by Molly Ivins
I submit to you that Lyndon Johnson was a superb politician. Had it not been for the fatal error of Vietnam, I believe Johnson would have gone down as one of the greatest presidents in our history. Think of government as a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption, perhaps the most complicated, least straightforward piece of machinery ever devised: Lyndon knew which buttons to push, which levers to press, which handles to crank, and where to kick the damn thing to get it to whirl around and turn out something that would actually help people. But as a human being, he was a miserable specimen. Who but Lady Bird ever could have put up with him?
I’ve known a lot of exceptionally decent people in politics, and I’ve known a handful of great politicians: The two are not mutually exclusive, but it is also true that they rarely overlap.
What to do?
Say it’s a life-or-death situation: You need open-heart surgery, and you’re looking for the best doctor you can find. This doctor is going to be cutting your heart: You want to know where he or she got his training, what his success rate is, what his peers think of his skills. I submit to you that you don’t particularly care if he cheats on his wife.
All I’m trying to say here is that I don’t think the press corps is particularly well qualified to go around passing judgments on other people’s private lives. (In fact, most of us are singularly ill qualified to do so.) I think we should stick to what we do know, which is looking at a politician’s record and reporting what’s there. And Clinton’s record is damn peculiar.
Sometimes politicians can be divided into those who are good at running for office and those who are good at governing. Clinton is obviously amazingly good at the former, not so great at the latter. Yet he is an intelligent man and genuinely knowledgeable: a true policy wonk. His greatest strength in governance is persistence.
An Arkansas state senator once told me Clinton reminded him of one of those broad-bottomed children’s toys: You tump it over, it pops back up; you tump it over, it pops back up again. He’d propose some grand scheme to make Arkansas a better place, and the Lege would peck it to death—costs too much, leads to new taxes, more bureaucracy, etc. They’d all vote no and assume the scheme was dead. But Clinton would always come back next session with a new way to achieve the same goal: George, I took care of that part you didn’t like; Mary, look what this will do for your district; Sam, you’re gonna like this amendment. And lo and behold, it would get done: not in the best or most efficient way, but in the way that was politically possible.
That’s an art, and I think it deserves respect.
Look at Clinton trying to get the public schools fixed. One third of American schools are somewhere between dilapidated and flat falling apart—holes in the roof, broken windows, kids tripping on broken linoleum and bad stairs. Estimates as high as $100 billion to fix them, new schools also needed, no way the local districts can handle this. First, Clinton asks Congress for a $5 billion appropriation to fix the schools. Typical Clinton—way too little, a mere gesture at the problem. R’s immediately reject the proposal—costs too much, balanced budget, local control sacred. Goes down in flames.
So he comes back this year: new approach on same problem. He wants $20 billion worth of bonds with a special tax break. Buy these bonds, you pay zero in federal taxes. Use private capital to fix the schools. Money is to be handled by the states and school districts: George, I took care of your problem with local control. Districts can use the federal bonds to leverage their own. Now we’re looking at $40 to $50 billion to fix the schools. We’re talking real progress.
If you can’t get it done one way, get it done another. That’s a smart politician. That is not a faithful husband.
If we can’t have both, take your pick.
May 1998
Look Beyond the Blather to the Political Buyouts
FROM HERE IN THE have-no-mercy-liberals camp, the political weather continues delightful. What could be more fun than watching Republicans turn on one another, snapping and snarling, throwing left hooks, right jabs, and mud pies? Splendid doings.
From a strategic point of view, I suppose I should want House Speaker Newt Gingrich to stay where he is, considering that he’s both hateful and incompetent. But I must admit to a mild case of Greater Good here: I’d really like for America to see Gingrich in its rearview mirror, because I think he’s a nasty piece of work who has brought American politics even lower than it would otherwise go. It’s a good-of-the-nation moment.
The same might be said for our Texans in the House leadership, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay. Personally, I’ve always wondered what it says about Republicans that those two were chosen for leadership positions in the first place. Armey is an ideologue of no noticeable political skill, and DeLay has been so clumsy and heavy-handed in his abuse of power that it’s been painful to watch, whether you’re for him or against him. Let the caucus decide.
In the meantime, a wonderful corrective has appeared on the horizon—an astonishing piece of journalism so timely and so much more important to what is actually going on than all this political blather that I’m tempted to announce it in terms of “Lo, a star in the East.”
In a typical item from the blather front, The New York Times sees internal Republican politics as leading to “still larger victories for minimal government and taxes, unfettered free enterprise and a return to conservative Christian values.” That’s almost a mantra (along with the fashionable new cliché, “conservatism with compassion”—the Bush brothers’ theme song) that somehow Republicans need to “get back” to their core values of less government and lower taxes. What’s wrong with this picture?
