by Molly Ivins
Henry B. once observed of a long-ago bit of political correctness that someone calling himself “Latin American” was just “a Mexican with a poll tax.” As high-flown as his rhetoric could be—Senator Phil Gramm once called him “the old blowhard”—it was often laced with mordant humor. He was always being outspent in his campaigns and would tell his supporters, “You can drink his beer and eat his tamales, but when you go to the polls, vote for Gonzalez!”
As you look back on his career, what’s astonishing is how principled, consistent, and right he was. In his thirty-seven years in Congress, he lived entirely on his salary and refused to take contributions from the special interests affected by the committees on which he served, including all his years as chairman of the Banking Committee.
The man never sold out to anyone, from his early service on the San Antonio City Council—where he fought to desegregate public swimming pools—to the great stand on the hate bills in the Senate, through the thirty-seven years in Congress.
He was right about deregulating the S&Ls—he was one of a handful who opposed that lobby-engineered disaster. He was right about Mexican banks not being strong enough for NAFTA.
He was right about Ronald Reagan’s HUD secretary’s misusing his office. Because Henry B. had long been a champion of public housing, he saw the department being twisted. It took Henry C.—i.e., Cisneros—several years to untwist it.
Henry B. told us how often PAC money turned our own representatives against us. He warned us about the concentration of power in ever-larger banks.
Henry B. was a powerful man for a long time. But he never forgot where he came from and what it was like. His best friend’s mother went blind from hand-sewing baby clothes at five cents a piece.
Dugger told a story of him that I cannot forget.
Henry B.’s parents were from Durango, but he was born in San Antonio. He started haunting the public library when he was eight, but when he started junior high, his accent was still so thick that they made fun of him.
He had read that Demosthenes of Athens developed his oratory by shouting at the sea with pebbles in his mouth. So Henry B. would read Thomas Carlyle aloud with pebbles in his mouth “until Poppa thought I was nuts and told me to stop.”
He had a friend correct his enunciation as he read Robert Louis Stevenson. And on some nights, his sisters and brothers would creep up to his bedroom window and watch him declaiming to a mirror, and then they would run off giggling.
November 2000
Shrub-watch
EVERY NOW AND again Shrub W. Bush will stop you faster than pullin’ on the whoa reins. You can go along for long periods thinkin’ to yourself, “Don’t agree with him about dog, but he seems like an amiable fellow.” And then he says something that sort of makes your teeth hurt.
One time W. got to describin’ the first time he ran for office—the Boy Bush was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress in 1978 out in West Texas—George Mahon’s old seat, district runs from Lubbock to Midland/Odessa to hell and gone. Dubya allowed the race had startled his friends: “They were a little confused about why I was doing this, but at that time, Jimmy Carter was president, and he was trying to control natural gas prices, and I felt the United States was headed toward European-style socialism.”
So there you are, trying to envision the very Baptist Brother Carter as a “European-style socialist.” Well, Carter does build homes for poor folk without charging, and if that doesn’t prove it, what would? Besides, West Texas oilmen, of which W. was one at the time, think everyone to the left of Trent Lott is a socialist. Reminds me of a story. One time in those very same years the ineffable Good Time Charlie Wilson and Bob Krueger, a Shakespeare scholar last seen in a political ad imitating Arnold Schwarzenegger—two of the finest minds the Peculiar State has ever sent to Congress—cooked up a scheme to deregulate the price of natural gas in such a way that everybody in West Texas would get stinking rich and all you Yankees would have to pay through the nose. They were delicately tap-dancing this masterpiece of reverse socialism through the Commerce Committee one afternoon by the time-tested ploy of sending everyone to sleep (the ploy works best right after lunch) with excruciatingly boring testimony. Wilson swears every Yankee on the committee was snoring when, to his horror, the late Jim Collins, a Dallas Republican, came to and caught the fatal words gas prices.
“Gas prices?! Gas prices?!” shrieked Collins, waking up all the napping Yankees. “We wouldn’t have gas prices this high if it weren’t for all this school busing. It’s school busing, busing all these Nigras and all these little white children for integration, that’s what’s driving up gas prices!” And he was off on an anti-busing rant that would not quit. By this time, both Wilson and Krueger were on their hands and knees under the table trying to unplug Collins’ mike, but it was too late. The Yankees promptly voted to squelch deregulation of natural gas under the impression that they were carrying on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
Collins is the man who once moved me, in the days when I wrote for The Dallas Times Herald, to observe, “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.”
Probably the best known of the “whoa” moments with W. Bush comes from an interview with Tucker Carlson printed in Talk magazine, concerning the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. Bush has now signed more than one hundred warrants of execution, but, as you may recall, the born-again Tucker drew attention both for being female and for having an extensive prison ministry.
