by Molly Ivins
“People who try to work together and listen to one another instead of beating each other up are accused of being weak, not strong. The people that really score are the people that lay one good lick on you in the newspaper every day instead of the people that get up and go to work, never care if they’re on the evening news, never care if they’re in the paper, and just want to make a difference,” Clinton said.
Well, Ol’ One-Vote Bill has been through some rough fights recently, so I guess he’s entitled to wax a little sentimental about his halcyon days in Little Rock, when it was all for one and one for all, or so it seems to him in retrospect.
But I spent some time in Little Rock last year talking to Arkansas legislators about Clinton’s leadership style, and so far I’ve seen nothing that either surprises or disappoints me.
The best description I got of him came from a state senator who said, “He’s like one of those broad-bottomed children’s toys that when you tump it over, it pops back up. No matter how many times you push it down, it pops right back up again. That’s Clinton. We reject one of his plans, and he comes right back at us saying, ‘OK, then, why don’t we try to do it another way?’ ”
I liked the sound of it then, and I still do. This is not the truly artful, Machiavellian arm-twisting and screw-tightening many of us were raised to admire in politics.
Let me tell you a possibly apocryphal Lyndon Johnson story. Supposedly it was late in Johnson’s presidency, and the city of Wichita Falls had done dog-all about integrating its schools, not a move. So one day, Lyndon phones the mayor of the Falls and says, Tom, do y’all really want to keep Sheppard (the local air force base)?
Of course, Mr. President, we certainly do, said the mayor.
Schools. Integration. Tomorrow, said Lyndon, and hung up. And the next day, they integrated the schools.
Now I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s told admiringly by people who like to see political power wielded with a heavy hand in a good cause. But those of you who recall the dark side of Lyndon’s use of power (the reigning authority on the dark side is Robert Caro, two volumes so far) will also remember that we used to yearn for a better way to do things. For lack of a better description, we thought it would be nice if someone tried democracy for a change.
Lyndon, who liked to put people in a vise and twist till they screamed, used to say in public, “Let us reason together.” In private, what he said was, “When you’ve got their peckers in your pocket, their hearts and minds will follow.”
Bill Clinton actually believes in getting people to reason together, reach a consensus on a good plan, and then go forward.
Sometimes these different ways of using power are described in gender terms. Ann Richards says one of her frustrations with the Texas Legislature is that boys are taught from early on to win—and when someone wins, someone else loses. Richards thinks girls are socialized to find win/win solutions. My favorite example is what any smart mom does when there are two kids and one cookie. The first kid gets to divide the cookie, and the second kid gets first pick of the halves. You can generally count on the moms of the world to find solutions where nobody loses.
To my mind, while Clinton is not batting a thousand (he’s barely batting .500), he deserves bonus points for taking on the toughest problems. We’re looking at twelve years’ worth of domestic problems that have been allowed to fester without action, and he’s the spoon that’s stirring the pot in Washington. He apparently just never counted on whatever is in that pot in Washington becoming more like cement than soup.
So Clinton’s plans have been tumped over a couple of times now. The last thing we need is for him to start feeling sorry for himself. What we need and what he needs to do is pop back up again and try to find another way to get it done.
I’m sure Vince Foster’s suicide made Washington look a lot darker to Clinton, but if I’m right that his greatest strength is persistence, he’ll be back.
And those of us who always yearned to see power used in less coercive ways need to quit describing the president as “weak” because he doesn’t club people over the head instead of getting them to reason together. The fight Clinton faces on health care is going to make the budget fight look like patty-cake. The amount of money being spent by the forces that find the status quo quite profitable, thank you, is staggering. My money’s still on Clinton to find a way to at least start to fix this mess.
August 1993
The First Year
ATLANTA — Having come to Atlanta for one of those “First Year of the Clinton Presidency” thumb-sucking sessions, I offered my own profession-centric view of the world by focusing on Clinton and the media. I felt obliged to review the record for this august occasion, and what’s depressing is that there’s so much evidence to support what I already thought: This president is getting trashed.
As an opinion writer who spent twelve years being generally unhappy with the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, I consider myself an expert on trashing presidents. I once wrote an entire column on the subject of how to describe the Reagan quality that was then politely referred to as his being “disengaged.”
“So dumb if you put his brains in a bumblebee, it would fly backwards” was one of my offerings. And Bush inspired several unkind reflections on my part; his inability to express himself clearly in the English language was fodder for many a column. How I miss him.
But I think you’ll agree that there is a qualitative difference between wondering what Bush actually meant when he said something incomprehensible and a radio talk-show host telling jokes about Hillary Rodham Clinton performing oral sex. I think we have a problem here, folks.
The difference between the way Bill Clinton has been treated by the press in his first year and the way Reagan and Bush were treated is not a matter of one’s political perspective. By now, there are several media studies comparing exactly the same story—“President makes major policy proposal” or “President signs bill”—and the wildly different treatment that Clinton has received.
