Leaving Edita to tell the boys a story, I returned to the piano bench to listen, yet again, to the C-major scale. There are days when the only family value in our household is just hanging on.
Yet even on evenings like this one, I find raising children incomparably more satisfying than anything else I have ever done. When I was single all I thought about was myself. Would I get a good or bad speech assignment when the next batch of work was handed out? Would I get a good or bad seat assignment the next time I flew on Air Force One? Now all I think about is money. Yet there is nothing self-absorbed about it. I have mortgage payments to make, medical bills to pay, clothes to buy—I never understood how fleetingly time passes until I began watching four children outgrow their sneakers. Working to support my family is the least selfish way I have ever lived.
I keep thinking back to one of those passages on the Web site of the Texas GOP. “The traditional family and the values it fosters are the foundation of American society.” When I read those words I can almost hear them being intoned by a sanctimonious southern voice, as if Jerry Falwell were giving a sermon in my head. But you know what? I believe them.
“Okay, here’s the way it sorts out between me and the South,” I said. David Brady, in his office at Stanford business school, where he is an associate dean, leaned back in his chair and put one foot up on his desk. David, I had learned, subscribed, at least in part, to the anti-southern school of thought. I wanted to have it out with him.
“I’m skeptical of the South,” I continued. “I can’t stand grits. I don’t buy CDs by the Gatlin Brothers, and I would pay good money not to have to listen to Reba McEntire.
“But look at what has happened in American culture. Just half a century ago getting divorced was difficult, abortion was illegal, and the idea that two gays or lesbians should be granted the same legal status as a husband and wife would have been considered ridiculous. Half a century, David, that’s all—half a century and the entire moral order has been turned upside down. Southern Republicans are just about the only people who have the courage to suggest that throwing out five thousand years of Judeo-Christian moral teaching might not be such a hot idea. Remember that quotation from Flannery O’Connor? ‘You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.’ Southern Republicans aren’t letting themselves get pushed around—not by northern liberals, not by popular culture, not by the age. They’re pushing back good and hard. And I say God bless ’em.”
“You say ‘God bless ’em?’ ” David replied. “I say the year is 1870. White southerners are watching their former slaves get elected to state legislatures. There’s only one group of people that pushes back, and that’s the Ku Klux Klan. So white people say, ‘God bless them.’ ”
“Oh, come on,” I replied. “The Klan was wrong and everybody knows it. What I’m arguing is that the moral values of southern Republicans are the moral values that shaped western culture.”
“And what I’m arguing is that times change.” David took his foot down from the desk. “Look,” he continued, “I don’t buy Caldwell’s argument that the South is driving the rest of the country away from the GOP. The South these days is becoming more and more like everyplace else, and most Republicans in the South are like most Republicans outside the South. But where Caldwell has a point is with the religious right—the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons. If you’ve got a party in which people like that are setting the tone, then you can be sure the party won’t carry the Northeast or California. Fortunately the tone these days is being set by George W. Bush, and he’s a compassionate conservative, with the emphasis on ‘compassionate,’ not a moralizer.”
“Not a moralizer? But, David, half the reason Bush has been doing so well in the polls is that people are sick of Clinton’s immorality. Don’t look so pained. ‘Immorality’ is a perfectly good word, even if the only place it gets used these days is south of the Mason-Dixon line.”
David eyed me for a moment. “Are you saying you want to bring back the morality that I grew up with in the 1950s? Is that it? No sex before marriage? Gays forced to stay in the closet? Peter, let me clue you in, that world is gone. Restore the nuclear family? With mommy keeping house while daddy goes to work? We’ve got a divorce rate of 50 percent. More than half of all women work outside the home. Outlaw abortion? Something like 70 percent of the public wants abortion to be available in certain circumstances.”
“So what are you saying?” I replied. “That there are no enduring moral values? That the sexual revolution was right but the Ten Commandments were all a big mistake?”
“I’m not talking values, I’m talking politics,” David said. “And if the religious right tries to turn back the clock to the 1950s, it’s going to make the job of centrists like Bush—people who actually stand a chance of winning elections in this country—a lot harder. There aren’t that many evangelicals—probably no more than a third of all southern Republicans, even in Deep South states like Mississippi and South Carolina. They can’t turn the whole country against the GOP. But they can cause trouble, especially since the press will always play them up. Remember, the press wants the Republican Party to look like a bunch of throwbacks.”
“You may be right.” I replied. “But I’m not sure I even care. I’ll say it again. Southern Republicans have courage. Sometimes you have to take positions even if they don’t win votes.”
“That’s what I like,” David said. “Politics as the art of the impossible.”
