Out of My Mind (29 page)

“Go ahead. You got a tape recorder?”

I didn't have a tape recorder handy so I didn't record anything.

“What were you going to ask me?” he said.

“I was going to ask whether you get tired of the same old Monica Lewinsky questions. I've been predicting you're going to stop doing these interviews.”

“Well, it does get sort of old,” he said.

“I read where the manuscript was in longhand. The book is 957 pages long. How many pages was it as you wrote it out in longhand?”

He laughed. “It was long,” he said, “That's why it took so long to edit it.”

“It was cut down?” I asked. “You mean it was originally longer?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Do you type?” I asked.

“Well, I type some and some of it was in longhand. But I dictated most of it.”

“You dictated?”

“Yeah. I think better when I'm walking around.”

I mumbled again.

“Want me to send you a copy?” he asked.

“Can I get one that isn't autographed?” I asked. “It might be a collector's item.”

In retrospect, I realize I didn't do very well with the conversation. It took me quite a while to get over the shock and my initial suspicion about whether it really was Bill Clinton slowed me down. I don't very often get a telephone call at eight in the morning from a former president of the United States.

OK. Now then. Where was I going when I started about an imaginary interview with Bill Clinton before he called me and I actually interviewed him on the phone? It was one of the most pleasant and most amazing coincidences of my life.

It is commonly accepted as fact that Big Business is at war with Big Government.

I would like to say, in a nice, quiet, polite way that this is horse manure. Big Business is in business with Big Government. They are best friends. Too often they exclude the rest of us from their behind-the-scenes dealings. We don't know what goes on.

About half the people who leave government jobs, including those who served in Congress, go to work for more money as lobbyists. They work for major corporations trying (often successfully) to influence the decisions of the government agencies they left. For some of them, being elected to Congress or getting a government job is just a stepping stone to a job as lobbyist with higher pay. The pay for U. S. representatives and senators is $157,000. The starting salary for a lobbyist with any connections in government is around $300,000 now.

The popular concept is that Democrats favor more government and Republicans want less, but there are more government employees now than there were under President Clinton.

Government spending in Washington increased by a whopping 30 percent between 2000 and 2004 to a record $2.29 trillion.

One of the bad things about the power of lobbyists to influence the laws under which businesses operate is that the biggest corporations with the most money can afford to pay the most influential lobbyists to get things their way. The little guys in small companies who don't have a million to pay an influence peddler are squeezed out. The big get bigger; the rich get richer.

The huge salaries made by lobbyists are a temptation many legislators can't resist. Lobbying companies and trade associations trying to influence government decisions in their favor offer former government officials millions to work for them. Marc Racicot, who made $75,000 as governor of Montana and then became head of the Republican National Committee, is going to get a million dollars a year as president of a lobbying firm euphemistically called “the American Insurance Association.” Former Representative Robert Livingston of Louisiana was chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He knows where the money is buried. Livingston is now president of a thriving lobbying company.

If you think it's only Republicans who are digging in this lobbying gold mine, note that former vice president and one-time head Democrat Al Gore joined the board of directors of Apple Computer for an undisclosed salary that was probably too embarrassingly big to be disclosed. You can bet it was ten times the $175,000 he got as vice president.

Lobbying is a Washington tradition most of us don't like or understand. I, for example, do not like or understand why the American Ambulance Association pays $300,000 a year to a lobbying company. I'm sure, though, that they get their money back and we pay it when we call an ambulance.

Last year, Hewlett-Packard paid lobbyists $734,000 trying to get Republicans to pass legislation that would allow the company to pay a lot less tax on the $14 billion they made in profits from foreign companies they own. I wouldn't want to have to explain it to a class of eighthgraders, but if a company pays Chinese workers 35 cents an hour and sells what they make in the United States as if they had paid the workers $25 an hour, the company makes a lot of money.

If I ever give up writing for a living, I may become a lobbyist. I'll get Congress to pass a law paying old writers $300,000 a year not to write anything in order to give younger writers a better chance.

Many of President Bush's critics are being critical of him for the five-week summer vacation he's taking at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. I am neither critical nor envious because for half the money in the world you couldn't get me to go to Texas this time of year.

One of the worst things about being president is that someone keeps track of every little thing you do. According to these presidential record-keepers, George W. Bush has made forty-nine trips to his Texas ranch since taking office. He recently passed Ronald Reagan's modernday record of having spent 335 days away from the White House, and Bush still has a way to go.

James Madison holds the all-time presidential record for one vacation. He left Washington in June 1816 and didn't come back until October. He went to his country estate in Montpelier, Va.

George Washington took his vacations on his farm in Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon is only sixteen miles from where Washington is now. But George's office wasn't in Washington. There was no Washington, no White House yet. Washington didn't become our capital until 1800. George's office when he was president was in Philadelphia.

Vacations are easy for our presidents now. They don't have to go through security at the airport getting out of town because they have their own airplane. They don't have to remove their shoes or empty their pockets. All presidents have to do when they leave Washington is climb the steps to their plane, smile and wave goodbye to us as they get on board.

President Bush's father had a ranch in Texas, too, but didn't go there for his vacations much. He went to Maine, where he fished, played golf and sailed.

They take so much time, a person needs a long vacation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt went to his home in Hyde Park, overlooking the Hudson River but later he went to Warm Springs, Ga., for the therapeutic value of the waters.

