Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays

by Norman Mailer

  BARBARA BUSH: I don’t know the answer to your question and so, in all honesty, don’t ask it. Pro or con. I just don’t want to get into it. I’ve had it with abortion.

  She could front any confrontation. The day before she had said, “It’s a personal choice.… The personal things should be left out of … platforms and conventions.” She had said that during a televised interview in a simple setting. The only picture in the room was on the end table next to her, and it was a framed photograph (signed, presumably) of Pope John Paul II. She could offer every indication to Republican women that she was their advocate for choice in the land, while reassuring the religious right by dint of her close respect for John Paul II—no champion of abortion was he!

  Speak of presumption, let us leave these musings of George Bush to hack away at the matter on our own. Concerning abortion, Barbara Bush is leaving just the kind of mixed message that only a monarch can dare to send out. Mixed messages are the prerogative of kings and queens; they are supposed to represent the entirety of the populace.

  That was just what she did in her speech on family values. It was no rhetorical gem. On the page, it read like one of those decaffeinated pieces of prose that used to blanket the old Reader’s Digest, affirmative, highly simplified, and emotionally available to anyone whose IQ had managed to stay below 100. But the GOP, we can assume, was profoundly aware, along with Barbara Bush, that most of the electorate was right there, right under that magic number.

  Virtually at her commencement, she paid lip service to other orators: “There is something not quite right here … speeches by President Ronald Reagan, President Gerald Ford, Secretary Jack Kemp, Senator Phil Gramm, and … Barbara Bush?!” It was evident already that despite her protestations, she was an exceptionally good speaker, and this because of one exceptional and virtuous ability—she could address tens of thousands of people as if they were not more than two or three individuals sitting across from her on a couch. This faculty is available to few, and it suggests she had managed some exceptional transcendence—a woman once sensitive about her stocky build and much-lined face, her dumpy presence once so remarked in relation to Nancy Reagan, had undergone, now that she in turn had become First Lady, so many rites of passage, that she was now possessed of a consummate ease in public. So she gave her audience in the Astrodome a satisfaction they had found nowhere else—a wholly comfortable, social, witty, and reigning queen in their midst; yes, Barbara Bush was politics in the deepest sense, even as is monarchy. Her confidence suggested that one thing at least was right in the world—herself! We vote for what looks right.

  So the royal presence that the Reagans had imperfectly commenced, the Bushes had now developed. The presidency had become a monarchy. In place of landed estates or thousand-year-old families, we had endowed symbols—endowed by the psychic etching upon our values of our quick history and, intrinsic to us, our American entertainment. Our symbols and our heraldry were in our American West, our Cavalry, the Marines, the Air Corps, the spirit-of-the-fourth-quarter, Notre Dame, and the kind of family values that had come down to us from Queen Victoria and been brought over by boatloads of immigrants, a sense of propriety brought up to the mark now by Queen Mother Barbara, and our own not wholly overpowering King George, a fantasy of rich national theater. However, since Mr. and Mrs. Bush partook of it as only WASP gentry and WASP vigor can settle into a set of roles they are able to spend their lives living out, but will never name, a subliminal nourishment was there for that part of America which could hardly survive without the certainty of a single powerful and uplifting idea, the unvoiced sense that Barbara Bush was, for all effects, our queen and so could underwrite the religion beneath all other American religions—America itself. Well, thought the Republicans, we’ll win by an avalanche if we can only keep the focus on Hillary versus Barbara, Hillary with her feminist intelligence and her hairband.

  For the speech itself little registers in the text unless we bring the emoluments of her presence to it. Speaking of her husband, she moved him safely out of harm’s way with queenly dispatch:

  I always feel wonderful when I get to talk about the strongest, most decent, most caring, wisest, and yes … handsomest man I have ever known … George Bush. Now I am here to thank hundreds of communities across the country for one of the great privileges George and I have had in the last four years … the chance to meet so many American families and to be in your homes. We have learned from you. And we look forward to meeting many more of you with four more years! We’ve met thousands of wonderful families, we include extended families … we mean the neighbors, even the community itself.

  and gave the enumeration:

  Heroic simple mothers and fathers, and grandparents … now raising their grandchildren … we’ve visited literacy classes where courageous parents were learning to read … we’ve held crack babies and babies with AIDS … George and I have seen communities gather around parents with a gravely ill child … times in our lives when we, too, couldn’t have made it without our neighbors … shared moments with [Persian Gulf families] … those yellow-ribboned towns not only wrapped trees and posts, they also wrapped their arms around their young families … as in our family, as in American families everywhere, the parents we’ve met are determined to teach their children integrity, strength, responsibility, courage, sharing, love of God, and pride in being an American. However you define family, that’s what we mean by family values.

  The Republicans in the Astrodome were delirious. They could believe in victory for the first time. Clinton’s lead was vanishing even as the First Lady spoke. For there was depth to this gambit. It would appeal not only to all who were happy and fierce about their family, but one could probably add in a host of those loners bereft of family, plus the unhappy families that wished to be happy so much that their hearts tugged at the thought that it might still be possible. Family values was bound to exert a force on 75 percent of the vote—all the people who were in favor of Barbara.

