Clinton & Me

by Michael Graham

  My Grandpa, the Nazi

  * * *

  February 1996

  My grandfather is an FDR, JFK, AFL-CIO, yellow-dog Democrat. His politics were born in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, hardened under fire on the battlefields of France and set in stone during the postwar labor movement.

  And he likes Pat Buchanan.

  My grandfather agrees with Pat on all the big stuff. A longtime union activist in southern California, he thinks we make it too easy to import foreign goods and export American jobs. He thinks it’s ridiculous that America can’t control its own borders, and while living in Los Angeles, he saw firsthand the real-life effects of illegal immigration on wages, taxes and crime. On social issues, Grandpa is less doctrinaire than Patrick J., but the idea that he—an Okie who fought West Coast bigotry as a youth—would have to stand in a quota line to get a job is unthinkable.

  Oh, there’s much about Pat Buchanan he doesn’t like, particularly the part where Pat calls himself a Republican (a word my grandfather rarely utters unless preceded by a prayerful invocation of God’s damnation). But even though his motto is “Better RIP than GOP,” my grandfather believes Pat Buchanan has some worthwhile ideas. Buchanan is addressing issues my grandpa cares about; he’s promoting a vision of America my grandfather can understand and, in many cases, support.

  Imagine my grandfather’s surprise to discover he has become a Nazi.

  Now, my grandpa knows Nazis. He saw quite a few of them in World War II—mostly down the barrel of a rifle. Listening to the Chernobylic reaction to Pat Buchanan coming from the media mainstream, Grandpa has begun to wonder if the panzers aren’t pushing toward our borders at this very minute.

  In the past two weeks, Pat Buchanan has been called every insulting label I’ve ever heard used to describe a politician: Hitler, racist, sexist, fascist, anarchist, and—believe it or not—liberal. The editorial page panic is so complete that a newspaper labeling him “Mussolini made in America” seemed to be softening its position. Columnists are rolling through a veritable right-wing Roget’s of famous dictators, from “Patrick Pinochet” to “the Idi Amin of the American right.”

  These labels—hilarious in their hysteria but angering in their arrogance—are applied with equal venom by Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative. Even limp-wristed commentators who once lacked the courage to denounce Louis Farrakhan have suddenly grown cultural cojones. They’ve filled their public comments with language violent enough to start a fistfight at an Amish wedding.

  Watching, reading and listening is my grandfather.

  He listens as Buchanan’s immigration policy is described as “fascist,” and wonders why. After all, Pat Buchanan opposes illegal immigration (do his detractors support it?) and wants to temporarily end legal immigration. We currently have limited immigration, by the way, under a plan enforced by the Clinton administration. So where’s the editorial cartoon of a goose-stepping Hillary?

  Now, you may not agree with Buchanan’s approach (I don’t), but how is it racist? It’s not like Pat wants to end immigration for everyone except Norwegian virgins or members of the Von Trapp family. His plan affects England and Ireland the same as Ethiopia and India. He may be right, he may be wrong. But a Nazi?

  And, my grandfather wants to know, what is so evil about Buchanan’s trade policy? Once again, Buchanan’s plan is nothing novel. He believes America should have a deal with developed nations such as Canada, Germany and Japan that’s different from the one we have with lesser-developed, lower-wage nations such as Mexico, Poland and China. This is radical? This is extreme?

  If so, then Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are extremists. We already have a byzantine collection of tariffs, quotas and trade incentives that differ from country to country. If Buchanan were proposing to trade only with “our Aryan brothers” or if he wanted to ban trade with any nation whose name started with a B, I would understand the anger.

  I am a devout free-trader who thinks Pat’s policies would be an economic disaster, but I’m not mad at him about it, any more than I’m mad at Ralph Nader or Ross Perot. The intemperance, intolerance and downright nastiness of the attack on Buchanan is mystifying.

  It is also dangerous. The double-barreled media attack on Pat Buchanan spreads its shot onto the earnest Americans who hear Buchanan giving voice to the questions and concerns they struggle with every day. These are people like my grandfather, people who—like Buchanan—may be right or wrong, but who are asking serious questions about our nation’s future. Their questions are inspired not by hate but by concern, concern about a future they don’t understand.

  The single-minded destruction of Buchanan will send a message to them as well, a message that they must remain silent, that their ideas are not allowed in our national discussion.

  No, my grandfather will never vote Republican—sorry, Pat. But will he bother to vote at all? Why should he, when an entire agenda of issues he cares about are pushed off the table as “fascist”?

  What he has seen during this campaign is a demonstration of the unity of purpose of the American media-political complex, a small but elite group of national figures who will defend at any cost their unchallenged status as rulers of the national conversation. They demand conformity of ideas, subservience of individuality and unquestioning submission to their party philosophy. The unorthodox, including Patrick J. Buchanan, cannot merely be challenged—it must be destroyed.

  That’s funny. The Nazis used to do the same thing.

