Who Let the Dogs In? (9 page)
Read Who Let the Dogs In? Online
Authors: Molly Ivins
Now we hear much sober analysis and hand-wringing over the fact that inner-city residents just don’t want to work. Really? What were those three thousand people in a Chicago ghetto doing last winter, lined up in the freezing cold hours before dawn to apply for a couple of hundred good jobs at a new hotel? Why is it that every year in Harlem, when the applications open to get summer jobs provided by the Business Alliance, hundreds of teenagers line up on the sidewalk twenty-four and even forty-eight hours in advance to make sure their applications get considered?
It is one of those odd little facts of life that poor people work harder than rich people. People who dig ditches and scrub floors and pick crops put in longer hours at backbreaking labor than dentists and stockbrokers, that’s all—as any college kid who’s ever worked summer labor will tell you.
I like getting lectures on values and hard work from Dan Quayle, who recently charged the taxpayers $27,000 for a golfing weekend (took the company plane). I think Dan Quayle knows a lot about values. For example, frat-boy Quayle made lousy grades in college, but he got into law school anyway by using family pull to take a slot reserved for a minority student on scholarship. He supported the war in Vietnam, thought it was a fine war; he just thought somebody else should fight it, and that’s why he used family pull to get into the Indiana National Guard, so he wouldn’t have to go. As Dan Quayle told us during his 1988 debate with Lloyd Bentsen, his grandma used to tell him, “Dan, you can grow up to be anything you want to be.” His grandmother was Mrs. Martha Pulliam, one of the richest women in the country, owner of several newspapers, part of a very powerful and influential family. So you see, Dan Quayle is in a position to tell us all about what’s wrong with moral values in the ghettos and the barrios; and all about how any kid in this country can grow up to be anything he wants to be, as long as he works hard and gets good grades in college and serves his country and joins the same fraternity as George Bush and keeps up his golf game at the taxpayers’ expense.
Dan, shut up.
May 1992
T
HERE
IS NO
shortage of symptoms that Things Are Going to Hell, so it’s a bit like bringing heat to Houston to point out one more. Still, this is such a vacuous little quirk, I’m distressed by it. Two political books have come out this spring, and the mediocre one is doing quite well while the superb one is getting little attention. Not an unusual tale in publishing, but still worth decrying, methinks.
On display everywhere, with a first printing of 750,000, on the bestseller lists, is Dan Quayle’s woodenly written, self-justifying compendium of twaddle called
Standing Firm.
Even the little touches of malice aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Everyone’s to blame but Quayle for all his problems.
While Quayle was veep, I was often asked if the press wasn’t treating him unfairly. I said I’d be inclined to agree, except that I’d covered him during the ’88 campaign and found him dumber than advertised. I privately thought he was dumb to a point that was alarming. Now Quayle informs us that wasn’t him in ’88—he knows he was awful, but his handlers made him do it. I’m sorry, but there was no way to know that at the time. And that first impression did stick.
On the strength of this book, I’d say Quayle isn’t as dumb as advertised, and he has a legitimate grievance, having been publicly ridiculed as a borderline moron for years. What doesn’t change is one’s sense of his limitations. As Peter De Vries once observed of a character, “Deep down, he’s shallow.” Quayle is the quintessential suburbanite whose world is divided into “us”—who play golf at the country club, vote Republican, love our families, go to church, and are mighty white—and “them”—who by implication not only don’t believe in God or love their families but who he actually claims “treat people worse” than conservatives.
Quayle quotes as unfair what seems to me a genuinely perceptive description of him by George Will: “that the conservatism I’d demonstrated was less a creed than ‘an absorbed climate of opinion, absorbed in a golf cart.’ ” I suspect you’ll wind up agreeing with Will if you read this book. The most amazing part is Quayle’s heated defense of his service in the National Guard on the grounds that he wasn’t given any special treatment to get in; he shows not the faintest awareness that the entire war was fought on a class basis. The book does contain a few giggles; my favorite is the description of “Lee Kuan Yew, an impressive public figure, a true geopolitical thinker.” That’s Lee Kuan Yew, the dictator of Singapore.
Quayle’s book is in astonishing contrast to Madeleine Kunin’s memoir,
Living a Political Life.
Kunin served in the Legislature and then as lieutenant governor and then governor of Vermont for six years before bowing out. Her book is infinitely more reflective than Quayle’s, about both government and political life, and also stands in striking contrast to Quayle’s placid, imperturbable good opinion of himself. If you want to study how much difference being an economically comfortable white male makes in the American psyche, compare these two books. Kunin suffered agonies of self-doubt, constantly questioned herself as to whether she was doing the right thing, and dealt constantly with the challenge of being female in a male world.