  You may be exhausted from working a job … or two jobs and taking care of your children, or you may have put your career on hold. Either way, you may wonder, as I did every now and then, am I really doing the right thing?… Yes, you are … from the bottom of my heart I’m here to tell you that you are doing the right thing and God bless you for it.

  Who would ever have believed there was any other side to her tonight? When the scandal about George had hit the fan just a week before the convention, and the media had been teeming with tales, not quite nailed down, of George and Jennifer Fitzgerald, Barbara Bush had called the reports “deceitful,” “harmful,” “mean,” “ugly.” That was to the media at large. To one interviewer, for whom she may have had a fond spot, she had laughed and said, “It’s funny. Nobody ever asks if I’ve fooled around.”

  Who knew? With all the Republican candidates for ’96, could she be wholly out of her mind if occasionally she had an errant thought or two about who might be added to the list? History, we know, has its own mordant sense of humor. Tonight, with seventeen children and grandchildren surrounding Barbara and George, the story about Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, and Soon-Yi was circulating happily among the Republicans. William Kristol, an able servant in the development of the Republican mind—he was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff—was heard to remark at a press briefing, “I’m tempted to say Woody Allen is a good Democrat and leave it at that.” Newt Gingrich looked to rake in the pot. “Woody Allen having nonincest with a nondaughter to whom he was a nonfather because they were a nonfamily fits the Democratic platform perfectly.”

  William J. Bennett, the former secretary of education and the drug czar for the Bush administration, was chosen to nominate Dan Quayle, a well-thought-out selection since Bennett was reminiscent of Pat O’Brien in the movies of the thirties and forties where he would play a tough priest. Bennett gave a quiet, principled, conservative speech and concluded with a dignified series of encomiums for Dan Quayle. He has succeeded, said Bennett,

  in sparking ne
eded debate about our most important social issue: the values by which we live and which we convey to our children. He has stood for family values. He has stood up against his critics. He has been principled and courageous and in response he has been belittled, but he has not been silenced. Through it all, this good and decent man has demonstrated grace and resolve and resilience. He has earned our respect. And we should stand by our man.

  On the following night, Thursday, last session of the convention, it was up to Dan Quayle to fit such specifications. No routine task. One would have needed the light forged by inner contests with one’s rage and anguish, and Quayle, from the day he had been chosen by Bush in 1988, had been unable to take in one breath that was not predeterminedly partisan. Embattled, ridiculed, in liege to a wife who seemed twice as strong as he was and eight times more opinionated, he had had a full term of skirmishing with the media, and now, four years later, his petulance still leaked through. After a bow to the greatness of George Bush, he said:

  I know my critics wish I were not standing here tonight. They don’t like our values. They look down on our beliefs. They’re afraid of our ideas. And they know the American people stand on our side. That is why, when someone confronts them, they will stop at nothing to destroy him. To them I say: You have failed. I stand before you, and before the American people—unbowed, unbroken, and ready to keep fighting for our beliefs.

  To this he added extempore: “I’ll never surrender, never quit, never retreat,” which was reminiscent of Churchill’s speech after Dunkirk, but then Churchill, quite as easily as Quayle, could have been seriously influenced in adolescence by Thomas Henley’s “Invictus”: “Out of the night that covers me / black as the pit from pole to pole / I thank whatever gods may be / for my unconquerable soul.”

  Quayle might speak with defiance, but he still seemed not so much unfinished as uncommenced. “It is not just a difference between conservative and liberal,” said Quayle, speaking with the sanctimoniousness that no politician in America seemed to have in greater supply, “it is a difference between fighting for what is right and refusing to see what is wrong.” That is probably why he inspired such hostility in the media. A young, rich, good-looking man does well not to be pious—piety, we sense, is not convincing unless it is based on tragedy and dread. Even as he threw down the gauntlet, he lacked dimension, a mediocre actor reciting a line more powerful than the true register of his experience.

  Besides, he lacked taste. He mashed tuna salad and blueberry muffins into the same picnic baggie:

  We have taught our children to respect single parents and their challenges—challenges that faced my grandmother many years ago and my own sister today. And we have taught our children about the tragedy of diseases like breast cancer—which took the life of Marilyn’s mother. Marilyn and I have hosted an annual event called the Race for the Cure of Breast Cancer. Two months ago, twenty thousand runners, men and women, young and old, joined us in the nation’s capital to race for the cure.

  Let us give him credit, however, for the interesting point he did make. He was all for reforming the legal system. If he did not say how he would bring this about without government interference, he did, at least, point to one of the first of our economic ills:

  America has 5 percent of the world’s population and 70 percent of the world’s lawyers. I have nothing against lawyers—at least most of them. I’m a lawyer; I’m married to one. When we worked our way through night law school, Marilyn and I looked forward with pride to becoming part of the finest legal system in the world. But today our country has a problem: our legal system is costing consumers $300 billion a year. The litigation explosion has damaged our competitiveness; it has wiped out jobs; it has forced doctors to quit practicing in places where they are needed most. Every American knows the legal system is broken—and now is the time to fix it.