The answer is to be found in the current and forthcoming issues of Time magazine, in which the superb investigative team of Don Barlett and Jim Steele is unleashed on the subject of corporate welfare. Holy mackerel—what a story.
While the R’s and the D’s sit here having this silly pretend-debate (education, the environment, and Social Security, chant the D’s; less government and lower taxes, chant the R’s), what’s really going on is being ignored by everyone. They’re all giving away the store—to big corporate campaign donors, of course.
Even for those of us who regularly follow corporate welfare, the Barlett-Steele investigation is mind-boggling. To what depth, breadth, and height can corporate welfare reach? And how much is it costing every one of us? Barlett and Steele not only dug out the answers, they dug out still more astonishing information. The system doesn’t even work; it’s not producing jobs. All these taxpayer rip-offs, subsidies, tax abatements, low-cost loans—all for nothing.
While state and local governments have caved in to this folly to an extent that’s beyond stupid and well into acutely embarrassing, the feds are still the biggest Uncle Sugar of them all, handing out $125 billion in corporate welfare during a time of robust economic growth and corporate profits. It’s insane. Barlett and Steele’s conclusion is that the corporate welfare system exactly mimics the most criticized aspects of traditional welfare programs: It “is unfair, destroys incentive, perpetuates dependence, and distorts the economy.” But instead of rewarding the poor, it rewards the powerful.
Corporate welfare also penalizes the rest of us; for every tax advantage given to a corporation, the tax burden shared by the rest of us is that much greater. Just in federal taxes, it is the equivalent of all the income tax paid by sixty million individuals and families. Lower taxes, anyone?
At the state and local levels, the folly knows no bounds. The investigators found cases in which governments gave away $323,000 in taxes and services to secure a $50,000 job that couldn’t yield that much in taxes over several lifetimes.
And as usual, the system is weighted toward the biggest (and biggest contributors): “Ten million jobs have been created since 1990. But most of those jobs have been created at small- and medium-sized companies, from high-tech start-ups to franchised cleaning services. Fortune 500 companies, on the other hand, have erased more jobs than they
have created this past decade, and yet they are the biggest beneficiaries of corporate welfare.”
This is my idea of extraordinary political journalism—investigating the real effects of politics on our lives. True, it has nothing to do with spin, counterspin, or Monica Lewinsky, but it sure does make a lot of difference to the people of this country. I think they’ll appreciate knowing about it.
November 1998
Remembering the Sixties
YOU MUST ADMIT, this is the most curious political phenomenon of our lifetimes: After five years of investigation by Kenneth Starr, one solid year of media frenzy, and three months of impeachment proceedings, President Clinton’s job approval rating is 72 percent, and Republicans now rank below Larry Flynt in public esteem. And their response to all this is: “More! More!” Kind of hard to know what to say to them.
And here am I in concert with Pat Robertson: Please, stop!
Incidentally, journalist Lars-Erik Nelson rather uncharitably noted that aside from impeachment, the Rs’ major legislative accomplishment of 1998 was renaming Washington National Airport after Ronald Reagan.
The latest wrinkle in right-wing spin is to claim that this is not a political phenom at all but rather the final battle in some culture war that I didn’t know was going on. I have my doubts about this culture war—can you be in one and not know it? Did our side actually vote for Flynt as our standard bearer? What is our side?
My last effort to grasp what the right wing is on about here was reading Robert Bork’s latest book—an experience so horrifying that I have not yet recovered and cannot bear to read any more in the genre. If Bork was the beginning of the political-culture war, as is sometimes claimed (“payback for Bork” being an occasionally heard battle cry), all I can say is: I didn’t know it was war at the time, but I’m sure glad I was on the right side.
An alternative theory is that the culture war dates back to the 1960s, and this is where I get totally lost reading right-wing cultural interpretations. The old joke is that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there. I was there, and I can remember it.
I remember the decade as being about the Peace Corps, the civil-rights movement, and the anti-war movement. As Margo Adler writes in her memoir of the period, it was quite possible to be an activist in the sixties and miss sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll in their entirety. “We Shall Overcome” remains the song of the decade for many.
That is, until 1968, the year of assassinations, when it all turned very, very dark.
I could be wrong, but I still think the berserker element of the 1960s was largely the consequence of Vietnam—the drugs, the craziness, the sense that the world made no sense because that war certainly made no sense. And that war was not the fault of those who fought it or opposed it. Your famous World War II generation presented that little gift to us: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Long time passing.
Another right-wing interpretation of the sixties is the bizarre notion that black rage was fomented by white liberal social programs. Bill Kristol has been alone among right-wing intellectuals, I believe, in consistently and gracefully conceding that liberals were right about civil rights and that conservatives (a word often synonymous with “racist” in those years) were wrong. That’s most generous of him, but I think it leaves a wrong impression (a bit like that odd film Mississippi Burning) that somehow white people were the key players in the civil-rights movement.