On the theory that the press is always sycophantic toward someone who has come in with a big electoral majority—at least for a while—I went back to our last minority president, Richard Nixon. The exit polls in ’92 showed that had Ross Perot not been in the race, his vote would have split evenly between Bush and Clinton, leaving Clinton with a clear majority. When Nixon was first elected in ’68, the situation was far muddier: The George Wallace vote was also a Robert Kennedy vote, one of those populist phenomena that always confound pollsters. Of course, the country was in turmoil after ’68, the Year Everything Happened. Opposition to the war actually escalated in ’69, Nixon’s first year in office, but it was not yet considered Nixon’s war, so the vituperation was not aimed at him. Press and popular opinion were to give the guy a chance.
Somewhat closer to the mark is the first year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Although Carter was cut far more slack than Clinton, who has been under steady and very heavy media fire since before his inauguration, there were undercurrents of the same vein of attack.
“This guy is from outside Washington; he doesn’t understand how things work here; he’s from a small, Southern, podunk state; he has white-trash relatives, etc.” Perhaps the most significant difference between media attacks on Carter and Clinton is that Carter appeared to be more vulnerable to them than Clinton does. Carter always looked as though he were in pain, whereas Clinton appears to be actually enjoying himself, at least some of the time.
There are a number of psychobabble theories to account for the media’s negativity toward Clinton. One is that Clinton is not a father figure; he’s a brother figure and so much safer to attack. One is that the Washington press corps is trying to make up for its lamentable performance in the eighties (missed the savings and loan story, missed the Housing and Urban Development scandal, missed Iran-contra) by getting tough with Clinton. Another is that Clinton early on declared that he would not be a captive of the Washington press corps. He wou
ld go over its head directly to the people on talk shows and in town meetings. And so it decided to show him who needed whom in this town. And so on and so forth.
One of the alternative theories is that neither Clinton nor the media are at fault. They are both part of a political climate that has become so polarized and so paralyzed that no one talks about how to fix anything anymore.
As a recent minor example of what happens to Clinton with the media, the big Washington story a few weeks ago was that the administration had decided to concentrate on getting health-care reform passed this year. Except that instead of being about getting health-care reform passed, the story immediately became that Clinton was dropping the ball, breaking his promise and letting slide . . . welfare reform.
Now, Superman couldn’t get two bills that size through Congress in one year, and it is clear to anyone who has looked at these problems that health-care reform is the key to welfare reform. What constantly happens to women on welfare is that they go out, get a job, and start making it on their own, and then one of the kids gets sick. And the only way they can afford a doctor is to go back on welfare. Ergo, you do health-care reform before you do welfare reform. This is not rocket science.
Exactly why the media have recently decided that a nonbreaking story (see The New York Times, August 1992) about an Arkansas S&L is now a story—the same media that ignored the S&L disaster during the eighties because Donald Trump was so much more interesting—is beyond me. I am a great believer in thorough research on politicians who make money while holding public office. Those who lose money and then fail to deduct it on their income taxes strike me as a bit less of a menace to the public at large than, say, Lyndon B. Johnson.
One of the many theories about all this is that Clinton is a victim of “changing standards.” JFK could womanize; Clinton can’t. Reagan could get away with having his California kitchen cabinet make him rich; Clinton can’t have any questionable friends in Arkansas. And on the whole, aren’t we a better nation for insisting that our public figures retroactively meet heretofore undreamed-of standards of purity? (While the media themselves, of course, are lowering their standards considerably about what’s fit to print.)
I don’t think so. Bobby Ray Inman might not have made a good secretary of defense because he’s a classic military-industrial-complex graduate, not to mention his spook background, not to mention his less-than-impressive private-industry record. But he’s right that making the housecleaner’s Social Security payment a make-or-break issue is silly.
More than the petty list of specific transgressions (recall the tantrums when the Clinton people fired some folks in the White House travel office) is the cumulative level of cynicism and sourness that this kind of coverage has achieved. Beyond that lies a far more vicious climate of actual hate and contempt fostered by talk radio.
Clinton is a very intelligent man; he is extremely knowledgeable about both state and federal government and how they fit together. He has lots of ideas about how to fix things and is quite flexible about adapting his ideas to take account of other people’s ideas and problems. He genuinely likes people. He’s not mean, he’s not autocratic, and he’s not paranoid yet. The media have yet to give him the benefit of the doubt on anything.
January 1994
Whitewater
I AM WORKING WOMANFULLY on the Whitewater scandal. I’m going to get a grip on it any day now. One of my secret vanities as a journalist is that I’m nonpartisan about ethical lapses, a veritable Ahab, I like to think, in relentless pursuit of do-badders of any persuasion.