“It was shocking to me to see how susceptible I continued to be to that most chronic symptom of female insecurity: feeling like a fraud,” writes the woman who was three times elected to the highest office in her state. She writes beautifully about the seductive nature of power, the struggle to keep her sense of self and of others free from the effects of power.
Compared with Kunin, Quayle still looks like a shallow frat boy. This is the first book written by an American woman who has succeeded in politics, and its searing honesty sets an extraordinarily high standard for the new genre. I’d also recommend it to anyone who has ever considered running for office at any level. It’s as realistic an account of the troubles and rewards as I’ve ever come across.
May 1994
O
N
THE CLINTON BUS, CORSICANA, TEX.
— It is a show, and a good one at that. I’d recommend it for everyone, regardless of political persuasion, who enjoys vintage American politics.
Our political life is now so dominated by television that it’s wonderfully pleasant to be able to wander down to the courthouse—or the mall—in your own hometown and listen to the guy who wants to be president while he’s out there sweating in the sun with everyone else.
That the entire show is carefully orchestrated for television is just one of the facts of contemporary life.
Clinton is an exceptionally good campaigner. I make this observation in the same spirit in which one would note that Joe Montana is an artist on the football field, even if one were a Cowboys fan. What is, is. The “liberal media” is not inventing Bill Clinton.
A couple of notable things about Clinton as a campaigner: His stamina is incredible, and he tends to get stronger as the day goes on. He blends gentle ridicule of the whole Bush era with a “We can do it” pitch that is actually classic Reagan—we’re the optimists; they’re the pessimists.
He has a standard litany of what he plans to do if elected. To my surprise, the one that crowds like most is the national service idea. Clinton wants to set up a national college trust fund, so any American can get a loan to go to college. Then, he emphasizes, the student will have to pay back the loan, either with a small percentage of his or her earnings after graduation or by giving two years to public service—as a teacher, as a cop, working with inner-city kids, helping old folks. As the list goes on, the applause swells. “We can rebuild this country, we can save our cities, we can do it, we can!”
Clinton and Al Gore have a lot of material to work with, given George Bush’s record, his dingbat mode, and his latest goofy proposals. Both men needle the president constantly and are rapidly turning the “family values” convention to their own advantage. Meanwhile, the Bush team, now under Jim Baker, is already quicker at responding and has now dropped family values.
Bush probably made a mistake when he told the evangelical crowd in Dallas last weekend that the Democrats left G-O-D out of their platform (that was before Baker nixed “family values”). An Episcopalian really should know better than to try to out-Bible a couple of Baptist boys. Both Clinton and Gore can quote Scripture to a faretheewell, but the ever-magisterial Barbara Jordan, daughter of a Baptist preacher, used it most witheringly at the enormous rally in Austin. “Everyone who calleth to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will not get in. Who will get in? Those who do the Lord’s work.”
Much of the Texas tour, viewed as a whole, is an exercise in inoculation.
The Clinton campaign fully expects Bush to go on television with massive negative ad buys. In Texas, two obvious targets are guns and gays—if past Republican performance is a reliable indicator, the gay-bashing will be done below radar, on radio.
Clinton tried to defuse the gun issue (he supports the Brady bill, the seven-day hold on gun purchases) by citing Ronald Reagan’s support for the Brady bill and touts it as a common-sense measure to help law enforcement.
The Republicans’ Texas attack plan, entitled “September Storm,” contains a memorable wincer. The R’s refer to the political operatives with whom they plan to flood East Texas as “Stormtroopers”: You don’t have to be Jewish to flinch at that lack of historical sensitivity.
There are three qualities that make Clinton such an effective campaigner—energy, stamina, and joy. Of the politicians I have watched, he is most like Hubert Humphrey and Ralph Yarborough. He loves doing this—he gets energy from people.
A lot of politicians, Lloyd Bentsen, for example, move through crowds smiling and shaking, but the smile never reaches their eyes, and you can tell they’d much rather be back in Washington cutting deals with other powerful people. In his book
What It Takes: The Way to the White House,
writer Richard Ben Cramer suggests that Bush despises politics, considers it a dirty business, and consequently believes anything is permitted.
The different thing about Clinton is that he listens to people as he moves among them—Humphrey and Yarborough were always talking. Clinton listens and remembers and repeats the stories he hears.
I have read several of the poetic effusions produced by my journalistic colleagues about Clinton’s bus tours and laughed. On Thursday evening, in the late dusk, moving among the thousands gathered on the old suspension bridge over the Brazos in Waco, I realized why so many of us wax poetic about these scenes.
It’s not Clinton who’s so wonderful—it’s America.
August 1992
