Who Let the Dogs In? (19 page)
Read Who Let the Dogs In? Online
Authors: Molly Ivins
The Kennedy-Kassebaum bill would have fixed these problems—until the Newtzis fixed the bill. They decided to lard it up with special-interest provisions. The most glaring example is medical savings accounts, a device that allows health insurance companies to skim the cream off the low-risk pool and leave everyone else with higher premiums. This insurance-company dream is the brainchild of the Golden Rule Insurance Co., which—according to Representative Cynthia McKinney—contributed $1.4 million to Republicans. And, according to the Associated Press, J. Patrick Rooney, an executive at Golden Rule, has contributed $103,000 to Gingrich and GOPAC. Imagine that.
March 1996
C
HICAG
O
— As someone who is seriously considering, for the first time in my life, simply not voting for president (I don’t need a line that says, “None of the above”—I need a line that says, “It makes me vomit”), I am still finding sweet consolation in the belated appearance of some intelligent defenders of President Bill Clinton.
I honestly do not know if I will vote for the man—in part because I don’t think I need to; he’s going to win anyway. But I remain chapped over four years of watching Clinton absorb more unmitigated garbage—both from right-wingers who wanted him to fail before the git-go and from the media—than any human being short of Adolf Hitler should ever have to endure. Garrison Keillor said in
The Washington Post,
“If Clinton had been president in 1863 and had gone to Gettysburg and given that speech, the press would have written, ‘Clinton Seeks to Burnish Image at Cemetery Dedication: Hopes Talk Will Distract Public from Whitewater Rumors.’” (Which reminds me: On the actual occasion of the Gettysburg Address, one newspaper reporter wrote, “President Lincoln also spoke.”) To misquote Linda Ellerbee: And so it has gone.
It’s awfully hard to pick the lowest moment. Vince Foster’s suicide—now, there was a gem. An absolute stampede by paranoid conspiracy-mongers and would-be Woodwards-and-Bernsteins to take a not-unusual tragedy—archetypal gifted perfectionist, unable to bear his failure to meet his own impossible standards, slides into depression and kills self—into whatever seamy tale would most damage Clinton (make that “the Clintons”).
Then, there was the froo-fraw over how Clinton was exploiting—yes, milking—Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s death for political mileage. I mean, all that mourning stuff went on for
a whole week.
Bound to be politically motivated! Right—the whole deal could have been cut down to three days if the folks in Bosnia had just been a little quicker about scraping whatever was left of Brown’s body off the side of that mountain. It was definitely Clinton’s fault.
Next came the stupendous scoop by the actual Bob Woodward about how Hillary had an imaginary conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt—revealed to an astonished world only months after the first lady wrote all about it in her widely syndicated newspaper column. Quel daring journalism.
Of course, one could go on for pages with examples of equally fair and balanced coverage by the same Washington press corps that was declaring Representative Newt Gingrich a political genius just eighteen months ago. (If you really want to hear all of it, nestle down and listen to James Carville for a few hours.)
Hey, I’m no wizard; I’m a good little conformist at heart. I probably would have thought Newt “Beach Volleyball” Gingrich was a political genius myself if the Washington press corps had not trespassed beyond the border of sanity by writing admiring profiles of his henchpersons from Texas—Representatives Dick Armey of Irving, Tom DeLay of Sugar Land, and Bill Archer of Houston.
Nobody
(outside the Beltway) is that dumb.
Then, there is the Mother of All Scandals, that teeny-tiny drop in the Old S&L Bucket, Whitewater. Gene Lyons, the Arkansas reporter who is no more gaga about Clinton than I am, has been fighting a valiant rear-guard action on Whitewater for years now. With commendable patience, using textbook methods of journalism, he has relentlessly exposed every nutty conspiracy theory, every exaggeration, every carelessness, and every distortion by saying over and over again: “Here are the facts; this is what the record shows.” For an example of Lyons at his best, see the August 8 issue of
The New York Review of Books,
which debunks yet another Clinton-is-a-sleaze bookette. (There’s money in them thar bookettes.) This one sounds like the best Clinton bookette since ex–FBI agent Gary Aldrich so brilliantly demonstrated why no one should believe what’s in an FBI file. And that, in turn, raises one of those rare Clinton screwups where the press did not get excited enough.
