Who Let the Dogs In? (35 page)

When you are barely making it in this society, hanging on by your fingernails, with every unexpected expense a crisis, it matters which is the lesser of two evils.

I know it’s hard for young people to envision age or illness, or the sick feeling of frantic despair when your old wreck of a car finally dies (it always does this in traffic) and will not start again. People who work two and even three jobs to support their kids get so tired—you can’t imagine how tired—and guilt and depression and anxiety all pile on, too. The difference between Gore and Bush matters to those folks.

This is an old argument between radicals and liberals; sometimes I’m on one side, and sometimes I’m on the other. In the primaries, I vote to change the world; in November, I vote for a sliver more for programs that help the needy.

I do not believe that things have to get worse before they can get better. I think you will find that most mothers object to the idea that you would deliberately do something to make a child’s life worse in order to bring about some presumed greater good in the long run. I believe that the best can be the enemy of the better. I believe in taking half a loaf, or even a slice.

And how do we ever change the whole rotten system at that speed? Brick by brick, child by child, slowly, toward liberty and justice for all. The urgent, crucial need right now is to fix the money in politics. It can be done, it will be done, it is being done, and we will get better politics.

In Texas, we’ll vote for Nader and a perfect world. You swing-state progressives need to make the hard choice—but you’re not making it just for yourselves. Good luck to you all.

October 2000

America 2000

I
N
THE LONG VIEW
of history—always a consoling perspective at a time like this—the 2000 presidential campaign most likely will rank as a giant waste of time.

Our future depends on The Stuff They Wouldn’t Talk About—economic globalization, global warming, the spread of AIDS, the need for some social control of new technologies, and the corruption of our political system. Al and Tipper Gore’s big smooch got more ink.

Having set the proper tone of superiority here—it is now obligatory for journalists to drip disdain on the democratic process as we assist in deforming it—may I say that I’m mad as hell? Not only has this been a stupid campaign, but it has been a deceitful one.

Gore’s reputation as a fibber and an exaggerator is apparently set in stone—despite the fact that he never claimed to have invented the Internet (although he assisted at its creation), that he was in fact a model for the lead character in
Love Story
(the stiff), that he never claimed he had discovered Love Canal, and that he did in fact have to work hard on his father’s farm in Tennessee when he was a boy. That’s the way it goes in Medialand.

Meanwhile, Texans have been enjoying the surreal experience of discovering that we live in Paradise and that we owe it all to George W. Bush, the fifth-most-important official in the state.

Now, the fact is that our state has a rotten record and always has had a rotten record, and that’s a consequence of public policy here. We’re a low-tax, low-service state, so we rank poorly on everything that government does.

Our public health care stinks; our criminal justice system is deeply racist (not to mention that it encourages lawyers to catch up on much-needed sleep); and we have a few other problems that would curl hair in someplace like Iowa. Mostly, people here don’t much notice any of this, being used to it. And besides, we’re Texans, so we’re actually proud of it.

Then along comes this campaign, and suddenly our governor is telling the rest of the country that we lead the nation in education and that he personally is responsible for this astonishing turn of events; that everyone in Texas has full access to health care; that each prisoner we fry has a competent lawyer; that the governor himself led the fight for a strong Patients’ Bill of Rights; and that our air and water are crystal-clear under his environmentally friendly leadership.

(Actually, Bush never really made that last claim—he just says the other guy is lying when he says Texas is real polluted, even though it’s real polluted.)

When all this started, I used to tell people calmly: “Well, I think you ought to look at his record, because it’s pretty clear, and you can make up your mind from that.” Now I feel like standing out by the highway in the rain with a sign that says:
DON’T VOTE FOR GEORGE W. BUSH—HE’S NOT UP TO THE JOB.

I’m sorry—the man is inadequate. You cannot slide through life on your daddy’s name, turning in a poor performance in school and the military, and a distinctly questionable performance in the business world, loaf through a few years in baseball trading Sammy Sosa, and then tell outrageous lies about your part-time performance in a powerless job. This is silly.

One of the few truly eerie things about W. is his inability to admit that he did it all on luck. Lots of people are born lucky in life, but they’re not born blind to that fact. No one is asking him to feel guilty about it; awareness would suffice.

