by Molly Ivins
Even when he’s not being accused of murder, the prez just cannot get a break. All the charmers who gritched about his speaking at the D-day ceremonies on account of he had enough principle to stay out of the Vietnam War would, of course, have been the very same people gritching if Clinton hadn’t gone to Europe. I can hear Rush Limbaugh now: “How dare the president of the United States ignore this anniversary of our heroic landing in Normandy?”
Now Washington is all agog over Bob Woodward’s book The Agenda, which (a) reveals that Clinton has a temper and (b) supposedly reveals that he’s indecisive.
Now on the temper question, I have it on good authority that when he was informed that one of his aides had used a military chopper to get to a golf game, Clinton was so mad he nearly broke a chair by picking it up and slamming it on the floor. He further had several choice observations to make concerning the sea of problems he’s facing and how, on top of all that, this dag-nabberty-blabbit, adjectival-deleted residue of bovine digestion (or words to that effect) had taken a chopper to go golfing.
Has no one in Washington any sense of history? For impressive presidential temper tantrums, you had to have heard Lyndon B. Johnson in full fury. Upon being informed that one of his aides had been arrested for indecent conduct in a men’s room, LBJ turned the air so blue that Bird had to say, “Now, Lyndon.” And she was used to him. (To the Johnsons’ credit, they never abandoned the man or his family.)
As to Clinton’s indecisiveness, wouldn’t you think someone as smart as Woodward would realize that Clinton habitually agrees with whomever he’s talking to? This is a good way to save yourself a lot of unnecessary arguments; it doesn’t mean he can’t make up his mind. I watched him once during the ’92 campaign agreeing with a pod of advisers who told him not to mention race in Tyler, which was then in the throes of a nasty racial conflict. And then he agreed equally cordially with the advisers who told him that he had to address the question. He got off the bus still agreeing with everyone and proceeded to give, in its entirety, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which was the single best thing I’ve ever seen a politician do, except for the time Bobby Kennedy spoke to that crowd in Indianapolis the night King was killed.
I’m also sick of hearing that Clinton has no foreign policy or keeps changing it. Bosnia, Korea, Haiti—listen, I don’t want us to go jumping into any of these places with both feet. If Clinton wants to push and test and probe and check around on what support he can get and then pull back and then start an escalating boycott, hell, I think that’s just what he should do. You notice that none of these geniuses criticizing him has any good ideas on what to do in Haiti, because there are no good choices on Haiti. Einstein would be hard put to figure out which is the least horrible choice in Haiti.
After two years of listening to Limbaugh & Co. viciously attack his wife, insult his daughter, and constantly purvey lies, innuendo, invective, and propaganda, Clinton hit back last week, blasting these little creeps for their cynicism. So now his critics are criticizing him for that. Martha Gellhorn calls it “Trial by denunciation. Sentence by slander.” At long last, have they no decency?
June 1994
The Politician
HARTFORD, CONN. — It just never does come easy for Bill Clinton, does it? He lost money in a bad real estate deal in 1978, and they’re going to hang that around his neck till kingdom come.
I have to add that Clinton has brought much of his trouble on himself, and the reason I have to add that is because a law was passed about four years ago; you may not know this, but the law forbids any journalist from ever saying anything either sympathetic to or admiring about Clinton without immediately adding, “But . . . ” and then sticking in at least a little knife. We all obey this law religiously because anyone who breaks it will have his press pass removed or, worse, lose his cynicism stripes and stand convicted of being a sucker for spin.
It’s especially important that no journalist ever give Clinton credit for an ounce of sincerity because, you see, we know him to be a Politician to the Bone. So is everybody else we cover, but we have to be especially cynical about the ones who are good at it.
It’s true that Clinton has spent pretty much his whole life working to become president. Isn’t that an awful thing? We in the media never forget it. He had to work hard at it, too: alcoholic stepfather, mom a piece of work, all the education from scholarships. The only “real” job he ever had was teaching constitutional law; aside from that, it’s been politics all the way, and we all know how despicable that makes him, don’t we? I mean, all the guy ever wanted to do was public service, so he stays in his home state (and we certainly all feel free to dump on Arkansas these days) at $50K a year instead of taking his Yale law degree to some big-money state and making a zillion dollars doing mergers and acquisitions. That sure means we should all look at him with contempt, right?
The trouble with being president is that the only thing you can do once you get there is the best you can. And I for one think they all do. Even Lyndon B. Johnson, who led us so deep into the Big Muddy that we’re not out yet; even Richard M. Nixon, that poor paranoid expletive-deleted—I think they did the best they could.
And I’d say that Clinton’s best is not bad at all. He had a good run his first two years—cut the deficit in half before the Republicans took over, saying a balanced budget was the be-all and end-all of government. Clinton blew health-care reform, but the money out to beat him on that was like nothing ever seen before in American politics. And for the last year and a half, he’s staved off the worst of Newt Gingrich’s nutty “revolution,” which is just a take-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich scheme.
