Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0)

by Anna Quindlen

  This last week there’s been so much talk of positioning, a word that is offensive to voters, suggesting that winning their allegiance requires no more than a Happy Meal with a McPrinciple and a large middle ground. Mr. Clinton positioned himself as a moderate and friend of the middle class. He said it was time for a change in the party, to admit that the welfare system doesn’t work and that creating jobs is more important than creating entitiements.

  The Perot groundswell had nothing to do with positioning—there were few positions, even to the bitter end—and everything to do with a vast number of voters who believe that government and its citizens live in parallel universes. Paying seemly attention to the meaning of the Perot candidacy, Mr. Cuomo said in his nominating speech, “Before he told anyone what he intended to do or how he would do it, he used one word and the applause broke out all over America. The word was ‘change’!”

  That big broad vague message has preempted this election. The old Democratic stances have been muted and the theme of a new generation hammered home with everything from Elvis jokes to Fleetwood Mac anthems. The tone has been set: change. From here on in, Mr. Clinton must stand the dictum on its ear—the messenger has become critical, the messenger and his ability to look dirough the scrim of positioning and spin and electoral votes and simply say, “I see you. I know you. I am you.”

  ONE VIEW EITS ALL

  September 6, 1992

  My oldest kid invited the jock home the other day. The jock’s name is, of course, Kyle. He is a nice kid with an awesome arm, the kind who can choose a tree halfway down the road, pick up a stone, and—bing!—nail it while my son stands openmouthed.

  This is one of the great rituals of growing up, trying to puzzle out who you are by discovering who you are not. Our children bring home familiar strangers, archetypes who will, by contrast, teach them what they’re made of. There is something bittersweet about watching this, something that makes you want to give them simple answers instead of time and space. But figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience. So we let them be.

  I couldn’t help thinking of this when Pat Buchanan gave his hateful speech at the Republican convendon. You figure when you go on vacation certain events will pass you by. But the Buchanan speech has stayed with me because it was so insulting to the American people and so contrary to everything we value.

  The election, he said, “is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are.” Here’s the catch—who you are is who Pat Buchanan says you should be. Distrust differences. Revile people who are gay. Dismiss the aspirations of women. Reduce the answers to the problems of our cities to “force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.” Let your fears and hatreds be your guide. Invoke God to justify them.

  “There is a religious war going on in this country for the soul of America,” Mr. Buchanan said. And if you agree with him you are blessed. And if you do not you are damned.

  Thus did we learn of a simpler life, life without thought.

  Some Republicans were distressed by the us/them tone of Mr. Buchanan’s speech. But his hyperpitch does not stand alone. Pat Robertson, who also spoke at the convention, says that the equal rights amendment “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” (What? No cannibalism?) Marilyn Quayle, questioned about the wisdom of asking Mr. Buchanan to speak, said tight-lipped that he was the one who had done the asking. But Mrs. Quayle did some polarizing, too, saying liberals were “disappointed because women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women.” I don’t know what Mrs. Quayle defines as my essential nature; luckily, I worked that one out for myself a long time ago. I know it will probably take my daughter some time and some pain to figure out what being female means to her. Guide her with my beliefs and experiences, sure, but I will not garrote her with them. Maybe it would be a lot less difficult if she followed some all-purpose formula. But then she’d be a lot less human.

  In the weeks since the convention the Republicans have figured out what the rest of us were thinking as we sat in front of our televisions. They flogged this package they called family values. And you could almost hear millions of folks saying, “Guys, we’ll take care of our values if you take care of the economy.” And that is the point: we do take care of our own values, and it is an insult to have some pol stand up and tell us he has a handy-dandy all-purpose values package, one size fits all. The Republicans have now abandoned this campaign cul-de-sac. It would be nice if this was because they realized it was wrong. The truth is it just didn’t play.

  The Buchanan speech played least of all. Conscience is not simple; prejudices are not ennobling. The problems of L.A. require much more than automatic weapons. Good people disagree about abortion. Knowledge comes from discussion, not conclusion and exclusion.

  It is painful to watch our kids struggle to find themselves in a complicated world. But it would be more painful still to have that growth stunted by the kind of exclusionary and conclusory catechism offered by Mr. Buchanan. He calls himself a traditionalist. I am a traditionalist too. The tradition I cherish is the ideal this country was built upon, the concept of religious pluralism, of a plethora of opinions, of tolerance and not the jihad. Religious war, pooh. The war is between those who trust us to think and those who believe we must merely be led. Demagoguery vs. democracy.

  RUMOR HAS IT

  October 11, 1992

  The rumor moves quickly, from newspaper reporter to magazine writer to television correspondent and back again, in the whisper-down-the-lane world of journalism. Someone has said that Bill Clinton considered applying for citizenship in another country while trying to avoid the Vietnam draft.

  But it had a smell about it, a tinny taste: no one had actually seen a letter that was said to exist, but a friend of a friend knew someone who had. First one newspaper was said to be preparing a page-one story, then another. Some versions said the approach was to the Swedes; others said it was to British officials.

  I said Segretti.