  Clinton and Me, Part Two

  * * *

  January 1995

  Two years ago, the same week William Jefferson Clinton was sworn in as head of our national family, I became a father. One year later, I wrote a column, “Clinton and Me,” in which I noted the frightening similarities in our enthusiastic but inept efforts to execute the duties of our new offices. I ended my article with a lighthearted reference to “the terrible twos.”

  Ha, ha.

  If it helps, Mr. President, there is an American who had an even bumpier ride in 1994 than you did.

  Sure, we got off to a good start. Like the president, I had the Big Mo coming into the new year, and I thought 1994 was going to be pretty good. The Comeback Kid had health care all but wrapped up in Washington, while my wife and I had reached agreement on a socially progressive budget, with heavy subsidies of such vital programs as the Tanning Salon Entitlement and Aid to Moms Who Might Eat Their Young If You Don’t Get a Sitter Friday Night.

  My wife, like yours, Mr. President, took a high-profile role in my administration as well, particularly on the divisive social issue of child discipline. Unfortunately, the resulting plan resembled the HillaryCare scheme in that it worked great until you actually used it. When, for example, my son Mencken discovered his ability to “express himself” through the destruction of property and unorthodox distribution of bodily wastes (we suspect he received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts), my wife and I were completely unprepared.

  She suddenly revealed a hidden liberal agenda, fighting my efforts at discipline and adding her maiden name to all family correspondence. Meanwhile, I clung to my more conservative principles and advocated a Singaporean model of social justice: beating the kid’s brains in.

  This division in our leadership left an opening for Mencken, who, like the House Republicans, was a master of exploiting weakness. When I discovered him standing over the commode holding the cord of my electric razor (the rest had been Roto-Rootered), he rushed past me and into the sympathetic arms of his mother. When he sensed she was on the verge of violence, he whipped up a few crocodile tears and clung to my leg. It was transparent political rhetoric, but somehow I couldn’t resist.

  It was Gerber gridlock, pure and simple.

  Eventually, it became clear that my son considered my commands mere suggestions, and not particularly worthwhile suggestions at that. If I said, “Put it down,” he picked it up. If I said, “Go left,” he went right. My administration was rudderless, drift
ing. My message wasn’t penetrating.

  Everyone had suggestions as to how we should repair our damaged public image, though we never went as far as you, Mr. President, inviting a psychic and motivational speaker to the White House. I was urged by my father to govern from the right (“Spare the rod and spoil the child! You got to beat some sense into ’em”). My mother counseled a more liberal approach (“He’s just a baby—he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Besides, you can always get another cat”).

  Then came the disastrous autumn. Kooks were shooting at the White House, and I was robbed at gunpoint in my driveway. Our poll numbers were plummeting, our wives were on the warpath, and just when it seemed it couldn’t get any worse . . . whammo! A chubby-cheeked interloper suddenly stole the limelight and began pushing a radical program of infantile self-promotion.

  Newt, meet Alex.

  Actually, it’s Alexandra. For the second time in less than twenty months, my wife and I had a baby—the ultimate October surprise.

  And talk about dominating the media! Talk about hogging the camera! Like Speaker Gingrich, little Alex can’t belch without making headlines. I’m trying to get the family focused on long-term issues (like the need for my wife to be sterilized) and instead the baby-hungry paparazzi spend all day with their heads in the crib, observing every move of my new House leader.

  In fact, listening to your pleading tones this past year, Mr. President, I heard a frighteningly familiar sound: the whining voice of a man realizing that no one is paying any attention to what he is saying. Our vocabulary in this second year of parenthood has consisted largely of sighs of frustration and occasional bursts of anger. Meanwhile, no one was listening.

  Well, Mr. President, no one said this would be easy. And, in fact, there have been some fun moments . . . well, for me, anyway. I have heard it said that being president is the most demanding, frustrating, punishing job in the world, that every president was abused, unappreciated and generally worn plumb out. Yet they all agree that it was the most rewarding part of their careers.

  After two years as a father, I know the feeling. Happy birthday, Mencken, and good luck again, Mr. President.

  Once again, we’re going to need it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  The Era of Big Government Is Over

  Brother Dearest

  * * *

  July 1996

  As Bill Clinton’s picayune presidency continues to shrink, his poll numbers expand to nearly gargantuan proportions.

  Meanwhile, Americans nostalgic for leadership watch in dismay as President Clinton moves easily from meaningless promises of the impossible (“We shall bring this terrorism to an end”) to breathless pronouncements over the irrelevant (“We shall have a new 911 phone system”). New York Times writer Maureen Dowd has dubbed Clinton “President Pothole.” She notes with great insight that the president’s reelection agenda more closely resembles that of someone running for alderman than the platform of someone who wants to be leader of the free world.

  Listening to the effluvia floating from the White House, one would never know that there are American troops in Bosnia or that our nation’s economic expansion is one of the slowest since World War II. What care we if our schools are failing or if the president’s drug policy is to get drugs off the streets and into the White House?

  But if you’re worried about little Johnny watching too much Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, President Clinton is on the job.