It was a movement of, by, and for black Americans; those few whites who took part—and there were mighty few of us in the South—were just bit players. As Taylor Branch’s wonderful King biography and many other books make clear, the whites in power, whether they reacted for good or ill at the time, were just reacting—reacting to one of the most astonishing, beautiful, and spontaneous uprisings for justice the world has ever seen.
The movement split in ’64, when Stokely Carmichael’s “Burn, baby, burn” stood in contrast to “We shall overcome someday.” But to blame that on anything that white liberals did is ludicrous. Race riots had been part of American history for one hundred years; they were not unusual before the civil-rights movement, and the roots of the rage underlying them are obvious.
These silly books blaming the sixties for various social evils are pathetically truncated in their viewpoint. Were there symptoms of decline in black family structure? According to anthropologists, the black family is one of the most durable social structures in history; it survived both slavery and Jim Crow and finally was visibly damaged only by the Depression, which of course fell more harshly on blacks. Incidentally, the Depression had the same effect on white families—those who yearn for hard times to bring us together might keep that in mind.
Was there an increase in sexual activity outside marriage in the sixties? If so, don’t you think it had more to do with the invention of the birth control pill than with “permissive attitudes”?
Don’t get me started. But perhaps what I object to most is the use of war as a metaphor for political differences. That way lies folly and worse. Call it a spirited discussion, a disagreement, or an all-out slinging match, but don’t call it war. That’s how you get murdered abortion doctors and bombed buildings in Oklahoma.
January 1999
Let’s All Play Hunt the Hypocrites
THERE’S A BEAUT OF a media story happening right in front of our eyes, and if you want to have a good time, you can start tracking this one yourself. The game is called “Hunt the Hypocrites,” or “What’s Wrong with This Picture?”
A few weeks ago, I kept running into civilians (nonjournalists) who all had the same question: Why isn’t this Newt Gingrich story a bigger deal?
The story, in case you missed it (and you may well have), is that the former Speaker of the House is getting a divorce because he has been having an affair with a much younger woman. I think that story got exactly the play it deserved—almost none.
Gingrich seems to be a spent cartridge as a politician. All that speculation about whether he would run for president is long gone—no more Time magazine Man of the Year, no more “defender of civilization” or lectures on how liberal policies cause moral decay in America. However, Gingrich is still huge on the fund-raising circuit. Since he left office in January, he has raised $1.3 million for his new political action committee. So he is still a public figure to some extent, and under the new rules of journalism, his private life is a story.
Of course, there is the oddball angle to the story. It turns out that Gingrich was having this long-running affair with the much younger woman all during the time the government of the United States all but came to a crashing halt over Monica Lewinsky.
This is the man who promised that Republican leadership would “improve the moral climate of the country.” So this presents us with an epochal moment in the history of hypocrisy. As Gingrich led the Republicans in full hue and cry concerning the moral sleaze, the sordid tawdriness, the unbearable, brazen shameless conduct of Bill Clinton, he was having something more than a flingette himself. We could be looking at a new world record for being two-faced.
But note the deafening silence from the media. It’s the same problem they have dealing with George W. Bush and drugs. (I am proceeding on the new media premise that he must have done coke because he sure as hell would have denied it by now if he hadn’t. I like these new journalism rules—it’s so much easier than having to go dig up evidence.)
And of course, Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard instead of having to go to Vietnam because of who his father was. How bright do you have to be to figure that out? As cartoonist Ben Sargent put it: “Find me a rich, Yale-educated congressman’s son in 1968 who DIDN’T get help staying out of the draft—now THAT would be a story.”
Note the astounding difference between the way the media covered Hillary Clinton’s interview in Talk magazine—the one in which she did NOT excuse her husband’s infidelity—and a far more interesting piece in the same issue of the same magazine about Bush, in which he cr
uelly mimics an imaginary plea for life from the executed Karla Faye Tucker.
Acres of air time on Mrs. Clinton’s supposed effort to excuse her husband, hours of tutting and judgmental commentary and psychological parsing of the Clinton marriage; almost nothing (honorable exception to George Will) on the appalling vulgarity of W. Bush.
And then there is the even messier problem of Dubya’s business dealings.
You thought Whitewater was a story? Wait’ll you read this one. Where’s Kenneth Starr now that we need him? And yet, you notice, the media reaction to all this is curiously . . . muted. Gone are the full-scale scrums of yesteryear, when packs of baying reporters surrounded Bill Clinton, the badgering about the draft, the screaming front-page tabloid headlines, the saturation television coverage. So what’s the deal?
Two things.