It's My Party (28 page)

To my mind, Rudolph Giuliani and the revival of New York do indeed rank right up there with Ronald Reagan and the fall of
the Berlin Wall. Giuliani, like Reagan, has shown Republicans that their principles are more powerful than even they themselves
often suppose.

* * *

As I was about to leave his office, Mayor Giuliani said there was something he wanted me to see. He stood, walked to his desk,
riffled among some papers for a moment, then found what he wanted and picked it up. He showed me a bound report. “This is
hilarious,” Giuliani said. “You’ll love it.”

The federal government, he explained, had just conducted a study of Yankee Stadium, checking it for accessibility to the disabled.
The inspectors had found some three thousand instances in which Yankee Stadium failed to meet federal standards.

“Listen to this stuff,” Giuliani said. He read one item after another. The path of travel out of the Yankee dugout was accessible
only by steps, not a ramp, making it impossible to get a wheelchair onto the field. The dressing bench in the Yankee locker
room was forty-five inches long by sixteen inches deep instead of the required forty-eight inches long by twenty-four inches
deep. The toilets in the locker room had a seat height of sixteen inches, one inch below the required seventeen inches. The
spout of the drinking fountain in the weight room was forty-two inches off the floor instead of the required thirty-six inches.

On and on Giuliani read, howling with laughter. The federal bureaucrats had failed to see that although many duties can indeed
be performed by disabled people, including, as Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated, the duties of president, some duties lie outside
the grasp of the disabled by their very nature, including the duties of the New York Yankees.

“The urinals are too high,” Giuliani continued, cackling. “The toilet paper dispenser is incorrectly mounted on the back wall
of the toilet. Do you believe anybody does this? I mean, people get paid to do this.”

Giuliani tossed the report back onto his desk.

“The federal government sent people here from Washington to do this. This is the stupidity they use. They are pointy-headed
stupid morons. This is ridiculous! This is ridiculous!”

Trying to imagine my fellow Republican, Rudolph Giuliani, as a member of the Senate, I made my way down the marble steps of
city hall, then past the men and equipment engaged in restoring City Hall Park. As I stepped back onto the street, I was still
smiling.

I
set out on this journey to discover what the Republican Party stands for now that Ronald Reagan is gone. But the journey
took on a life of its own, teaching me lessons I hadn’t expected. One was that the very way I had approached the GOP, expecting
to be able to capture it by coming up with a list of positions, was mistaken. I had the wrong scope or scale in mind. The
Grand Old Party proved bigger and older—grander—than I had thought.

Of course the GOP takes positions on the issues. But it has a prior stand, an overarching position that it has held throughout
its existence. As one of the two major parties, the GOP helps to keep American politics both stable and vital. In power, it
unites disparate elements behind its agenda. Out of power, it serves as a stout critic of the Democratic Party while providing
a base from which politicians eager to defeat the Democrats can develop new programs. With a membership made up of particular
ethnic, religious, regional, and socioeconomic groups, it has an almost tribal character, giving tens of millions of Americans
a sense of personal involvement—a stake—in politics. It is one thing to watch as a disinterested observer while politicians
win or lose this or that election. It is another to believe that their victories and defeats reflect upon your own tribe.

A source of stability. A base from which to put forward new programs. A link between ordinary Americans and the political
process. Many Republicans don’t realize this themselves—I certainly didn’t—but before it stands for anything else, the Republican
Party stands for the success of American democracy.

To repeat the question I asked at the outset, Who
are
these people? What does George W. Bush have in common with Rudolph Giuliani, Haley Barbour with David Brady, Michael Medved
with Jane Dee Hull, Justin Adams with Newt Gingrich? A discernible set of principles? Or now that the Cold War is over—and
Ronald Reagan has departed from the scene—does the GOP amount to nothing more than a tribal affiliation intermixed with a
scattering of exiles from the other party? Is its only animating principle, like that of the Whig Party before it, enmity
toward Democrats?

Nearly every person with whom I spoke was able to articulate his reasons for being a Republican. A belief in individual responsibility.
The conviction that any government that absorbs a full one fifth of the goods and services its citizens produce is too big
and too intrusive. The desire to see American military might remain unassailable, even in the post-Cold War world. An eagerness
to bring market forces to bear on social problems, introducing voucher programs, for example, to improve our schools, or replacing
welfare with workfare. From Fresno to Jersey City, I found, Republicans hold in common a clear set of principles. It is true
that on the social issues, Republicans are divided. Yet the main body of the party—the GOP that lies inside the Finkelstein
Box—is pro-life, opposes special rights for gays, and supports the institution of heterosexual marriage. While the GOP makes
room for a wide divergence of opinion on these matters, it is nevertheless accurate to say that the GOP as a whole stands
for traditional morality.