  Segretti is the word I mutter when my conscious mind refuses to accept the gutter level of politics in America. Donald Segretti was a dirty trickster of the Watergate era who, among other tilings, infiltrated the campaign of Edmund Muskie to make sure the capable Maine Democrat would crash and burn during the primary season.

  There was the literature circulated during the Florida primary suggesting Senator Muskie supported Castro and forced busing. There were the stink bombs at appearances and the appearances mysteriously canceled. The coup de grace was the letter, on bogus Muskie campaign stationery, suggesting that Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson had engaged in sexual misconduct.

  Sure enough, in 1972 George McGovern was the Democratic nominee, and Richard M. Nixon, on whose behalf Mr. Segretti labored, won by a landslide.

  This would all be history if the president had not revealed in the last few days that he is living in the past, and the worst sort of past at that.

  It is astounding that Mr. Bush says that demonstrating against the Vietnam War, an honorable way for millions of us to register righteous dissent, was a dishonorable undertaking. It is astounding that he would suggest, with not a shred of evidence, that a trip Mr. Clinton made as a student to Russia was suspect.

  When Representative Robert Dornan, a stalking horse for the Bush campaign, said Mr. Clinton had gone to Moscow as a guest of the K.G.B., he didn’t even bother to concoct sources, as Mr. Segretti might have done in the old days. Mr. Dornan said he had no proof; he just thought it was so.

  Like most rumors, it is impossible to trace the one about Mr. Clinton’s citizenship to its source. The State Department certainly helped the rumor along by referring questions about alleged tampering with Mr. Clinton’s passport file to the F.B.I., the ultimate red flag. No one has explained how the State Department came to be looking at Mr. Clinton’s file in the first place, since it is protected by privacy laws and cannot be reviewed without
his consent.

  And no one has explained why a young man so ambitious that he wrote at twenty-three that he could not resist the draft and “maintain my political viability” would consider renouncing American citizenship. No one has to explain—it’s just a rumor, right? Nevertheless, Mr. Clinton has been placed in the position of having to deny it on several talk shows. He has also had to deny that his Russian trip included anything untoward. Thus does the rumor mill grind.

  Mr. Bush miscalculates, and miscalculates again. With his attacks on Mr. Clinton’s dissent during the Vietnam era, he insults a huge group of Americans who believed the policy in Southeast Asia was ill conceived. And he revives the Silent Majority divide-and-conquer strategy of Mr. Nixon, a strategy that was ultimately devalued by a growing body of opinion hostile to the war and the historical record on the corruption within the Nixon administration.

  The innuendo campaign about the Clinton trip and the Clinton antiwar activity makes it clear that the Bush campaign is both desperate and desperately out of touch. When the debates begin tonight, I hope the president remembers that most of us are living in 1992.

  Mr. Bush is stuck in a time warp, part Best Years of Our Lives, part Joe McCarthy. As he has done so often during this campaign, he has now backed off from his criticism of the Moscow trip, not because it was dishonest but because it didn’t play. And the F.B.I. announced Friday that it had ended its investigation into Mr. Clinton’s passport file without finding evidence of tampering. Thus does the rumor mill run out. It all stinks to high heaven; it all smells of desperation, but not of votes. Mr. Bush needs to get current and win friends. As Mr. Nixon could tell him, fighting dirty can be a chancy way to make them.

  A PLACE CALLED HOPE

  November 4, 1992

  For the last fifteen years Barbara Walters has been haunted by the comment she made to Jimmy Carter in a pre-inaugural interview. “Be wise with us,” she said. “Be good to us.” The truth is that we all know what she meant, because most of us, on one Tuesday in November or another, have felt at least a whiff of the same thing. It’s called hope.

  I flipped the little blackjack next to Bill Clinton’s name with hope, the first time I recall feeling that emotion since I cast my first vote for George McGovern in 1972. If ever a man has been tested for the presidency, it is this one, not in Vietnam or even in the trenches of long life, but in the court of public opinion.

  My polling place was choked with voters; even children wanted to stay up and hear the news. Everyone is eager to say that this is because the American people seized the day. And they did, fashioning a real contest from common sense, Larry King, the debates, the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, the pages of their newspapers, the Today show, endless dinner-table discussions, and concern for their children and their checkbooks.

  In time there will be many postmortems of this election, but one thing they should all have in common is the admission that Bill Clinton ran the best Democratic campaign in recent memory, and George Bush the worst Republican one. The man who was inexorable vs. the man who didn’t turn up, then turned nasty. History will record that the president turned in two lackluster debate performances and that when he got his campaign back on course with questions about higher taxes and misplaced trust, he derailed it himself by the sophomoric gaffe of calling his opponents “bozos” and comparing their expertise to that of his spaniel. They say it’s not over till the fat lady sings; I say when the dogs rear their heads, it’s time to bow-wow out.

