by Molly Ivins
Friedman points out one slight hitch in the getalong here: We’d have to amend the Constitution to impose a tax on wealth, just as we did to impose the first income tax back in 1913. Personally, I think it’s worth doing. And I’m curious to know how many of those worth more than $2.3 million think a 1 percent tax is too high. Pollsters, can you help?
December 1999
Bill Bradley
IT’S TAKEN ME QUITE a while to make up my mind about the Democratic presidential contest. I find Al Gore as discouraging as everybody else does. Even if you agree with him, imagine trying to work up enthusiasm for Gore.
I once spent a day with Al Gore off the record, so I know there’s a real human being in there somewhere. Lord knows what happened to it.
Meanwhile, Bill Bradley has been coming up and coming up. It’s always been clear that the man is a class act, without a phony bone in his body.
The trouble is, class acts are a problem in this country. Adlai Stevenson was a class act, and he lost twice. I’ve had my political heart broken by class acts more times than I care to remember. I’m class-act-shy.
Almost every cycle we get some candidate greatly esteemed by those who know and care a lot about government—John Anderson, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas—some brainy, professorial type who appeals to some of the media, all the college kids, and practically nobody else. No lunch-bucket appeal.
I long since decided that if the candidate doesn’t have some Elvis to him, he ain’t gonna make it. Bradley has zip in the Elvis department.
What he does have, and it takes a while to explain this, is Midwesternness. Not to paint with a broad brush or anything, but Midwesterners tend to be incredibly practical and incurably down-to-earth. (I base this opinion on the three years, including eighteen winters, I spent in Minnesota.)
Bradley represented New Jersey in the Senate, but he was raised in Missouri and it shows. He can be going along explaining some complicated policy—it’s like listening to a good teacher—when it suddenly occurs to him to explain why we should be doing whatever-it-is in the first place.
“I think we should fix the roof while the sun is shining,” he offers—as homely a metaphor as one can find, but precisely the actual reason we need to make some changes in Social Security, Medicare, education, etc. Everybody nods, and then we go back to the gory details, which he explains so well that everybody then feels like an expert on the subject.
But will it sell in a thirty-second sound bite? No question, Bradley is not a thirty-second kind of guy. But if you listen to him for even ten minutes, what you get is a sense of his depth, unflappability, seriousness, and knowledge.
He also has very good manners, even inducing the notoriously overcaffeinated TV host Chris Matthews to calm down. If I may be crudely political here, he’s the perfect candidate to put up against George W. Bush, who does have some shallow-twit tendencies.
Without being at all witty (I would guess he gets off a good line about once every ten years), Bradley is capable of a wry take on things, including himself. For a man running for president, he’s amazingly mellow, which is what comes of spending years of your life under the incredible pressure of playing in championship games—state high school, college, Olympics, pros.
If you’re used to twenty thousand people screaming hysterically at you while you go for a free throw with a championship on the line, Chris Matthews is not likely to rattle you. This is a guy who knows how to play under pressure.
Bradley has one of those eerily perfect biographies: grew up in a small Midwestern town, top student, top athlete, Eagle Scout, committed Christian, Princeton, captain of the 1964 Olympic team, Rhodes scholar, Knicks star, U.S. Senate. Bradley was so strikingly mature and extraordinary even as a boy that John McPhee, the great New Yorker writer, did a profile of him as a college freshman that became the book A Sense of Where You Are.
The ten years that Bradley spent playing pro ball gave him a rare understanding of what it is like to be black in America, the subject of the best and certainly the most passionate speech he ever made in the Senate. Those years also give us all the character clues. Everyone who ever watched Bradley play knows he made it on brains and hard work rather than great natural talent.
My favorite basketball story is from the Olympics, when Bradley was keen to beat the tough Soviet team. He knew that it would be a rough game and that the Soviets liked to call out their plays in Russian, expecting no one to understand. So Bradley went to Princeton’s Slavic languages department and got them to teach him a Russian street phrase meaning roughly, “Watch it” or “Be careful.”
The first time he got an elbow thrown in his ribs, he used the phrase. The Russians got flustered, stopped calling out their plays, and lost some of their harmony. The Americans won the gold.
His Senate career is also characteristic of the man in that Bradley took on a few tough issues, mastered them, and in many cases got something done about them. His most notable contribution was the tax reform act of 1986, simplifying the code and lowering the top brackets. Brains and hard work—never any flash or grandstanding or posturing. A lot of Bradley’s Senate record is surprisingly conservative, however.
Bradley is a man of truly unusual stature; he seems to have been a grown-up all his life, and a man concerned with the most serious issues. He also talks to voters as though we’re grown-ups, too.
True, he suffers from low-watt charisma. He will not dazzle you with his oratory or his nimble wit. He will, however, just impress the pants off of you with how much he knows and how serious and determined he is to get some big problems fixed. And he’s the man who can do it.
January 2000
Class Warfare, Anyone?