Do the GOP’s principles make any difference? Pat Buchanan doubts it. Buchanan says he bolted the Republican Party because
its agenda had become all but indistinguishable from that of the Democratic Party. In one sense, Buchanan is merely restating
a truism of political science, namely that the two major political parties in the United States are much closer together than
political parties in Europe, which run from monarchist to Communist. Yet at the same time Buchanan has a more immediate point.
Republicans are in less of a revolutionary mood than they were when Ronald Reagan ran for office in 1980. The differences
between George W. Bush and John McCain on the one hand and Al Gore on the other are far smaller than were the differences
between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

“Ever hear of vectors?” David Brady asked when he and I discussed this. “No, you wouldn’t have. It’s math.” Vectors, David
explained, are sets of data with both distance and direction—in effect, arrows. “Start two vectors right next to each other
on a graph. Then point them in different directions—just slightly different, a degree different, half a degree different,
whatever. The further you plot them, the further apart the vectors become. Follow those two suckers out any distance at all
and you’ll end up in two completely different places.”

Likewise our political parties. Even when they appear close together, the differences between them still add up.

George W. Bush and John McCain may both refuse to promise that they will appoint only pro-life judges to the Supreme Court
and the federal bench. Yet either would appoint far more pro-life judges than would Al Gore, who has promised to appoint only
pro-choice judges. George W. Bush’s and John McCain’s plans to cut taxes, boost defense spending, and restrain domestic spending
may be tepid compared with those of Ronald Reagan—McCain’s plans, since they are so ill-formed, particularly so. To use Kellyanne
Fitzpatrick’s formulation, Bush’s and McCain’s plans may amount not to a Republican revolution but to Republican ripples.
But either George W. Bush or John McCain would cut taxes, boost defense spending, and restrain domestic spending far more
than would Al Gore—and if either Bush or McCain had the support of a Congress controlled by his fellow Republicans, he would
cut taxes, boost defense spending, and restrain domestic spending even more. At the end of four years, still more at the end
of eight, the nation would find itself in a completely different place under a Republican from where it would end up under
a Democrat.

This brings me to a point that I have been trying to avoid.

Throughout this book I have worked assiduously to keep my focus on the Republican Party, suppressing my impulses—and I have
felt them repeatedly—to attack the Democratic Party. In just a few pages this book will be over, and you would think that
I could make it to the end gracefully, containing myself, civil and well-mannered for just a few hundred more words. I can’t.
The tension is too much. Permit me to rant.

I begin with the leader of the Democratic Party, Bill Clinton. In recent years President Clinton has told us that “the era
of big government is over.” Yet early in his administration he enacted the biggest tax hike in more than a decade, then proposed
a health plan that would effectively have nationalized one seventh of the entire economy. President Clinton speaks constantly
about the need for our armed forces to remain strong. Yet during his administration the navy has been reduced from just under
six hundred ships to just over three hundred, combat readiness in every branch of the armed services has plummeted, and military
spending as a proportion of GDP has fallen, as Mayor Giuliani noted, to its lowest point since before the Second World War.
During the 1992 campaign, President Clinton pledged to make abortion rare. Yet on the very day he was first inaugurated he
signed five executive orders extending the role of the federal government in funding abortions. Thus despite his talk about
bringing it back to the center—about establishing a new, third way—Bill Clinton presides over a Democratic Party that continues
to stand for higher taxes, an ever-expanding welfare state, cuts in the military, and the moral values, if they may be called
that, of the sexual revolution.

The Democratic Party wasn’t always like this, of course. In 1960 the Democratic presidential candidate John Kennedy actually
ran to the
right
of the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, calling for greater military preparedness. Then, as president, Kennedy proposed
massive income tax
cuts
.
^*
But today? George McGovern may feel right at home in the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton, but John Kennedy would scarcely
recognize it. And even though Bill Clinton has only months remaining in office, Al Gore has done nothing to repudiate any
of Clinton’s positions, limiting himself instead to occasional tongue-clicking about the president’s dalliance with Monica
Lewinsky. The Democratic Party might pay lip service to free markets and traditional values. It might manage to keep its more
radical impulses in check. But under Al Gore the Democratic Party would remain what it has been under Bill Clinton: a party
not of the center, but of the left.

There. I feel better now.

* * *

It is easy to find the Republican Party absurd. The GOP calls to mind bland WASPs in New England, television evangelists down
South, and feckless members of the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. It is likewise easy to find the Republican
Party pigheaded. The GOP has done almost nothing to appeal to African-Americans or single women, while its efforts to deal
with the growing Hispanic population have so far proven perverse. At times I find myself imagining that the GOP represents
the past, its members, the last remnants of an America that was once overwhelmingly white and Protestant, now living in the
interior of the country as they make, so to speak, their last stand, steadily dwindling as a proportion of the population.
Then I snap out of it. The GOP controls both houses of Congress and holds thirty of the fifty governor’s mansions. Its candidate
for the Senate in New York, Rudolph Giuliani, one of the most intelligent and colorful politicians in the nation, is an Italian
Catholic, not a WASP. One of its candidates for president, George W. Bush, won a majority of the Hispanic vote in Texas the
last time he ran for governor, and at this writing he has led Al Gore in the polls for months on end. Another of its candidates
for president, John McCain, has just romped through the early primaries by demonstrating that even a Republican can win votes
from Independents and Democrats. To my mind, McCain has won too many votes from Independents and Democrats and too few from
Republicans. But still.