* * *
In a way David Brady and I were doing nothing more than discussing one of the basic principles you’d hear described in Political Science 101 in any university in the country. Every political party faces a perpetual dilemma. To win, it must make compromises. Yet to make winning worthwhile, it must resist compromises, standing instead on principles.
Republicans in Dixie are the kind of people who believe that abortion should be restricted while guns are made available, not the other way around. Yet if David is correct—and he reads polls all the time—that’s not exactly a winning position on the coasts.
What’s the GOP to do? Drop family values and set to work building a base outside the South? That would please those who subscribe to the anti-southern school of thought. Insist on family values, retaining the southern base while trusting that, eventually, other regions will come to respect the integrity of the GOP’s positions? That would please me.
The most likely outcome is of course neither and both. As professors in Political Science 101 would attest, no successful party will ever cut itself off from its base—or ever stop trying to expand it. Hence the dilemma—principles or compromises—is one the GOP can never escape, any more than Republicans in the East or West can ever escape their fellow Republicans down South.
Chapter Four
COOL AND UNCOOL, OR MEDIALAND
Journal entry:
On the Bush campaign jet from Los Angeles to Sacramento this morning, I sat with the press in coach while Bush and his staff sat up front, in first class. Once the jet reached cruising altitude, Bush’s press secretary, Karen Hughes, a tall, broad-shouldered, businesslike woman, appeared from behind the curtain that separated the two compartments to walk down the aisle and talk with the press. I had been looking forward to meeting her. When she and I had spoken by telephone a couple of weeks before, Hughes could hardly have been friendlier. She had told me that although the governor wouldn’t be giving any interviews during his swing through California, he might make an exception for me since I used to work for his father. Now, I thought, Hughes would recognize me, then find a quarter of an hour for me on the governor’s schedule later today or tomorrow—for that matter, she might even take me forward to first class right now.
“How ya doin’?” Hughes asked, shaking my hand. Her voice was warm, but the look in her eyes was flat and official. I told her my name twice. Both times she replied simply, “Good to meet ya.” When I tried to explain who I was, Hughes turned away. She continued down the aisle, greeting re
porters the same way she had greeted me, her voice friendly, her eyes keeping their distance. She reminded me of the treatment that American diplomats used to give their Soviet counterparts.
What had changed? When Hughes and I had spoken on the telephone, I realized, I had been a fellow Republican. Now I was a member of the media. As soon as I hung the press credentials around my neck, I might as well have defected.
Yes, I know. It seems odd for a book about Republicans to devote a chapter to the press and Hollywood, which are dominated by Democrats. But you cannot understand Republicans without understanding how much the news and entertainment media irk them. The GOP may have held the White House for half the postwar period and controlled both houses of Congress for the last six years, but resentment of the media remains as basic to the identity of Republicans as does resentment of the English to the identity of the Irish.
By traveling from the most Republican region of the country, Dixie, to the least Republican, the region inhabited, as it were, by the media, I hoped to benefit from the contrast. I understood why the South, once solidly Democratic, became Republican. Why couldn’t the media do the same?
PLEASE LIKE US
The Republican attitude toward the press is easy enough to demonstrate. All you have to do is talk to a Republican. Shortly after he left office, Pete Wilson, the Republican governor of California, and I had breakfast together. My notes indicate that it took no more than eight sentences for Pete—he insisted I call him by his first name—to begin railing against the press. As governor, Pete supported Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative under which the state of California would have denied all but emergency services to illegal immigrants. (The measure passed by large margins but was set aside in 1999 as the result of arbitration.) Pete told me that he had supported Proposition 187 on strict grounds. The federal government, which had failed in its duty to control the state’s border with Mexico, had no right to force the state’s taxpayers to provide illegal immigrants with the $3 to $4 billion in health care, education, and other services that they used each year. Yet the press had twisted Pete’s position, making it seem racist. Pete shook his head in exasperation. “It’s the goddamdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
There you have the authentic voice of the Republican. Pete Wilson’s political career spanned three decades. He served as a member of the California Assembly, as mayor of San Diego, as a United States senator, and as governor of the most populous state in the union, never losing a general election. What came to mind when he reflected upon his long and distinguished life in public service? Those sons of bitches in the press.
The governor had a point. Every poll of the press produces the same result. By a wide margin, the press is liberal. This bears repeating. The liberal press is no mere chimera of the Republican imagination. It exists. Consider just a few studies.
In 1988 a newsletter called The Journalist and Financial Reporting surveyed 151 business reporters from more than thirty publications. The respondents were business reporters, mind you, the ones you’d expect to be as conservative as any reporters ever are. By an overwhelming majority, the reporters described themselves as “liberal.”
In 1989 the American Society of Newspaper Editors surveyed 1,200 reporters and editors at seventy-two newspapers. Those who identified themselves as “liberal” outnumbered those who identified themselves as “conservative” by three to one.