WE CONTINUE TO enjoy the faux-naïf routine offered by Republi-cans and their media flunkies: What could Gore mean by “the people against the powerful”?
Dubya was so confused about it that he called it “class warfare.” I especially enjoy watching Washington pundits affect to be unable to figure out the fuss. They cover Washington, D.C., and they never in their whole lives have seen or heard of a case in which special interest money influenced legislation against the people and in favor of the powerful.
They missed communications deregulation (a bill written by lobbyists), utilities deregulation, bankruptcy “reform,” banking deregulation, the S&L disaster, the killing of the patients’ bill of rights, the pittance in royalties from public lands paid by the oil companies, the sugar subsidy, the ethanol subsidy, and the auto industry’s lobbying against higher pollution standards and a rating system for SUV rollover hazard.
What could Gore mean by “powerful special interests”?
They missed the drug industry’s continuing rip-off of the public above and beyond the already wretched pricing system by sneaking drug-patent extensions through Congress, never noticed the insurance industry spending $10 million to kill health-care proposals, didn’t see the corporate tax write-off for obscene executive salaries, haven’t wondered why a $1-an-hour increase in the minimum wage can’t get through Congress, and never saw the Forest Service subsidizing logging roads for the timber industry.
So, why in the world is Gore trying to incite “class warfare”?
By the way, I’m fascinated by the fact that Dubya far outpolls Gore among men. One guy played football, went to Vietnam, and is notoriously emotionally distant. The other guy was a cheerleader who got into a National Guard unit through family influence, lost money in the oil business, traded Sammy Sosa, and is now sliding through a presidential race on his charm. Do I not get American men, or what?
I JUST finished with nine months of treatment for cancer. First they poison you, then they mutilate you, then they burn you. I’ve had more fun. And when it’s over you’re so glad, you’re grateful to absolutely everyone. And I am.
The trouble is, I’m not a better person. I was in great hopes that confronting my own mortality would make me deeper, more thoughtful. Many lovely people sent books on how to find a deeper sp
iritual meaning in life. My response was, “Oh hell, I can’t go on a spiritual journey—I’m constipated.”
Being sick actually narrows your world, I’m afraid—makes you focus more on yourself. Maybe when it’s over and you don’t feel like crud all the time, then your spirit soars.
I vomited in the office, couldn’t sleep, lost fifty pounds. I don’t recommend the diet. I was like, help, I’m flunking cancer.
Of course, I laughed a lot—who could not laugh? I got my first hair a few weeks ago. It came in right next to my mouth—that little mustache I’ve always hated. That God—what a sense of humor!
Cancer is good for priorities. Traffic, for one thing, is not worth getting upset about. As my pal Spike Gillespie says, you look at those fools honking, getting steamed, cutting in front of you, and you just think: “Hey, it’s not a malignant tumor, you know?”
Despite my request, untold numbers of people wrote wonderful cards, notes, letters. My friends sent funny stuff by e-mail. I’d save it up, and about once a month when I couldn’t sleep at 3 A.M., I’d be sitting in front of the computer, laughing and laughing. And I’m most grateful of all to the women who went out and got mammograms. It’s going to take me longer to write all the thank-you notes than it took to get over cancer.
Cancer is not easy, it is not pleasant, and given a choice, I would just as soon have skipped it. But I now know what all survivors know, and I am grateful. So grateful.
October 2000
Credit Where It’s Due
THE TIME HAS COME to bid farewell to President William Jefferson Clinton. Been a lot of wasted time and wasted talent these eight years. The politics of personal destruction. A level of vituperation so intense and so stupid that it shut down the federal government twice.
And through it all came the Unsinkable Clinton, ever bobbing up again cheerfully in a fashion that maddened his enemies. As near as I can tell after eight years, the man gets up every single day in a state of cheerful anticipation, ready to set about whatever’s on the plate.
We have never once seen him in a temper or a sulk or being vindictive or holding a grudge. Closest we ever saw to an upset Bill Clinton was right after we had watched him discussing the most intimate details of his private life for four hours on national television, and to this good day I have no idea what public purpose was served by that exercise in humiliation.
But I continue to be amazed by the man’s good manners.
When Clinton arrived in Washington, there were two untouchable lobbies: the National Rifle Association and the tobacco industry. They are not untouchable today. This is not the result of inevitable social change; it is the result of real political leadership by Clinton and many others.
Clinton is a master incrementalist—he gets a little bit done, then a little bit more, then a little bit more. Because he knows and cares about the details of policy, he has often gone back and fixed or improved things that were initially passed in unsatisfactory form.
The two great failures of his administration are the domestic wealth gap and Russia.
We are now facing a destabilized nuclear power many times more dangerous than the former Soviet Union. Life expectancy in Russia is crashing, 75 percent of the people live in poverty, health care is a disaster, and the country is being run by gangsters pretending to be capitalists.
There will eventually be a terrible price for all this misery—and the country still has thousands of deteriorating nuclear weapons. Its early warning system is in such disarray that last summer the Russians came within a hair of nuking a Swedish weather balloon.
