Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (7 page)

One response to a debate question would not ordinarily have such an impact. But this event was simply the climax of an electoral battle characterized by its comical but earnest performances of masculinity. While Bush, with much help, had adroitly, if temporarily, countered attributions of effeminacy, Dukakis had not been so successful. The rhetorical assaults on his manhood had ranged from subtle innuendo to grotesque caricature, but the cumulative effect was an enduring image of the Democratic candidate as a feminized man.

The Republicans had actually begun impugning the masculinity and wholesomeness of Democratic candidates in the 1984 election, when Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale. At a time when homosexuality was beginning to enter the public discourse in earnest, largely due to the emerging AIDS crisis, Jeane Kirkpatrick delivered a prime-time address to the GOP convention in which she referred five separate times to the “San Francisco Democrats.”

But what was an implied and secondary theme in the 1984 election became the predominant attack in the 1988 campaign under the direction of Atwater and Ailes. And the successful depiction of George Bush as a tough guy and Dukakis as an effeminate girly-man, more than any other factor, swung the election in Bush’s favor.

The cultural theme of tough, masculine, wholesome, salt-of-the-earth Republican versus the weak, emasculated, freakish, elitist Democrat reached a whole new level of viciousness in 1992, when then-president Bush was under attack from both Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. And there is no more vivid expression of the GOP slander machine than the prime-time 1992 RNC convention speech delivered by Pat Buchanan, who had shaken up the political establishment by posing a serious primary challenge to the incumbent president.

Buchanan’s convention speech took what had been the implicit gender-and personality-manipulating cultural attacks on Democrats and made them explicitly clear. Wasting no time linking Democrats to transvestites, Buchanan declared,

Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden—where twenty thousand radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists—in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.

Following in the wake of Kirkpatrick’s pioneered phrase “San Francisco Democrats,” the meaning of Buchanan’s attack was clear: Democrats were the party of the fags, the dykes, the gender-confused freaks. And the media, as it always does with such catty and personal smears, swooned with delight, doing more to bolster and disseminate the smear than all the paid advertising in the world could accomplish. In 2007, Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan fondly reminisced on MSNBC about Buchanan’s speech as follows:

MATTHEWS:
Pat, you are one of the greatest rheoreticians [
sic
] of our life. You spoke down there in Houston in ’92. I mention this because it was
one of the great moments in the Republican Party.
You’re down—great in a certain way. You’re down there in Houston,
talking about the whole Democratic Party “cross dressing.”

BUCHANAN:
Well, I…

MATTHEWS: Jeane Kirkpatrick in ’84 referred to the “San Francisco Democrats.” Everybody got the giggle. We all get the giggle.

“Everyone” in the press “got the giggle”—and they still do. During that 1992 speech, Buchanan (who has no children of his own) repeatedly emphasized the central importance of the traditional family as a reason to vote for Bush. And he contrasted that image by continuously invoking the specter of the frighteningly assertive wife of the would-be Democratic president, one who—despite having been married to the same man her entire life and having raised with him a daughter—did not, according to Buchanan, believe in the proper place for women or even in the institution of marriage itself:

“Elect me, and you get two for the price of one,” Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse.

And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that twelve-year-olds should have a right to sue their parents, and she has compared marriage as an institution to slavery—and life on an Indian reservation.

Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.

Friends, this is radical feminism.

Buchanan, despite having been of prime fighting age throughout the Vietnam War but avoiding all military service, sought to portray Bush as The Better Man Than Clinton when he contrasted Bush’s war record to what he called Clinton’s “draft dodging.” That argument prompted boisterous cheers from the GOP throngs. Those are the same throngs who, a mere eight years later, would go on to elect and then venerate combat-avoiding George W. Bush. They’re the same throngs who, in 2000, supported Bush over Vietnam-serving Al Gore, and in 2004 reelected him while mocking Vietnam veteran John Kerry’s war medals and waving signs at that year’s GOP convention depicting a Purple Heart patched with a Band-Aid. Buchanan thundered:

George Bush was seventeen when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school class, walked down to the recruiting office, and signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war.

And Mr. Clinton? When Bill Clinton’s turn came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.

Which of these two men has won the moral authority to call on Americans to put their lives at risk? I suggest, respectfully, it is the patriot and war hero, Navy Lieutenant J. G. George Herbert Walker Bush.

In that speech, Buchanan made as explicit an argument as had been made that elections ought to be decided not on the basis of foreign policy disagreements or even domestic policy conflicts, but rather on the basis of religious and cultural tribalism. Ominously referring again to “Clinton & Clinton”—thus elevating the emasculating “lawyer-spouse” and belittling her controlled husband—Buchanan drew the battle lines:

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.

Right-wing efforts to emasculate Bill Clinton relied at least as much on the depiction of Hillary as a threatening, excessively domineering female as it did on any attacks on Bill himself. As Ducat demonstrates through a series of countless examples, during both the 1992 campaign and for the first two years of the Clinton presidency—with Clinton’s defense of “gays in the military” as the context—both the right-wing press and their allies in the establishment media repeatedly depicted Hillary as a domineering woman who shattered the proper gender role of women, in the process emasculating not only her husband but all American males.

Throughout the 1990s, twisted attacks on the femininity of Hillary Clinton dominated both right-wing demonization campaigns and mainstream political discourse.
National Review
repeatedly referred to Hillary as “that smiling barracuda.” Bill Maher said of the possibility raised in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment suit that Clinton may have to have his penis physically examined to determine if it had “distinguishing characteristics”: “He has to be careful around the White House because you know how Hillary loves to shred evidence.”
Newsweek
ran a cartoon showing Hillary lying next to Bill in bed with this thought in a bubble over her head: “Hillary Rodham Bobbitt.”