What amazes me is the level of vituperative hatred aimed at Bill and Hillary Clinton. A lot of people hated Johnson because of Vietnam and civil rights; a lot of people hated Nixon, I think, because he was so full of hate himself. But what this reminds me of is John F. Kennedy.
Most people have forgotten it, but there was a substantial amount of intense, almost insane hatred of Kennedy. I always thought it was a class thing; in addition to being born on third, Kennedy embodied that aristocratic ideal (you see it in the Peter Wimsey character) of making excellence look easy. You’re supposed to get a First at Oxford and play championship cricket all without appearing to work for it. With guys like Nixon, the sweat always shows.
But it doesn’t seem to me that Clinton ever plays the aristocrat; he was proud of his mom, whom many of our snobbier citizens took for something close to trailer trash. (I thought she was a darling, myself; I like people who know how to have fun.)
Slippery is a word often applied to Clinton, and I wonder if it’s because he’s bicultural in the odd way that educated Southerners often are. If you go to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, you pretty much learn to walk the walk and talk the talk common in those places. But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t really prefer to be eating barbecue in some joint back in the Piney Woods where no one cares which fork you use—or if you use one at all. It’s not a matter of being two-faced; it’s just being comfortable in two different worlds.
Clinton is an Arkansan, which an amazing number of sophisticated Washington reporters still think means being barefoot with a piece of straw in your mouth. Believe it or not, when George Bush was elected, there was a spate of alarmed articles about how “The Texans Are Coming,” as though a bunch of barbarians were about to be unleashed to spit and cuss in the genteel precincts of D.C.
I think that Clinton’s most salient traits as a politician are that he’s a listener, he’s a learner, and he’s a deal-maker. When I hear talk about how “dirty” he is or about how he is, as one irate caller said, “the most corrupt man ever to occupy the White House” (may you rest in peace, Warren Harding), I’m at a loss to explain where the hate comes from.
June 1994
Power Town
WASHINGTON, D.C. — I believe one should never pass up an opportunity to berate the Washington press corps, and so I did the other nig
ht.
Now that I’ve gotten all that spleen out of my system, it occurs to me I was a little unfair—just a trifle, you understand. I probably shouldn’t’ve referred to the White House press corps as “a bunch of trained seals sitting around waiting for their four o’clock feeding.”
And I guess I went too far in describing the level of political discourse in this city as “petty, pompous, and parochial.” Not all political discourse here is petty, pompous, and parochial—just most of it.
Just because we read more about Hillary’s hat than about homelessness was no reason for me to take on in that tacky fashion, was it?
In the calmer light of day, it occurs to me that my brethren and sistren in this trade are just trying to make up for lost time. Having blown every big story of the eighties—including the savings and loans, Iran-contra, Iraq-gate, Reaganomics, and the Housing and Urban Development scandal, just to mention a few—my colleagues are now determined to play “gotcha” journalism with the Clinton administration. Who am I to plead with the brethren, “Jeez, give the guy a break”?
I don’t believe in breaks for the powerful, never have.
I think old Joe Pulitzer was right: “A free press should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare.”
And by George, that inaugural hat of Hillary’s was silly-looking. The reason I avoid Washington as much as possible is not because this is a city where everybody says what everybody else says. It’s because whenever I’m here for ten minutes, I find myself saying exactly what everybody else says. Which is why I’m writing about Hillary Rodham Clinton and her hat.
What is the hangup this town has about Rodham Clinton? “No one voted for her,” insist the sclerotic conservatives. Hell, no one ever voted for Jim Baker either, but he ran the country for several years without noticeable objection.
The latest flap over Rodham Clinton is that she won’t open the policy-making process on health care to the press. Now, I’m confused about this. I thought I knew what secret government was. Ten years of covering Gib Lewis and I know a done deal when I see one. I just finished lambasting Bob Bullock for calling in the special interests to cut a deal on products liability. And now here’s the Washington press corps agog because Rodham Clinton isn’t calling in lobbyists for the American Medical Association to get their input on the health-care plan. Uh. Excuse me. But why should she?
Do we really think the poor, pitiful AMA is going to be shut out of this debate? The problem is that we’re not to the debate stage yet. So far, we haven’t even got a proposal. That’s what Mrs. Clinton is trying to put together. Doesn’t she get to work on her proposal without the press and the lobsters at the table? Isn’t the usual deal that after she finishes this proposal and releases it, then the press and the lobsters pick it apart? I’ve no objection to the press picking on the Clinton administration—have at ’em—but I think the press has come down with a bad case of premature picking. I always thought you were supposed to wait until the folks in office had screwed up before you went after ’em.
I recall Abe Rosenthal, then editor of The New York Times and, Lord knows, not a man I often agreed with, once mildly suggesting that the new mayor of New York should be given a chance to mess up before we attacked him. In that particular case (Ed Koch), I thought we held off far too long, but I agreed with Abe’s premise.
Quite a disconcerting number of the brethren here were claiming the Clinton administration was a disaster before the man had even been sworn in.
I am puzzled by the Washington press corps’ reaction to affirmative action by the Clinton administration—not reverse discrimination, but affirmative action.