  But ultimately the president’s greatest burden was his own first term. On the morning after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, the editorial page of this paper thundered: “The Republicans got what they richly deserved. During the past 12 years they have displayed that insensate pride which goeth before destruction.… Four years ago Republicans promised, under their benign guidance, an ever-ascending scale of prosperity, just before the worst and longest financial and industrial and agricultural disaster fell upon the land.” And the editorial added, “There can be no mistaking the determination of the American electorate to order a change in their government and in its policies.” I am a working mother, a feminist, and a reporter whose enduring interest has been in the small moments of the lives of unsung people, the kind of people who ride in limos only when someone in the family dies. I thought George Bush was not interested in, not even aware of, most of those disparate parts of my life, whether vetoing family leave, nominating Clarence Thomas, or talking endlessly about a capital gains tax.

  One night I saw Bill Clinton on the news say, “The hits that I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits the people of this state and this country have been taking for a long time.” And I began to believe that he saw us. I began to believe that growing up struggling to make ends meet, learning to live with an alcoholic parent, losing the governor’s office because of the hubris of the young and cocky, and taking the hits about infidelity, patriotism, and moral spine that he had taken during this campaign might have taught him something about hard times.

  Every once in a while I want a little hope, the way some people want a martini or a new pair of shoes. That’s what Barbara Walters was trying to get at when she talked to Jimmy Carter. People said she didn’t act like a journalist, and maybe there’s some truth in that. But maybe there are simply some occasions when we reporters, despite our best intentions, can’t help acting like human beings.

  Yesterday was one of them. I could be cynical about the possibility of real change and the manifest dangers of expectations. I could talk about the enormous challenges to come. But not right now. This is Mr. Clinton’s moment; he deserves it and I am glad he prevailed. You walk into the voting booth and each time you pull the little lever there is implicit in the gesture a tiny leap of faith. And this time some hope as well. For at least a moment, I’ll make it last.

  WOMEN’S RITES

  If anyone had told me even ten years ago that I would, in my first years as an Op-Ed columnist, write more columns about abortion that any other single subject, I would have been both incredulous and disconcerted. The reasons are obvious. I am Catholic. I have three beloved children whose gestation, delivery, and rearing have been my greatest joy. And I have been, for most of my life, deeply ambivalent about abortion, about what it is, what it means, and how we think about it.

  None of those things changed during the time that I wrote an opinion column. But what they came to mean to me within the context of the unquenchable fire of the abortion debate that raged in America during the last decade of the twentieth century changed a good deal.

  The truth is that no matter what I had eventually come to believe, think, and feel about the subject, I would have been remiss in my mandate as an opinion columnist, and particularly as a woman in the job, if I had not written with some regularity about the subject. Only think: during 1990, 1991, and 1992 Supreme Court justices were apparently chosen on the basis of their perceived positions on the issue, several American cities were thrown into tumult because of demonstrations about it, it became a defining issue in a presidential campaign, and the Supreme Court handed down one of its most important and eloquent opinions on the subject. No one can claim it is an exaggeration to say that abortion became the most talked about and controversial issue in this country during the 1990s. And that shows no signs of abating.

  “When do you think it will be settled?” people sometimes ask. And I think the answer is clear: it will never be settled. That alone makes it an issue different from most others, and more compelling, too.

  But for me it is also the issue that most embodies the name that was eventually cooked up for my column when we began it in 1990. It took us a long, long time to find a name. We would think something sounded right, send it to the legal department to be vetted, and find out that some other publication was already using it. (The best blowout was the name “Persuasion,” which I floated primarily because I am a great Jane Austen fan. It turned out that “Persuasion” was already the name o
f a column—an advice column in a sadomasochistic skin mag.)

  The editorial-page editor, Jack Rosenthal, finally came up with the name “Public & Private” modeled, in part, after Walter Lippmann’s “Today and Tomorrow.” At first I found it serviceable but not particularly illuminating; eventually I found it perfect. For I became most interested in writing about the intersection of the private and the public, most convinced that that was where the action was. The economy as reflected in the job search by a fifty-year-old middle-management type, the issues of welfare dependency embodied in one reluctant welfare mother—the policy without the personal seemed to me empty, the personal without the political not telling enough. The two together spoke the truth.

  And nowhere is this more true than on the question of who will and should decide whether an individual pregnancy must be taken to its endpoint of birth and motherhood. It was because of my private feelings that my public profile became so determinedly that of an advocate for legal abortion.

  (A word on words here: the words we use to talk about abortion are among the most unsatisfactory in any public dialogue. Both pro-life and pro-choice are oversimplifications, and nothing about this issue is simple. So at a certain point I tried to give up both and simply refer to the two groups as those opposed to legal abortion, and those in favor of it. This adds words and, when 750 is your limit, added words are unhappy events. But the alternative was distortion by oversimplification, which is, to my mind, no alternative at all.)

  My Catholicism has in fact guided me to that position, because it first led me to the idea that the act of an individual examining her conscience to search for wrongdoing was honorable and proper. My three children, while the greatest joy of my life, were all wanted but exhausting, so that, having them and rearing them, I felt conscious of the potential damage to both mother and child of an unwanted pregnancy in a way I doubted many of the male leaders of the movement against abortion, so blithe in their assumption that one could make do, would ever be.