President Kennedy took his vacations at the Kennedy family place in Hyannis on Cape Cod. Newspapers always called it “the Kennedy compound.”
Lyndon Johnson went to his ranch in Texas. Reporters who cover the president, whoever he is, hate it when he leaves Washington because they have to live and work under difficult conditions away from home. Presidents on vacation always arrange to have good pictures taken of themselves doing something that's healthy for them. When photographers went to Texas with Lyndon, they could depend on getting pictures of Johnson riding his horse. There are good pictures and bad pictures and a president on horseback is a good one.

A lot of presidents have gone to Florida for vacation. Warren Harding was the first president to go there but after that Harry Truman went there and Richard Nixon went often and stayed with his friend Bebe Rebozo in Key Biscayne. Nixon also went back to his place in San Clemente, Calif.

Bill Clinton didn't seem to have any roots in a vacation place, so he went with the crowd to Martha's Vineyard. I guess he'd heard that was the place to go. Jimmy Carter went to his peanut farm in Plains, Ga.

Gerald Ford was the best athlete we ever had as president. He had been an All-American football player at Michigan and the thing he liked to do most on vacation as president was ski in Colorado and stay at a Vail resort.

While a great many people who don't like President Bush are objecting to all this vacation time he's taking, the people most critical of him don't object at all. They're in favor of his long vacations. They say things are better in Washington when President Bush is on vacation than when he's at work.

Congress and the President have been playing a game recently, and so far the score is nothing to nothing.

The executive branch of our government, the President, and the legislative branch, Congress, have been at war. This has happened before in
our history but seldom have their differences been so numerous and pronounced as they are today. Even though members of Congress and the President are separately elected and independent, they are dependent on each other for getting something done. Right now, because neither side is winning, the rest of us are losing.

The battle for power that always exists between the President and Congress may be the major shortcoming of a democracy—but it's also its strength. The division of power keeps us from becoming a dictatorship. Over the years, we've had weak presidents and strong presidents. The weak ones caved in to Congress. The strong ones dominated it, but opposing Congress is not, by itself, a test of a president's greatness.

One defect in democracy as a system of government is its ineffectiveness. A dictatorship is efficient and effective. Too often, a democratic government is unable to act quickly on important issues. The governing bodies get tied up in arguments and end up nowhere.

No one is calling George W. Bush a great president but his opponents are calling him stubborn and dumb. Being disrespected by half the American public and much loved by the other half doesn't make George W. Bush special. Plenty of Americans hated the man and disagreed with the politics of Abe Lincoln. As president, Lincoln was so afraid Congress would disapprove of his Emancipation Proclamation that he waited until they'd adjourned before he issued it. Kind of sneaky, Abe.

It seems ridiculous to an outsider, me, that the President and members of Congress aren't sharing what they know and working out our problems together. The President doesn't trust Congress and tells them nothing. Many members of Congress don't trust the President, even some of his own party members, and don't give him the support he needs to get his programs approved.

If you want to be optimistic, you could say that inaction in Washington on the President's proposals is democracy at work. Maybe nowhere is just where we ought to be going.

Democracy is a magic word for us. We never question its virtues, but democracy is not always held in such high regard by other people. We
should be making it look good as a way of showing the whole world that it is the best system of government. Having Congress at war with the President is not the way to do that.

Considering how much faith we have in the ability of our democratic system for choosing our leaders, it's disappointing to look at how few great presidents we've had over the years. We've had good ones, bad ones and mediocre ones but very few great ones.

If pressed to answer a question about his own standing among the forty-two men we've had for president, I don't think George W. Bush would claim to be one of the great ones. I don't know what he thinks of his performance. He seems satisfied with his work but he also appears modest enough to deny ranking at the top. (As Winston Churchill said of his rival Clement Attlee, “He is a modest man—with a great deal to be modest about.”)

Power in the United States is, fortunately for all of us, not so much centralized in the presidency that the occupant of the Oval Office is solely responsible for the course the nation takes. The president, whoever he is, often diffuses his power by delegating a lot of it to others.

President Bush has spread his power thinner than most by turning over so much of his authority to helpers like Vice President Cheney, unelected assistants like Donald Rumsfeld and behind-the-scenes aides we didn't elect and don't even know, like Karl Rove.

It's too bad President Bush is not great because we're in need of greatness right now. We're in competition with Japan, China and the Arab countries for leadership of the world. We're still ahead but they're catching us. Of course, we might be better off if they did, so that the whole weight of the world wouldn't be on our shoulders.

There has often been a shortage of greatness in the White House. To unfairly pick a few examples off the bottom of my head, no one ever
accused Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon or the first George Bush of greatness. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is probably the only president of the twentieth century that future historians will put in the same rank with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. John F. Kennedy might have been on his way to Mount Rushmore but he was assassinated.

There are supporters who make a case for Lyndon Johnson, Truman and Ronald Reagan, but “great” is not the universal adjective used for any of them. Woodrow Wilson isn't a hero in the history books, although he was the first president to recognize that the United States needed to be part of a world alliance. His League of Nations was a good idea that failed, so he doesn't get any credit.

Our best presidents have found a way to overcome the most serious defect in our democracy—the seesaw balance of power in the relationship between Congress and the president that too often ends in inaction. Politically knowledgeable presidents like Lyndon Johnson knew how to play the House and Senate, but too often our presidents have been stymied by the legislature. President Bush isn't much in charge of either, even with his own Republican majority, and he has a way of alienating them.