The first thing that George W. Bush might usefully do is spend a few billion rebuilding the Russian DEW line. By expanding NATO, bombing Serbia, and horsing around with the oil pipeline on Russia’s southern border, we have managed to hit every paranoid button that the Russians possess—and if there is one clear strain in the Russian worldview over the centuries, it is paranoia. Further talk of putting the Baltic republics in NATO is frankly nuts.
In this country, we still have trickle-down economics, but mighty little is trickling down. Although it is not Clinton’s fault, Congress becomes ever more the tool of corporate special interests. Because Clinton is such an enthusiastic free-trader, the tendency toward gigantism continues—mammoth, international corporations with more wealth than most governments and subject to only one imperative: higher profits.
Meanwhile, I don’t think you can argue that we are better off today than we were eight years ago, despite the long boom. Even after wages in the lowest quartile finally, finally started to go up, it wasn’t enough in constant dollars even to get people back to their standard of living thirty years ago.
The Wall Street Journal headlined last week: “Raw Deals—Companies Quietly Use Mergers and Spin-offs to Cut Worker Benefits.” Duh.
The wealth gap is worse than ever, and the mechanisms slowly and painfully created to check capitalism—government regulation, lawsuits, and unions—have all been eaten away.
I grant you, it would have been worse without Clinton, especially his expansion of the earned income tax credit. Goodness only knows what Newt Gingrich and his merry crew would have done without Clinton there to outplay them at every turn. That was a masterly political performance and a real joy to watch—too bad the media missed it because they were so focused on Monicagate.
As for Clinton’s private life, even though it’s none of my business, I think we had a right to expect him to keep it zipped for eight years. Shame on him.
But having to listen to the likes of Henry Hyde, Bob Barr, and Newt Gingrich lecture Clinton on personal morality took shamelessness to new heights. What a bizarre hypocrisy festival that was. I wound up preferring Clinton to his enemies.
The Clinton-haters have been an odd and troubling part of these past eight years. In The Hunting of the President, Gene Lyons and Joe Conason traced most of it back to a sorry posse of old enemies in Arkansas.
The distressing part was how so much of that baloney got picked up by Establishment media and taken seriously. We wasted years on Whitewater. Some of it, I believe, has nothing to do with the Clintons but is simply a reflection of the viciousness of their enemies.
Clinton probably has as much sheer political talent as any player I’ve ever watched. But he got dealt a very odd hand as president, perhaps aptly compared to that of Andrew Johnson.
At least he never whined in public. It is commonplace to say that the Clintons led others into trouble and then left them to hang; actually, it can be argued that they were singularly ill-served themselves by those who had cause to be loyal to them.
It seems to me that most of the media have a very odd take on the Clintons. You look at all those “scandals,” and there is no there there. It’s nonsense.
Clinton was smart, able, articulate, graceful, and humorous, and he busted his tail for a Middle Eastern peace and a lot of other important things, some of which he didn’t get. Life will be duller once Elvis has left the building.
December 2000
Is Texas America?
WELL, SHEESH. I DON’T know whether to warn you that because George Dubya Bush is president the whole damn country is about to be turned into Texas (a singularly horrible fate: as the country song has it: “Lubbock on Everythang”) or if I should try to stand up for us and convince the rest of the country we’re not all that insane.
Truth is, I’ve spent much of my life trying, unsuccessfully, to explode the myths about Texas. One attempts to explain—with all good will, historical evidence, nasty statistics, and just a bow of recognition to our racism—that Texas is not The Alamo starring John Wayne. We’re not Giant, we ain’t a John Ford western. The first real Texan I ever saw on TV was King of the Hill’s Boomhauer, the guy who’s always drinking beer and you can’t understand a word he says.
So, how come trying to explode myths about Texas always winds up reinforcing them? After all these years, I do not think it is my fault. The fact is, it’s a damned peculiar place. Gi
ven all the horseshit, there’s bound to be a pony in here somewhere. Just by trying to be honest about it, one accidentally underlines its sheer strangeness.
Here’s the deal on Texas. It’s big. So big there’s about five distinct and different places here, separated from one another geologically, topographically, botanically, ethnically, culturally, and climatically. Hence our boring habit of specifying East, West, and South Texas, plus the Panhandle and the Hill Country. The majority of the state’s blacks live in East Texas, making it more like the Old South than the Old South is anymore. West Texas is, more or less, like Giant, except, like every place else in the state, it has an incurable tendency toward the tacky and all the cowboys are brown. South Texas is 80 percent Hispanic and a weird amalgam of cultures. You get names now like Shannon Rodriguez, Hannah Gonzalez, and Tiffany Ruiz. Even the Anglos speak English with a Spanish accent. The Panhandle, which sticks up to damn near Kansas, is High Plains, like one of those square states, Nebraska or the Dakotas, except more brown folks. The Hill Country, smack dab in the middle, resembles nothing else in the state.