In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. “Did you meet with any of them?” I ask.
” Bush whips around and stares at me. “No, I didn’t meet with any of them,” he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. “I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like, ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’
“What was her answer?” I wonder.
“ ‘Please,’ ” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “ ‘don’t kill me.’ ”
I must look shocked—ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush—because he immediately stops smirking.
Tucker also reported that the exchange mimicked by Bush never took place; Bush made it up.
Well, that was a moment.
Another came during one of Bush’s rare appearances on a Sunday chat show. (Ann Richards used to call him “the phantom candidate”; political reporters on his national campaign say he is “in the bubble,” rarely let out for an unscripted performance.) Tim Russert asked Bush who on the Supreme Court he most admired. “Scalia,” said Bush promptly. And after a second’s thought, “and Clarence Thomas.”
He sure can pick ’em. If you are a heavy-duty right-winger, as opposed to the moderate, compassionate conservative, Scalia is a good pick. First-rate mind, hideous politics. But no one covering the Court, regardless of politics, has ever chosen Clarence Thomas as a standout. The best I’ve ever seen written about him, by people who consider Scalia a great justice, is that he’s adequate. Everyone else, including those of no noticeable ideological persuasion, considers “adequate” far too kind.
Thomas, of course, was W.’s daddy’s pick. I don’t do Siggie Freud myself, being completely unqualified. I leave that to such great minds as Gail Sheehy. But W. does have a daddy problem. Pretty much the entire record of his life is daddy, but it’s not his fault. His name is not George W. Smith: What the hell was he supposed to do? Be a big enough fool to throw it all away? Nevertheless, it does sometimes trap him into ridiculous positions.
Twice in the past few weeks we’ve seen Bush, as we so rarely do, outside the bubble in “debate” with fellow Republican candidates. Myself, I think mah fellow pundits have been entirely too polite. In the first Republican deba
te in New Hampshire, Bush was, at best, “adequate.” In the Arizona debate, he was just bloody awful. Call a spade a spade, troops. If you will pardon a personal note here, I was in hospital, facing a delayed surgical proceeding, during the entire hour-and-a-half debate, and by the end of it, I was screaming, “Put me under the knife! I can’t take any more!”
A note here for those of you who will be following “Shrub-watch” in the coming weeks. I am a Texan, and we are notoriously soft on our own: I drew the line at Phil Gramm (who wouldn’t?), but I can still give a lecture on the virtues of John Connally (when he was a Democrat) on occasion. Texas liberals (screw you, it’s not an oxymoron) are persons of large political tolerance. I may intervene from time to time to explain certain political/cultural phenomena—such as why W. Bush keeps leaning into people and touching them—but I plan to limit myself mostly to the geopolitical terrain with which I am most familiar. I know what kind of governor this guy has been—if you expect him to do for the nation what he has for Texas, we need to talk.
January 2000
Gems of Opacity
YOU MAY THINK A person would bring up the subject of political rhetoric in our day only to dis it, to mourn the decline of the once-noble art, to compare the puny babble of our modern pipsqueaks to the magnificent cadences of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Churchill, and so lament anew. Not me.
What I mourn is that none of the current candidates measures up to the glory years of the Ineffable Big George Bush and the Immortal Dan Quayle, who shall be forever revered for setting new standards in political language.
My personal favorite in the oratory sweepstakes is George W. Bush, who is rapidly developing a style that may yet become comparable to his father’s. He is a master of the perfectly opaque response. We now know that Ronald Reagan’s famous line in the 1980 campaign—“There you go again!”—was carefully scripted in advance. This leads to visions of an entire team of W. Bush speech writers cogitating on how to achieve the perfect nonanswer. Examples:
“Whatever’s fair.”
“Whatever’s right.”
“I’m all right on that.”
“Whatever is fair between the parties.”
And, a recent gem of opacity:
“I will take a balanced approach on the environment.”
That last one was Bush’s death-defying leap to separate himself from all the candidates who have promised to take an unbalanced approach on the environment.
During an impassioned speech in support of free trade this month, Bush said, “If the terriers and bariffs are torn down, this economy will grow!”
Another great moment with Bush the Younger was his answer to the question, “Do you support affirmative action?”
Said the governor: “What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think vulcanize society. So I don’t know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that’s my position.”
In South Carolina he told supporters: “This is still a dangerous world. It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mential loss.” OK, maybe it was “menshul.”
the Financial Times of London noted that the Education Governor revealed the urgent need for higher standards in subject-verb agreement when he said, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”
If you cast your mind back to the long-gone days of 1992, you may recall that after four years of Big George’s pronounless prose, Bill Clinton was considered something of a wonder because he spoke in complete sentences. Indeed, in complete paragraphs. People actually wrote about it at the time: “He speaks in complete sentences.”