I pride myself on the roster of Democrats and/or liberals I have roasted, toasted, and basted on matters both fiscal and moral: Lyndon Johnson, former House Speaker Jim Wright, Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, former attorney general Jim Mattox, former Texas House Speaker Gib Lewis, etc., etc.
It’s just that every time I see Senator Al D’Amato waxing indignant about Whitewater, I start laughing. You have to cut me some slack on this: I used to work for The New York Times, where I covered D’Amato, who is one of the most awful weasels I ever ran across. Believe me, if you know Al D’Amato, watching him wax indignant about an ethical question is comic beyond all hope of redemption.
Nevertheless—operating on the theory that with all this horsepuckey around, there’s bound to be a pony here somewhere—I have been studying Whitewater. Here’s the deal:
Sixteen years ago—possibly on a cold, dark night—Bill and Hillary Clinton invested in a real estate deal that didn’t pan out, lost about $60,000, and failed to take a deduction for the loss on their income taxes. So far, I fail to ignite. Like Queen Victoria, I am not amused by politicians who make money while holding public office, but I’ve never had to take a stand on a politician who lost money and failed to take a deduction before. Hillary Clinton later got shrewder about tax deductions, even taking off for donating Bill’s old underwear to the Salvation Army, but that is apparently not part of the current complaint.
There follows the usual tangled tale of how the Clintons’ partner in the real estate deal, James McDougal, owns this savings and loan called Madison Guaranty that gets into the usual S&L trouble. At which point there’s the usual conflict of interest because Hillary Clinton has been hired to represent Madison Guaranty for the usual $2K-a-month retainer, and among other legal work, she represents McDougal before a state bank regulator appointed by her husband. Further conflict-of-interest charges loom on account of Hillary Clinton’s being a partner in the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, which represented several banks and S&Ls and then later, as per usual, also represented the government in the liquidation of banks and S&Ls.
At the Washington end, we get a big flap-de-do because some Treasury officials briefed some White House officials on how the Resolution Trust Corporation’s examination of Madison Guaranty was coming along, and this is a big no-no because it might look like political pressure is being put on the RTC. Gawdawmighty, if there’s a virgin left at RTC, I’d like to know who it is—gee, no one there ever would have guessed that the White House had any interest in Madison Guaranty; it’s only been on the front pages for two years now.
The only truly distinguishing feature of the Madison Guaranty saga is how absolutely average it is. Notice that I am defending no one and nothing about it; I’m just telling you this story is as common as dirt. Talk about missing the forest for the tree. The Washington press corps has found itself a tree. Well, good on them. There just happens to be an entire darkling plain out there covered with the damn things.
Had the media bothered to cover the S&L scandal back when it was happening, this story would be considered a hopeless yawner. You think the Rose Law Firm looks funny on this? Try Akin, Gump in Dallas or any of dozens of other law firms in Texas alone. You think Texas looks strange on this? You should see some of the theft that was pulled off in California. You think the RTC might be questioned on its conduct of this case? The RTC should have been questioned, grilled, and bastinadoed years ago.
The Reagan administration set up the S&Ls to be looted in 1981. It was done, and then the very lawmakers who voted for the Garn–St. Germain bill, who took money from the S&L lobby, who pressured the regulators on behalf of their home-state contributors, had the nerve to set up an ethics investigation of five senators and call it quits. Except now, they want to make an example out of Madison Guaranty to get at the Clintons. Led by Al D’Amato.
Maybe it’s pathetic of me, but I’m still not a cynic. I actually hope that Representative Jim Leach, who has a damn decent record on S&Ls, will use his hearing to get at what was wrong with the system, not just Madison Guaranty. I think that if he and Representative Henry B. Gonzalez cooperated, the two of them could actually, finally, get after the whole forest and do a world of good in banking reform and regulation along the way.
I gave up on the tooth fairy and Al D’Amato a long time ago, but I still have faith in Leach and Henry B.
March 1994
No Decency
EXCUS
E ME, I must have a banana in my ear: I thought you said the Senate chaplain prayed for comfort for O. J. Simpson, including the line, “Whether he is innocent or guilty rests with our system of justice, but our hearts go out to him in his profound loss.”
While your faithful media mavens were busy re-re-re-hashing the Simpson case last week, the dollar fell to a post–World War II low in the world currency markets, which means that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates again, which means you’re going to get shafted again. Whenever the economic recovery threatens to become serious, they call in Dr. Greenspan, who promptly puts a halt to it in the name of fighting inflation. Inflation, you understand, benefits debtors and harms lenders—i.e., the banks. Banks before people, that’s Alan Greenspan’s motto.
Oh, and nuclear war in Korea was averted.
Also, the president was accused of murder. Nah, not the old Vince Foster rumors; this is some guy in Arkansas who supposedly had the goods on Bill Clinton’s sex life, and even though there is no evidence whatsoever, you can hear the president being accused of murder on a videotape being sold by the Reverend Jerry Falwell for forty bucks, plus $3 for shipping.