I don’t have Lyons’ patience. I watch the reporters go down to Arkansas, which they all assume is Dogpatch with L’il Abner geeking around at Moonbeam McSwine, from Washington, that stainless bastion of sea-green incorruptible politics. They remind me of the French cop in
Casablanca,
who was
shocked
to find gambling in the back room. I think the word I want is
hypocrites.
Also entering the list of intelligent Clinton defenders is Taylor Branch, chiefly known as the superb biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. (
Parting the Waters
). His piece in the current issue of
Esquire
is written with the almost painful scrupulosity that marks all his work.
Soon to be out: Martin Walker, the ridiculously smart correspondent for
The Guardian
of Britain, looks at Clinton’s record from an international point of view, which you would never catch anyone in our provincial media corps doing.
So, if Clinton is all this much better than the American media have ever hinted, how come I’m such an unhappy camper? Read the welfare bill.
August 1996
N
O
ONE,” THE EDITORS
of
The New York Times
argue, “can doubt [the president’s] commitment to using government to spur the economy, protect the environment, defend the cities, promote racial justice, and combine compassion with fiscal prudence.”
Fine. Here, then, are a few notes from no one.
Perhaps the best gloss that liberals and progressives can put on the first Clinton administration is that the president would have liked to use the government for the purposes outlined above, but only if no one with power and influence objected overly much. It’s not that Clinton won’t fight for anything but that each issue represents a precise mathematical calculation: popularity of an issue times its political importance minus the number of enemies it has, divided by the power of those enemies to disrupt the rest of Clinton’s agenda. For liberal causes to make any progress in the second Clinton administration, their proponents must first subject themselves to the same disciplined analysis.
It ain’t pretty. A whopping 16 percent of Americans now admit to the label “liberal.” According to the musings of some senior administration advisers, the campaign issues that have at least a fighting chance of enactment in the next four years include:
• Political Reform. Clinton promised in his first inaugural address to “reform our politics so that power and privilege no longer shout down the voice of the people.” He lied. This time, however, having recognized the potential explosiveness of the issue, as well as Al Gore’s vulnerability in 2000 regarding it, advisers swear that Clinton means it. Indonesia-scam aside, Republicans will be loath to look like shills for corporate corrupters if Clinton takes the issue center stage.
• Poor Kids. If the welfare reform bill is to be in any way defanged, it will happen because of “the children.” Clinton is genuinely eager to ameliorate the bill’s harsh treatment of immigrant kids and further beef up its child care provisions. If he is truly ambitious, he will challenge Congress to invest not only in “empowerment zones” but in transportation resources, to allow former welfare recipients who don’t have cars and can’t afford trains and express buses to travel to areas that need workers. If he were someone else entirely, he might even challenge the private sector to invest in the worker training programs that Congress gutted in his 1993 budget. But never mind that.
• Health Care. Kids rule here as well. A movement is afoot to pass a new tobacco tax to pay for universal health coverage for children. Given all the money Philip Morris spread like manure on Bob Dole’s candidacy, Clinton might want to do it simply for revenge. Gore would probably go along just to prove he hates tobacco as much as he said he did when he made everybody cry in August. And of course Hillary’s on board—unless she’s behind bars. Tobacco pushers are even less popular than liberals.
• Workers’ Rights. This is the progressives’ sleeper issue. Americans hate sweatshops and they hate child labor. They hate the idea of foreigners taking away jobs with exploitative practices and they could be driven crazy over the idea of, say, Indonesian influence-peddlers buying themselves sweetheart deals that put U.S. workers out of business. With labor rejuvenating itself and Gore’s campaign vulnerable to a Perot/Buchananite explosion around the issue of workers and wages, Clinton could be forced to see the wisdom of vigorously enforcing the GATT rules already on the books. That means, in the case of, say, Indonesia, a country’s special trade preferences could be withdrawn until it allows collective bargaining and discontinues its practice of ending worker disputes with bullets and prisons. Much could also be done to put the fear of The Market into the minds of the leaders of China, Colombia, Mexico, and Pakistan as well. The issue works particularly well in conjunction with political reform. Do the calculations yourself: Without campaign contributions, how many votes does Indonesia have?
December 1996
T
WO
SOLID WEEKS
on the road talking about nothing but the president’s dick. Not that I haven’t tried to change the subject. Valiantly, if I say so myself, I keep trying to point out that with all due respect to the president’s private parts, we do have bigger problems in this country. No go. The media are just obsessed. Happily, the rest of the country is taking all this in stride, making useful distinctions to which the media are oblivious.