  Yes, indeed, and would he lead the war against the nonproductive costs put into our economic system by all the law firms that did corporate work?

  Packed around the floor under the podium, cheering every phrase, placards pumping, voices chanting, and with a high tropism for the nearest television lens, the Republican Youth Delegate Program, also known as the Youth Group, had been powering it up so masterfully for Dan Quayle that if one had not seen them do as much for Pat Buchanan, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Phil Gramm, and Lynn Martin, the impression could have developed that Quayle’s address to the convention had gotten him off to a good start for ’96. The essence of successful prostitution, however, even when it is merely spiritual, is an exaggerated if temporary enthusiasm for the client, and the Youth Group had certainly done as much for each of the other speakers. Two hundred strong, picked for Republican balance in gender and ethnicity—a judicious spotting of black, Hispanic, and Asian faces—they were Republican high school and college students who would be future politicians, and so were up each day by five in the morning and did not pack their convention gear until after midnight, a special corps bused from rally to rally and event after event, there to give life to the TV crews outside and inside the Astrodome.

  They certainly did their best for Quayle, and if one did not discern the drop in intensity as one moved farther away from the podium, there would have been no way to explain the little economic fact that over in the Astroarena, down in the shopping center, Buchanan buttons were selling briskly, Kemp buttons modestly, and Quayle buttons were not moving at all. How severe are the findings of the competitive free market! By its stern laws and principles, the unsuccessful are equal to the undeserving. Quayle’s buttons would be cast out on Friday.

  Enter George Bush. Once again, as in 1988, he would have to give the speech of his life. Or so it was generally agreed. The feeling among Republicans was that family values had taken a full bite out of the Democrats’ lead in the polls, and if George could deliver on this occasion, parity might be near.

  Bush had fretted over the need to prove himself one more time. It was as if he could not overcome his resentment that he, the conqueror of the Persian Gulf, was still obliged to seek victory through oratorical splendor. Whatever his desires, he had ended as the focus of narrative interest for this four-day convention. Would he or would he not startle and encourage the nation with new ideas and new policies? Or would he fail to?

  Thursday morning at an ecumenical prayer breakfast, he had said, “Tonight, I give my acceptance speech—and if it catches fire, it may give a whole new meaning to the burning Bush.” A humorous remark, but a vain hope. He was too angry within: the delegates were treated instead to the smoldering Bush. If Clinton had failed to deliver a great speech and took fifty-four minutes to prove it, the same sentence could now be employed for George Bush except that he ate up fifty-eight minutes.

  On reflection, there was a difference in the nature of their journeyman gifts at the podium. Clinton had elucidated a number of points and programs, even if he had felt obliged to do it three times over; the president, having no new themes, provided a hundred applause lines. In the beginning, response came quickly and frenetically, his audience steamed up to hysteria not only by the Youth Group, packed in whole compressions of young humanity under his nose at the podium, but from the delegates on the floor, superheated in the first minutes of this hour of climax, ergo George Bush had difficulties handling the din. His first estimated ten minutes must have consumed twenty. Nor was he simple and modestly appealing as he had been in ’88 with Peggy Noonan’s speech. Tonight, the text read like a committee production, and by the end, a quiet pall was on the Astrodome, not unreminiscent of Bill Clinton’s last ten minutes at the Garden.

  So it is pointless to do more than give a most restricted sampling of what he offered. He had, after all, said it before, and would say it again. His contribution to the problem of the economy was to tell again his tale of woe. Blame must fall on the head of Congress. The speech, like his ideas, was scattered in bits and pieces, a Broadway comedy which cashed laugh after laugh and left its audience muttering, “What an empty show!�
�� The longer it went, the more one became aware that the center of narrative interest, the philosophical content, was the one protagonist that never appeared.

  Here, then, is Bush’s climactic speech presented in selected snippets that will prove less injurious to him than the complete text:

  This convention is the first at which an American president can say—the cold war is over, and freedom finished first.… I saw the chance to rid our children’s dreams of the nuclear nightmare and I did … when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.… What about the leader of the Arkansas National Guard—the man who hopes to be commander in chief? Well, while I bit the bullet, he bit his nails.… Sounds to me like his policy can be summed up by a road sign he’s probably seen on his bus tour, SLIPPERY WHEN WET … Who do you trust in this election? The candidate who raised taxes one time or the other candidate who raised taxes and fees 128 times, and enjoyed it every time?

  Listening carefully in one of the VIP boxes above the floor was Jim Baker. Studying his expression, one could only decide that he was not the fellow to play poker with—by his expression you could not tell whether Baker was enthralled, appalled, or bored. As Bush went on, Baker proceeded to study the text of the speech with the concentration others might give to a musical score. Was he noting which lines produced more genuine response or less than he had anticipated?

  Now, I know Americans are tired of the blame game, tired of people in Washington acting like they are candidates for the next episode of American Gladiators. I don’t like it either. Neither should you. But the truth is the truth. Our policies haven’t failed; they haven’t even been tried.

  It was a long exercise in the use of the larynx to come from a man whose voice was sixty-eight years old, and he was beginning to whine—indeed, the timbre of complaint was beginning to remind one of Quayle.