Mind of an Outlaw (73 page)

Dole-Kemp will do it. The trick is to keep telling yourself: an
election campaign is not cut in stone. Not like legislation. For the Senate, you have to respect legislation. How can a nation survive all the bad bills that get passed if there aren’t a few good ones? Keel of government. Underline that. As a legislator, you have to be responsible. Some of the time.

As a presidential candidate, it’s opposite. Be ready to get away with what you can. Look at Reagan. Easier to catch a fly with your thumb and forefinger than to corner Reagan on a weak point. Emulate Ronnie. Don’t look back. Most voters are not living in Kansas. So stop treating them as if they are smart enough to read character. Failing memory is the fastest-growing disease of the twentieth century. People do not wish to have to recall what was said five days ago.

All the same, don’t go off half-cocked. Calculate media cost. They’ll bring up those jokes. What were they? How long ago was that? He had said, “If Jack Kemp were smart, he would corner the market on hair spray instead of undergoing all that personal expense.” Something like that. Kemp had an answer. Not a bad one. Talked about poor Bob Dole. Said how sad it was that this fire burned down Dole’s house. However, Dole’s library was saved. Both of his books were intact. That was nice, because Dole hadn’t yet finished his coloring book.

Well, he couldn’t laugh all the way home, not over that one. Kemp had upped the ante. Ergo, do unto others as they do unto you. Our good news, Dole had said, is that Jack Kemp and some of his supply-siders were in a bus crash. The bad news is that three of the seats were empty.

You could say he had gone too far. Had to watch that streak. Dark, Dole, dark. The media would swarm over those jokes. Still, it would keep everybody paying attention to Dole-Kemp. Do those two guys get along? Do they not? Will produce narrative interest. And Kemp will be loyal. For the next couple of months, anyway. Had to. Would want to be elected vice president. And no need to worry about a change of life in office. It’s all in an old Italian saying. Heard it in Italy: revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold. He could live with the joke about the coloring book.

Would Kemp accept his offer? Would Neil Armstrong refuse to take a first step for mankind? Dole knew political figures when they were making policy on the inside. Knew them when they were pushed outside. He had installed some fellows in good places. Had maneuvered a few gentlemen out. Been inside and outside himself. At one point, Nixon had turned chilly. That hurt. Practically speaking, you could call it one big crisis of identity. Left you feeling small.

Now Kemp had been out for a while. Called it living in his “wilderness years.” But he was going to call Kemp back to the fray. That would do it. How could Kemp not love him? All the same, he couldn’t approve of Kemp altogether. Talked too much. Very little Kemp wouldn’t put on the air. Nonetheless! Dole-Kemp. A Mac Whopper of an oxymoron.

He was hearing it all over the place. An enthusiastic crowd was waiting for them. Good for warming the bones. In front of the courthouse in Russell, he introduced Kemp to a large group—all home folks. Called him an “American original.” Of course, you could say that Dole was an American original. For that matter, so was Sweet Billy Clinton. Whatever. And Jack Kemp, when he got up to talk to the folks in Russell, mentioned that at lunch he had asked Bob Dole how long he wanted him to speak, and Dole had answered, “Kemp, you can speak as long as you want, but we’re only going to be here for five more minutes.…”

We must prepare for a shock. We are going to move over to Jesse Jackson giving a speech on August 27 at the Democratic convention. Jesse Jackson may be our greatest orator, but his voice is sometimes muffled by all his withheld sounds—rage of frustration, clamped-down sobs of exasperation, the dark vibration of this year’s patience compressed upon last year’s patience. Sometimes you can hardly hear him. Truth, there are many whites who would not wish to hear him, a majority doubtless. Still, he said it on Tuesday night, August 27, 1996, in Chicago, like no one else happened to be saying it these days. Let us put up his words as a benchmark by which we can measure both conventions by
their resolute inability to look into the eye of the issues, the few real issues:

The ghostly tone of the Democratic Convention in Chicago can more easily be found, however, in the following speech:

A liberty has been taken. Two words were changed. “Republicans” and “Republican” were altered to “Democrats” and “Democrat.” The speaker was not in Chicago but in San Diego on Monday, August 12, and he was Colin Powell.

Given his remarks on corporate welfare, he is, in fact, to the left of the Democratic Party. Powell was, of course, to the left of the Republican Party as well—there was no other luminary in the GOP who spoke out against corporate welfare at the convention. A year earlier, that had not been so. John Kasich, head of the House Budget Committee, had been looking to wipe out the deficit by the year 2002. He also had to find no less than $200 billion to pay for the tax breaks promised in the Contract with America. For a time, he thought corporate welfare might even be the place to do it. Kasich said in an interview, “I think it is an absolute outrage that some of this crap is still in this budget, and it just infuriates me every day when I think about it.”

It is not the sentiments of men that make history but their actions. Kasich came down from the mountain of $200 billion to $25 billion. Didn’t get anywhere with that, either. By the time he stood at the podium in San Diego, he did not mention corporate welfare. Rather, he spoke of “reattaching our souls to one another,” and “sending a clear message to God that He is being invited back into American life.”