Of course, that was compared to Big George, who once delivered this complete sentence: “It’s no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or the other.” And a more typical bon mot: “To kind of suddenly try and get my hair colored, and dance up and down in a mini-skirt or something, you know, show that I’ve got a lot of jazz out there and drop a bunch of one-liners, I’m running for the president of the United States. I kind of think I’m a scintillating fellow.”
And this happy thought on the recession: “Coming off a pinnacle, you might say, of low unemployment.”
We were also accustomed to hearing from Dan Quayle in those days (“If we don’t succeed, then we run the risk of failure”), so we’re starting from a low threshold here—the rhetorical equivalent of having Dick Morris shape domestic policy.
The Nation recently described Al Gore as “an attack chihuahua” for a series of observations that cannot be described as in the positive vein. Gore accused Bill Bradley of being a quitter, a hypocrite, a disloyal Democrat, a “left-of-center insurgent,” who would break the bank with his “throwback” health-care proposal while addressing “only a small number of things at a time.”
The Nation notes that Gore is a charter member of the Democratic Leadership Council, which campaigns for privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare and school choice. This has not prevented Gore from assailing Bradley for proposing a debate on Social Security reforms and voucher experiments.
The only thing to be said for Gore’s performance is that he can get through an entire debate without using the word whatever.
According to The Dallas Morning News, during the last debate in Iowa, when Alan Keyes accused Bush of doing nothing when the town of El Cenizo adopted Spanish as the language for all official business, Bush replied, “No es el verdad” (That’s not the truth). That would, of course, be “la verdad” in Spanish.
Reminding us all of Jim Hightower’s line when he was informed that Governor Bill Clements was studying Spanish: “Oh, good. Now he’ll be bi-ignorant.”
January 2000
Blushing for Bush
WATCHING OUR HOMEBOY George Dubya as he wends his way—somewhat unsteadily—toward the presidency is a nerve-racking procedure. Face it, our reputation is on the line along with the governor’s. All of us know that twenty million Texans can’t be brought to agree on anything, including whether the guys who died at the Alamo were heroes or fools. Nevertheless, we are all being painted with the Bush brush, so whenever he makes a cake of himself, all of us get the blame (“Those Texans, so ignorant”).
Relatively speaking, Bush is one of our better representatives on the national scene. In Washington, which seems to have been deeply scarred by LBJ’s occasional lack of couth, we are still regarded as a tribe of Visigoths. (“And then, he lifted his shirt and showed us the scar!”) Every time Governor Preston Smith, who had a terminal West Texas accent, went on television, I used to wince: “Our biggest problem after this hurricane is all the day-brees we got lyin’ around.” So, Dubya Bush doesn’t seem like anyone we’d have to blush for.
But one national columnist, writing this week about how Bush favors the concealed-weapons law—and the amendment to the law that allows concealed weapons to be carried in church—wrote, “Apparently Texans feel so naked without their guns that they cannot even take time off to pray without the reassurance of their little metal friends nestled somewhere warmly on their persons.” Another columnist decided not long ago to blame all twenty million of us for “bloodthirsty criminal justice officials. . . . Texas, where liberals are required to carry visas and compassion is virtually illegal . . . a state perfectly willing to execute the retarded and railroad the innocent . . . by far the most backward state in the nation when it comes to capital punishment . . .” etc.
So when Bush commits a gaffe, we all look bad, which brings us to the unfortunate matter of Jean Poutine, who is not the prime minister of Canada.
Some joker from a Canadian radio comedy show told Bush he had been endorsed by “Prime Minister Poutine of Canada.” Whereupon Bush thanked the prime minister for his support and said how important our neighbors to the north are to us all. Unfortunately, poutine is a form of Canadian junk food made with potatoes, cheese, and brown gravy (sounds awful). Granted, you ca
n’t find a quorum of Texans who know who the prime minister of Canada is, so this sounds at first like another one of those stupid “gotcha” quizzes. But any Texan who’s ever been involved in national politics does know that no foreign head of state would ever make an endorsement in either a primary or a general election.
Ever heard the phrase “that’s an internal political matter”? If a head of state were to violate this long-standing diplomatic tradition, it would be a matter for stiff notes between state departments, apologies demanded—for all I know, breaks threatened in diplomatic relations and ambassadors recalled. It would be a whale of a flap. Why didn’t Bush know that? True, the United States has been known to favor one side or the other in a foreign election. Among other memorable episodes, we worked to defeat Salvador Allende in Chile in the seventies, with the usual dubious results. But we do things like that covertly; we don’t have the president instructing citizens of other countries on how he wants them to vote. Think of the ruckus.