I thought it was a good idea to have an administration that “looks like America” instead of the usual suits. Look what’s already happening on the Hill now that it looks a little more like the rest of America. When the family leave bill was being debated, Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the “mom in tennis shoes,” put in her oar by recalling when she had to quit her secretarial job because she got pregnant. When they were discussing the Zoe Baird problem of people not paying Social Security taxes on their domestic workers, Representative Carrie Meek of Florida allowed as how she had been a domestic worker at one point in her life, her mom was a domestic worker, and so were all her sisters. Not a point of view normally heard in the corridors of power from the suits.
So why isn’t it a good idea for Clinton to go out of his way to find a qualified woman attorney general (Zoe Baird not included)? How did this press corps get so conservative that they object to change on principle? Change is what this country rather stunningly clearly wants.
I am uneasily reminded of the last time this press corps failed to understand a president (for kindness’ sake, we will draw a veil over the performance of this press corps during the Reagan years). Jimmy Carter was a president the press just never cottoned to. Like the senators during the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, they just didn’t get it.
Actually, it was pretty simple. Jimmy Carter has been out of office for thirteen years now. And every day for thirteen years, that man has gone out and behaved like a good Christian—for no money. Because that’s who he is, and that’s who he always was. But that was too simple for Power Town.
July 1994
The New Regime I
THE MOST FUN GUY to watch in the New Regime is House Speaker-elect Newt Gingrich. The reason you want to keep an eye on Gingrich is that he plans to improve your morality, and he’s just the fellow to do it.
You may not have had the improvement of your morality in mind when you voted to get the government off your back Tuesday, but here in the New Regime, many things are wondrous.
Gingrich explained to The New York Times the other day that the country has been in a state of moral decline since the 1960s and that he plans to root out the remnants of the counterculture and the Great Society. Said Gingrich: “Until the mid-1960s, there was an explicit, long-term commitment to creating character. It was the work ethic. It was honesty, right and wrong. It was not harming others. It was being vigilant in the defense of liberty.”
Yep, you want to know right from wrong, you check with Newt here in the New Regime because Newt knows.
Gingrich spent the first part of the dread 1960s at Emory University in Atlanta, at a time when many who felt strongly about morality were involved in the civil-rights movement. He was not. Like President Clinton, being a graduate student—in Gingrich’s case, already married with children—kept him out of Vietnam. He went to Tulane, where he was also not involved in the preeminent moral issue of the late 1960s. Like Clinton, the only nonpolitical job he has ever held was teaching college: Clinton taught constitutional law at the University of Arkansas; Gingrich taught history at West Georgia College.
Gingrich, the man who put term limits in the Contract with America, was first elected to Congress in 1978 after two earlier, unsuccessful races. He was, of course, strong on family values. In 1980, he filed for a divorce from his wife, Jacqueline, after eighteen years of marriage. While they were separated, she had her second operation for cancer. Gingrich went to see her in the hospital to discuss the terms of their divorce. In 1993, Jacqueline sued Gingrich for failing to pay his $1,300 monthly alimony on a timely basis and for failing to pay the premiums on a life-insurance policy for her. He settled the lawsuit by agreeing to give Jacqueline the first $100,000 coverage in his life-insurance policy. Gingrich remarried in 1981.
In the famous flap about the House bank, Gingrich was found to have bounced twenty-two checks, compared with Speaker Tom Foley’s two.
But easily the most notable contribution to our political life made by Gingrich during his congressional career has been the level of rancor and vitriol with which he practices politics. So impressive were Gingrich’s thrust
s at the opposition that in 1990, the GOP issued a list of them—words that Republican candidates should use to describe their opponents so they could be successful, like Newt. The words are: sick, pathetic, traitor, welfare, crisis, ideological, cheat, steal, insecure, bizarre, permissive, anti-(issue), and radical.
Let’s look at that list again because we’re going to be hearing quite a lot from Mr. Gingrich, and not only in person. As he has announced, he will be using Rush Limbaugh and Christian-right radio and television programs to communicate his ideas. Sick, pathetic, traitor, welfare, crisis, ideological, cheat, steal, insecure, bizarre, permissive, anti-(issue), and radical.
Such language, here in the New Regime, will be helpful in solving problems, such as how to get health-care coverage for forty million Americans, how to get people off welfare, how to create decent-paying jobs and give people the skills to do them.
Mickey Kaus of The New Republic gives us a typical example of how Gingrich does politics. You may recall the flapette late in the mercifully over elections concerning a memo written by Alice Rivlin, one of the most consistently realistic deficit hawks in the Clinton administration. Rivlin outlined a number of options for further cutting the deficit and still finding ways to invest in programs, particularly job-skills programs. Among her options was cutting Social Security benefits to the wealthy. This was seized upon by Gingrich, who promptly raised an enormous furor about how Clinton was planning to cut Social Security. Clinton brilliantly riposted that he wasn’t planning to cut it but that the Republicans were. Are not, are so, are not, they argued, which was the level of debate we got throughout the elections.