  On Monday, President Clinton announced a “landmark” agreement with television broadcasters to air at least three hours a week of educational programs for children. Try to imagine George Washington reaching an agreement with colonial newspapers to print more high-quality cartoons, and the decline of the modern presidency comes clearly into focus.

  But this is what big-government liberals do when the era of big government is over. For Bill Clinton, big government is dead, but Big Brother is alive and well.

  This is the president who signed into law a measure censoring the Internet so tightly that testimony from lawsuits in which he is personally involved may not be legally transmitted on the Web. This is the president who insists that media moguls stop spreading violence and indecency in the entertainment industry but who smiles as they spread more than $450,000 into his various campaign coffers.

  And this is the president who wants the federal government to regulate the content of commercial television programs to make sure they’re “good.” Yikes!

  Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Pat Robertson lose his race for the White House?

  The theory of big-L liberalism (the Clintons’ brand) is that people ought to be good, and if they won’t, the government should make them. So if those bad ol’ TV networks don’t put enough educational programs on the air, the government will force them to do it by threatening to take away their licenses.

  There, that was easy. Now, what about those publishers who don’t print enough Clinton-friendly novels?

  President Clinton and the Niceness Nazis would have a point if the problem were the lack of good shows. But in fact there are just as many quality kids’ shows as kids will stand, and that ain’t many.

  Mandating three hours a week of good children’s television (when you figure out what that is, please call the FCC) only solves the picayune problem of broadcasting government-approved programs. Getting young citizens to sit still and watch them is the real trick.

  We already have a government-run TV network with twenty-four hours of official, government-sanctioned programming every day. Much of it is for children, real quality stuff such as Barney and Teletubbies.

  What’s worse is that the problem of trashy TV and the decline of family fare is one the market has already solved. New family-friendly TV networks are springing up on cable, satellite networks, the Internet and everywhere else. TV networks love bragging about “family hour” and the unwatchable, whitewashed drivel they are producing for it.

  Just a note to the Clintons: The secret to programming TV isn’t ranting—it’s ratings.

  The reaction of the general public to annoying initiatives such as the president’s is usually a shrug: “So it won’t make kids’ TV any better, so what? What harm can it do?”

  And if you don’t count little things like poking holes in the First Amendment or destroying the liberty of a few individual TV station owners, you’re right. The costs are small, the effects negligible.

  Just about the right size, in fact, for an incredible shrinking president.

  Guru to You, Too

  * * *

  June 1996

  Caricatured as Hillary’s New Age Svengali, Jean Houston offers myths and mantras that may seem strange, but are right in the baby-boom mainstream.

  —Newsweek

  There was a moment during the Filegate hearings when the head of security in the White House personnel office announced that he had never actually been hired, and I looked up from the TV set and thought: “Yes, there is a God.”

  In these heady days, with Clinton apparatchiks waking each morning intent upon humiliating themselves on national television, it is tempting to believe that a divine hand is guiding their ill fortune. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that mere mortals are capable of this level of incompetence without help from the Great Beyond.

  Alas, I am an infidel and must lay the daily sins of stupidity at the feet of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. Watching these two obviously intelligent and politically savvy operators immolate themselves in their own hubris is not a pleasant sight, even for a right-wing wacko like me. I would like to believe there is some divine purpose to their incompetence, but I cannot in good conscience blame God for the Clinton White House.

  He didn’t vote for them—we did.

  Instead of thinking of the presidential buffoons as God’s punishment, I think of them as the natural result of democracy. Looking around at America, it seems we have precisely the First Family that we deserve.

  The Clintons live in the paradoxe
s that plague the American character: They are simultaneously ethically flaccid and morally rigid, finding easy ways to work around their own ethics while stridently demanding good clean livin’ from the rest of us.

  The Clintons are also wildly ambitious, yet unrelenting in their pursuit of public policies to punish those who achieve. And—the most annoying paradox to me personally—Bill and Hillary Clinton are both thoroughly secular and untiringly religious.

  For a couple of world-weary baby boomers, President and Mrs. Clinton have a breathtakingly metaphysical naiveté: They’ll believe in just about anything—even themselves.

  It’s been interesting to watch the GLUMs (godless liberal media types) cover the story of “Hillary’s Rasputin,” Dr. Jean Houston. Reporters who have never had a kind word for any religious sensibilities trumpet Mrs. Clinton’s “deeply held Methodist faith”—demonstrating at once their willingness to suck up to the First Lady and their complete lack of knowledge concerning modern-day Methodism.

  A Methodist service inspires all the religious fervor of a Rotary Club luncheon—the only difference being that the Rotarians occasionally read from the Bible. A devout Methodist is almost as hard to imagine as a Quaker terrorist.

  At the same time, the press has gone to great lengths to note that Mrs. Clinton’s meetings with the self-declared “doctor” (she reportedly lied on her resume about having a doctorate from Columbia University) were not séances or spiritualism. “Dr.” Houston is not a psychic, but rather a “sacred psychologist,” we are told pointedly.

  The conclusion being that while Mrs. Clinton is devoutly religious and imbued with the sacred, it’s not like she actually believes in God.