In 1995 the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press published a study that compared the attitudes of the press with those of the public. Among the public, 40 percent called themselves “conservative.” Among the press? Five percent.
In 1996 the Freedom Foundation and the Roper Center released a survey of 139 reporters and bureau chiefs in Washington, D.C. Four years earlier, in 1992, the study found, 89 percent of the reporters and bureau chiefs voted for Clinton, only 7 percent for Bush. The proportion who identified themselves as registered Democrats? Fifty percent. The proportion who identified themselves as registered Republicans? Four percent.
If you eavesdrop on Republicans when the subject of press bias comes up, first you’ll hear them express their anger. But if you keep listening, eventually you’ll hear them express something that sounds a lot like insecurity as well. Reporting, fact checking, analysis, writing—all the jobs that the press performs require considerable intelligence and skill. Republicans know that. If the press is composed of such bright, talented people, Republicans often wonder, and sometimes even ask out loud, then why don’t they like us?
After years of trying to figure out why the press is biased against Republicans, I’ve collected just three explanations. Each contains some truth. Yet each suffers from limitations.
The first is that it’s simply the nature of the press to be adversarial. As the old saw puts it, the job of a reporter is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Since Republicans tend to be better off than Democrats—one of the most persistent patterns of American politics is that the higher a voter’s position on the income distribution, the more likely he is to be a Republican—the press regards Republicans with suspicion.
The problem with this explanation? The new economy. There are now well-established high-tech and entertainment plutocracies, large groups of very, very rich people who tend to be Democratic, not Republican. But the press doesn’t exactly line up to take them on.
The second explanation is that the structure of the news industry reflects the larger class structure of America itself. Reporters and editors get pushed around by Republican publishers, so they develop an antagonism for Republican bosses in society at large.
The trouble here? The explanation is decades out of date. Nowadays publishers are at least as liberal as their news staffs. Katherine Graham when she ran the Washington Post, Otis Chandler when he was still at the Los Angeles Times, the Sulzbergers at the New York Times. As David Brady put it, “These people aren’t Republican oppressors. They’re liberal saints, for Pete’s sake.”
The third explanation is that Republicans make for bad copy. This explanation has always struck me as the most compelling. The Republican agenda, after all, is often quite negative. Smaller government, fewer programs, lower taxes. If a Republican like me had his way, the three-ring, Barnum & Bailey-sized federal government would be reduced to the scope of a flea circus. But what would the press write about then?
In 1992, just a few weeks before President Clinton took office, I had lunch with a friend who writes for the New York Times. He could hardly wait for the Bush administration to end. As he saw it, nearly all that Bush had done was give boring speeches, hold press conferences in which he mangled the language, and produce budgets in which he did nothing more inspired than split his differences with the Democrats. Clinton promised instead to give stirring speeches, hold quotable press conferences, and undertake dozens of dramatic policy initiatives. You might think my friend was talking like a liberal. He wasn’t. He was talking like a reporter. What he saw was a simple set of truths. Bush equals bad copy, Clinton equals good copy.
The problem with this explanation? Ronald Reagan. Reagan equaled good copy—for most of the 1980s he equaled better copy than almost anyone else on the planet. He cut taxes, rebuilt the military, and held a series of summit meetings with Gorbachev, providing the press with one huge story after another. But I’d be willing to wager that even fewer members of the Washington press corps voted for Reagan than voted for Bush.
It’s worth noting that the press is liberal in every western democracy in the world. “Look,” David Brady told me, “the reason the press is liberal is one of those deep questions that combines history, psychology, and for all I know anthropology and half a dozen other disciplines. Why are WASPs Republicans?” David asked. “Why are the Irish Democrats? Who the hell knows? Sure, you can come up with this or that explanation, but none of them even comes close to a complete answer. You just have to take it as one of the stipulations of Democratic politics. The press is liberal. It just frigging w
ell is.”
Hence the Republican predicament. They’d like the press to like them—they really would. But it doesn’t—and no matter how hard they try, Republicans can’t quite figure out why.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
If you want a rough measure of the extent to which Hollywood is Democratic, look at political fund-raisers. President Clinton has held more than a dozen fund-raisers in Hollywood and its environs. The price per plate at these events has ranged from $5,000 to $10,000. Virtually every studio head, actor, agent, and supermodel of any standing has ponied up to attend at least one. Moguls such as Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Lew Wasserman, David Bronfman, and Steven Spielberg (Spielberg is so close to Clinton that Clinton has been an overnight guest in Spielberg’s home). Stars such as Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Barbra Streisand (Streisand is so close to Clinton that she has stayed as an overnight guest in Clinton’s home, the White House).
It's My Party Page 7