer terminal on which I composed this review I can read hundreds of magazines, receive electronic mail, participate in national and international bulletin boards on almost any topic imaginable, and receive daily or weekly news analyses from any number of independent information sources. The computer revolution is at long last reaching down to the individual, day-to-day level, and it is bringing with it political and legal controversies of the first order. What legal protections do these processes deserve? Will they draw people into the political process by giving them a greater sense of efficacy and participation or drive people away through overload, fragmentation, and expense? Neither Robert Schmuhl nor Patrick M. Garry has definitive answers to these questions and others like them. But they have both provided a public service by offering early and, on the whole, insightful analyses of the radical change that technological advances are bringing to democracy, statecraft, and American civil liberties.