I’ve never found Bush ill-intentioned—just oblivious. In fact, I suspect that he’s rather easily touched by people with sadder lives than his own.

What Bush does not get is the connection between policy and results in real people’s lives. He really thinks we’d be better off if most of government was done by charities. He thinks that nice corporate polluters will volunteer to cut down on filth. I know he’s good at politics, but he is not interested in governing. It bores him; he has no attention span for it.

If this were just an election that was going to put a lightweight in the White House, I wouldn’t feel so bad. We can survive that. But I’m not sure that we can survive what comes with Bush, or more precisely, what’s behind him.

On November 2,
The Wall Street Journal
ran a rather chilling article about the Business-Industry Political Action Committee, “an organization dedicated to keeping Congress in pro-business hands.”

It was specifically about a congressional district in Kentucky where local and national business interests have organized to protect an incumbent who voted against the Patients’ Bill of Rights. That’s a simple fight: On one side you have the people, and on the other side you have the HMOs. So the HMOs are now buying that district.

Our political system is corrupted by money, and the only thing that George W. Bush wants to do about it is make it worse.

November 2000

Lord Help Us

G
OOD
GRIEF. HOLY COW.
Wow. And Lord help us.

I don’t know who wrote the script for this election, but it was so far over the top that the perp should be chucked out of the screenwriters’ guild.

Naturally, we can think of reasons to be chipper about the outcome. George W. Bush is not a mean man, and he is not a nincompoop. This may strike you as faint praise, but media expectations about Bush have been so low that it sometimes seems necessary to report, “Look, he can jump over a matchbox.”

Besides, he has that same daffy inability to get a grip on the English language that his father has, thus providing glorious material for political humorists.

I happen to think that Bush is quite good at the political end of politics—at holding together a disparate coalition, at reaching out to unlikely suspects, and at making himself generally liked. There is much talk of a national-unity kind of government, rather like the one that Ehud Barak is trying to create in Israel. (Put a Democrat or two in the cabinet.)

The trouble is, when you win a close race, you owe all the members of your coalition big-time. You can’t say to the National Rifle Association or the Confederation of Roof Manufacturers, “Go take a leap—we could have won without you.” You pretty much have to say, “So what do you want?”

The only reason to be down about a Bush presidency is the money. We may well have just lost our last shot for a very long time at getting anything done about the money in politics. Unless John McCain makes fixing soft money the price of his participation—and the Bushies may not want him on the inside—we’re not going to see campaign finance reform.

A House led by Tom DeLay and Dick Armey and a Senate led by Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell are not going to commit public campaign financing. Business just outspent labor in this election by more than 15 to 1, and the business folks ran the table, as they say in pool. They took it all.

And that means they’re going to be even more difficult to dislodge next time, because it’s harder to beat incumbents.

So it really will have to get worse before it gets better, as radicals often argue—and if the special interests lose their heads and go into a greed frenzy, as they did with tax cuts at the beginning of the Reagan years, that’s what’s going to happen. We already have a political system painfully close to legalized bribery, and it could get worse.

Because Bush is not interested in public policy—it notoriously bores him—what we’ve gotten in Texas is staff-driven policy. Texas doesn’t have a cabinet form of executive; in Washington, Bush could theoretically put a team of Republican all-stars in the cabinet and govern that way, which might work out quite well.

There is still some question in my mind as to just how ideological Bush actually is. Some of Bush’s early appointments as governor, especially the trio of pollution-loving watchdogs he put in at the state environmental protection agency, were quite eye-popping. But we’ve rarely seen hard-edged ideology from him in recent years, and he certainly ran well toward the center, and indeed ran away from the more right-wing parts of his own record.

All of which indicates that he’s quite a fast learner. When you approve of a politician, this is known as flexibility; when you don’t, it’s called lack of principle—but in fact, politics requires accommodation. I’d be a lot more worried about Bush if he hadn’t demonstrated flexibility.

If Bush has a mandate, it is to be a uniter and not a divider, to work with Democrats as well as Republicans and to restore civility in Washington. True story: In 1992, a governor named Bill Clinton told me that he thought the main reason he would be a good president was because he had been able to work well with Republicans in Arkansas.

May Bush have better luck.

November 2000

Blushing for Bush II