Spy
magazine ran a cover story titled “Hillary’s Big Secret” and depicted Hillary on its cover in the mold of the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing on a grate with her skirt blowing up—only, Hillary’s skirt blew up and revealed a penis asserting itself through her male underwear.
The American Spectator
featured a cover story by Fred Barnes warning of the domineering Hillary’s health care plan, and published a cartoon of a man held down helplessly on his back by Bill Clinton, while Hillary stood over him with a saw; the cartoon was captioned “Health Nuts.” Even in 2007, this Emasculating Hillary imagery continued to roll out of the mouths and keyboards of our nation’s frightened right-wing tough guys, as, for instance, when
National Review
’s Mark Steyn wrote a column about Hillary’s newly unveiled health care plan titled “Bend Over for Nurse Hillary.” On his MSNBC show, Tucker Carlson actually confessed about his reaction to Hillary: “There’s just something about her that feels castrating, overbearing, and scary.” Carlson’s MSNBC colleague, Chris Matthews, referred to surrogates of the Hillary Clinton campaign and asked rhetorically: “[A]ren’t you appalled at the willingness of these people to become
castratos
in the
eunuch chorus
here or whatever thay are?” All of these creepy, revealing phrases echoed Rush Limbaugh’s repeated application of the woman-fearing phrase “testicular lock-box” when describing various Clinton policies, including her Iraq plan and health care proposals.

Despite all of that, the twice-elected and highly popular Bill Clinton was the one Democratic candidate of any significance over the last two decades whom the Republicans failed to transform into an effeminate, weak male. Despite the vicious efforts of the right-wing noise machine and the GOP edifice to emasculate Clinton by portraying him as the captive of gays and a controlling wife, Americans perceived Clinton as a regular guy. And the reason, ironically, was that the right wing’s obsessive focus on his sex life and other appetites, and their endless depictions of him as a conquering lady’s man, had the opposite of the intended effect.

The Clinton sex scandals unintentionally pushed Clinton closer to the GOP image of the virile, sexually conquering, and unquestionably heterosexual male than the effeminate-loser image that had engulfed Dukakis, Mondale, and so many others. How threatening and emasculating could Hillary be, how effeminate and whipped could Bill Clinton be, if—as the right wing endlessly insisted—he was a virile sexual conquerer having his way with one woman after the next?

Right-Wing Dirt-Peddlers: From the Fringe to the Dominant Mainstream

While the right-wing political movement parades around as the morally upstanding, traditional-values-embracing, wholesome American faction, they are led by some of the most morally “untraditional” hedonists who engage in myriad decadent and filth-wallowing practices. Two of the most politically influential figures in the right-wing noise machine—Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge—spent virtually all of the 1990s spewing one assault after another against the Clintons based not on policy disputes but instead rooted in gender, cultural, and highly sexualized themes.

The draft-avoiding, illegal-pill-addicted, and multiple-divorced Limbaugh—burdened with one of the most decadent and degraded personal lives of any public figure anywhere—repeatedly insinuated and then outright asserted that Hillary was a lesbian, that Bill had assaulted and even raped women, and that Hillary had her lover, Vince Foster, murdered. Matt Drudge, an unmarried, reputedly homosexual recluse, supplemented Limbaugh’s sexually twisted attacks with even more degrading discussions, repeatedly spewing rumors—fed to him by the tawdry, bottom-feeding likes of Laura Ingraham, George Conway, and Ann Coulter—about the marks on Clinton’s penis and his alleged multiple rapes.

Remarkably—indeed, incredibly—while the decadent individuals and dirt-peddling practices that defined the Limbaugh/ Drudge circle began as the unspeakable fringe, these right-wing smear merchants and their tactics have become not just mainstream but dominant. Our political culture and mainstream discourse are now shaped by the same right-wing filthmongers who spent the last two decades spewing some of the most vile and defamatory trash imaginable.

That our establishment media has been “Drudge-ified”—that is, completely taken over by right-wing dirt-peddling and twisted gender-based caricatures—is beyond dispute. The examples conclusively demonstrating that to be true are too numerous to chronicle in this one book. But the task is unnecessary, for many of our country’s leading mainstream journalists, working at the top echelons of our most respected news organizations, have made the definitive case that this “Drudge-ification” reigns.

Mark Halperin was the political director of ABC News and is now senior political analyst for
Time
magazine. John Harris was the national politics editor for the
Washington Post
and is now the editor in chief of
The Politico,
a Drudge-mimicking daily Internet political newspaper. It is virtually impossible to find journalists who are more consummate Washington political media insiders than Halperin and Harris, working, as they do, for our nation’s most establishment and influential news organizations.

And yet in their 2006 book,
The Way to Win,
Halperin and Harris reveal one of the most amazing and extraordinary truths about our establishment political press: that the individual who wields the single greatest influence over the process by which political news is reported—what the duo call “The Freak Show”—is the lie-spewing, dirt-wallowing, right-wing Internet gossip Matt Drudge:

In the fragmented, remote-control, click-on-this, did you hear? political media world in which we live, revered Uncle Walter has been replaced by odd nephew Matt….

Matt Drudge rules our world…With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts.

So many media elites check the Drudge Report consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too….

And there has been no more effective venue for promoting the Freak Show agenda in presidential politics than the website run out of the Miami apartment of Matt Drudge, the impresario of
the attack-based personality-obsessed politics that is the Freak Show’s signature….

Members of the Gang of 500—which, according to the
New Yorker,
includes “the campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment”—all read the Drudge Report. If the greatest challenge of any person seeking the presidency is keeping control of his or her public image, and the great obstacle to this control is the Freak Show, then Matt Drudge is the gatekeeper. In this sense, he is the Walter Cronkite of his era.