God, who is reputed to mark the fall of every sparrow, might not need an invitation.

Of course, the numbers involving corporate welfare are, to put matters in the politest form, full of discomfort. Stephen Moore of the right-wing Cato Institute has said, if we were able to get rid of all the corporate welfare spending programs, “we could cut our budget deficit in half.”

We can also take a quote from a signally good article on corporate welfare in
The Boston Globe
on July 9, 1996: “ ‘Clinton initially wanted to make a strong statement on corporate welfare, but backed away,’ an administration source said. He eschewed the words ‘corporate welfare’ in public, the source said, adding: ‘He uses the phrase in private and cabinet meetings, but the phrase is too combative for him.’ ”

Shall we call it corpfare from now on? Corpfare the rich child; welfare the hungry child. We need not be surprised that the Democratic Convention was close to an overlay of the Republican convention.

The American political body had evolved into a highly controlled and powerfully manipulated democracy overseen by a new species of aristocracy formed at the junction of four royal families—the ten-thousand-dollar suits of the megacorporations, the titans of the media, the high ogres of Congress, and the upper lords of the White House. The inner disputes of a court with four such elements are not easy to follow, but their accords are clear.

Both parties were linked on balancing the budget, increasing the sentences on drug dealers, upgrading the best armed forces in the world and downsizing government (as if the two had no relation to each other!). Both parties would change welfare as we know it. No one asked whether anyone writing the specifications for those changes had any intimate knowledge about what life might be like on welfare.

There were, it is true, a few points of dispute: The Democrats, for example, were tougher on cigarette smoking among adolescents than were the Republicans, and the Democrats were certainly pro-choice. Family values would prevail in both parties except for those special cases where family values might interfere with megasize profits. There, in the realm of film, music, and health management organizations, family values could take a walk.

Given these similarities, we do not have to catalog the Democratic Convention activities either. Details are interesting when a dramatic turn in one event produces an unforeseen shift in another. None of that occurred. No riots, demonstrations, or protests offered enough impact to be closely followed by the media. Both conventions had been prepared so thoroughly for TV that an irony intervened. Except for the last night, the major networks refused to show more than an hour of convention time. The largest question for the media became: Who will win a larger share of the TV public during the prime-time hours on the first night of each convention?

The Republicans brought the deaf, the wounded, the victim of rape to testify to the honor and compassion of Bob Dole; on their initial network hour, the Democrats did not discuss politics at all. What a stroke! The genius of Dick Morris was once more confirmed. Focus groups had given him an ideal speaker for the first night, a nonpolitical person with immense TV impact, none other than Superman, Christopher Reeve, who had broken his neck taking his horse over a jump. In his
20/20
appearance with Barbara Walters last year, he had generated an enormous response. The Democrats, having no one available for their first night with status comparable to Colin Powell, chose Reeve, and he gave one of the best speeches of both conventions. Because everyone knew that he could not move his limbs, the stern small shifts of his lips as he intoned his hard-earned sentiments of compassion occasioned real oratorical intensity. He stirred large emotional depths in the audience, and much of that was in relation to how handsome he was, and how immobile. He was not unlike a mythic idol, human, but made of stone. As he spoke of the need for research, one could see that it was the plainest women who were weeping most. His voice, transmitted through a larynx mike, was stirring precisely because it was small and necessarily measured:

At the end of Reeve’s ovation, Clinton came in on the big TV screen. He was speaking from Columbus, Ohio, and looked as large as a big-time football coach at a Friday night rally. His mojo was working. Thanks to Christopher Reeve, the returns for the Democrats’ first night had done almost as well as the Republicans’ first night had with Powell and Nancy Reagan.

It is a true change of scene to go from Christopher Reeve to Barbara Boxer, for the senator from California was tiny and peppy, and she wore very high heels. She talked a great deal about children. She was so devoted to their welfare that one wondered why she seemed 1 percent phony. Later, one learned that she and Dianne Feinstein, the other senator from California, voted on the side of corpfare. It was, however, no evil deed. The bill to take a whack at corporate welfare had been voted down 74 to 25. So, Boxer and Feinstein were just two of 74 senators defending the nest where the big birds hatched their eggs.

On Monday afternoon in the Sheraton Ballroom, Barbara Boxer, at the podium, turned to Hillary Clinton on the dais and said, “We’re going to take back the Hill because of you.” She saluted her. She added, “To my favorite First Lady of all time.” Barbara Boxer was the only one wearing red on the speaker’s platform, a primary red that gave a bounce to her black hair and red lipstick. If you’re tiny, flaunt it. It was also likely that she dieted with major passion. She was older than the new generation but nonetheless had the look of the New Woman. She was the instrument of her own will. She would make herself into what she chose to be. It was possible that she did not understand that one virtue we cannot acquire by an act of will is to improve our minds in such a manner that we can improve the minds of others. Acts of will, on the contrary, tend to produce abilities that oppress others. Piety, for example.