The Last Empire (32 page)

Mary’s first impression of James: “I took a look at him . . . a squinty-eyed, bald-headed skinny guy. He was wearing skin-tight jeans and a little muscle-man shirt with a green turtleneck collar. I’ll bet any amount of money that he doesn’t remember what I was wearing.”
James:
“I know she had her hair the way I don’t like it.”

In the spring of 1991, Bush of Mesopotamia looks to be unbeatable. Such Democratic powerhouses as Lloyd Bentsen decide that it is impossible to beat him and choose not to run. Then two things happen. First, John Heinz, Senator from Pennsylvania, is killed in a plane crash. Next, Governor Casey, in violation of every law of American politics, appoints the man best qualified to be a senator, Harris Wofford. A special election is called. Enter James, campaign director. A long shot, Wofford is elected on universal health care. An issue is born. Also a political star: James is now in a position to audition Democratic candidates for the 1992 election. He turns down Senators Bob Kerrey and Tom Harkin. He takes on Clinton. He meets Mary, who has a strong sense of professional hierarchy. James is strictly a statewide operator while she is Presidential. When she learns that James has leapt above his humble station, she goes, as they say in the book, ballistic. How can what is now a couple be on opposing sides in a Presidential
election? Grimly, Mary thinks, “If I didn’t get [the job] because of Carville I’d have to kill him.” But she gets it.

The media are mildly bemused by the situation. But then, like Wall to Pyramus and Thisbe, the media, which now keep them physically apart, bring them together. They are forever waking up in the morning—each in his own bed far from the other—to see the face of the beloved on the morning news. They are all over television, and thus two media stars are born. He is effective but she is splendid, with her dark cobra eyes and her secret smile to camera that tells us: I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Give me a break.

There is a new vocabulary in play. James and Mary are professional “spin masters.” James gives the press credit for this resonant phrase: “The word ‘spin,’ I think, means what political strategists do when we go out and put our candidate in the most favorable light. That’s what spin is. Well, la-di-da, guess what? They’re right. . . . Why don’t the media just admit the truth about themselves that they’re way more into self-justification than information?” There is a lot of talk about “body language” (Woodward likes this phrase, too) though no explanation of what is meant, other than Gerald Ford falling down. Needless to say, James and Mary are cautious on the subject of the media (a plural noun becomes disagreeably singular as it means, paradoxically, more and more outlets). They must live with media; exploit media; die with media.

James:
“No one understands the power of the media in this country. I went into this campaign believing they were powerful. I didn’t know. The power they have is staggering. . . . They like to think of themselves as learned and insightful and thoughtful and considered. They claim the mantle of truth. Hell, truth is they make initial snap judgments and after that all of their time . . . is spent on nothing but validating their original judgment.” Also noted is the media’s fragmentation, best demonstrated by “the emerging power of CNN . . . a very, very important player in Presidential campaigns. . . . It used to be that the Associated Press had the real effect on campaign coverage.
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
and the other majors are all morning papers, while the AP serviced afternoon papers with the first take on breaking campaign events. . . . But there are fewer and fewer afternoon papers in the country,
and CNN is on all day, every day. . . . They don’t have a lot of viewers but, hell, as long as you have a hundred reporters looking at you and they are filing stories, you don’t need to have numbers to have influence.”

Finally, there is the actual election of 1992. James steers Clinton through primaries fraught with drama. Events from the past keep slowing down what Bush used to call the Big Mo (momentum). All our old friends make a final (presumably) appearance.

Gennifer Flowers (
Mary:
“God, if that’s Clinton’s taste in women . . .”). Clinton plays golf at an unintegrated club (
James:
“Someone close to the body” should have checked out the club. The Body is the phrase for the Candidate, like the central puzzle in a murder mystery). Interesting odd facts like: Why does television spend so much time photographing Clinton when he jogs? In case he has a heart attack. Remember Jimmy Carter’s eyes rolling upward during a marathon?

James dismisses Jerry Brown as “a nut” who is far too pessimistic for a happy people. He also glosses over Brown’s primary victory in Connecticut where, for the first and last time, the defense budget was challenged with a brand-new thought—conversion from a militarized to a peacetime economy: make bullet trains in the same factories where submarines are made. Kerrey is a war hero, attractive in every way, but he has no “message.” The others don’t matter. The nomination is won. En route, Jesse Jackson is sandbagged, ostensibly because of a black singer rapping about killing whites, but largely because the Jackson image is still too radical for the sacred center where the votes are.

Incidentally, words like “liberal” and “conservative” and “radical” mean absolutely nothing in this text, any more than they do in American politics. The only radical note struck in the campaign was by Pat Buchanan when he prescribed a religious war for us. This certainly promises to liven up future elections—should any be held, of course. If
All’s Fair
has a subtext, it is that the cost of electing one of two—or even three—essentially interchangeable candidates is not only too high but potentially divisive when Cross confronts Satanic condom.

Mary has a harder time than James. An incumbent President does not expect to have to fight in primaries, but suddenly there is Crossfire Pro-Cross Pat Buchanan, with his lullaby of hate and his 20 percent of the Republican vote. As if that were not enough bother, Ross Perot pays for a series of budget lectures on prime time. Not since Robert Benchley’s “Treasurer’s Report” has anyone given so much pleasure to so many with sheer numbers galore.

Mary, who has not only been there but knows a thing or two, does have one enthusiasm that passeth all understanding.
Mary:
“I picked up the phone and heard the unmistakable voice. Honest to God, my mouth went dry and my palms got sweaty. . . . No one, myself included, could believe it was actually him.” The Pope? Who on earth—or in heaven—could that voice belong to? “He was incredibly deferential and respectful. Didn’t want to bother me, but was wondering, if it wasn’t too much trouble, could he get a copy of the ‘hypocritical Democrats’ fax. . . . To my even greater amazement and pleasure, he did a whole monologue to my notorious fax.” Did you guess who? Rush Limbaugh. (Tim Robbins is interested.)

Rush had got interested in the campaign as it started to go very “negative.” Apparently, Clinton had gone to Moscow as a student and the KGB had turned him into the Manchurian Candidate. He had also written a letter explaining why he disapproved of the Vietnam War, easily the
most
distinguished and honest statement of his career thus far. But as Bush drops in the polls, the decision is made to play dirty, school of Lee Atwater, Mary’s guru, whose recent death had left the campaign singularly lacking in Willie Horton–style ads. Little Miss Mary Mischief is thrilled: “No one had really been happy with the option of just doing positive Bush because we didn’t think we’d break through. And besides, going negative puts everybody in a mischievously productive and creative mood.” All sorts of tricks and treats are then offered an electorate that, according to James, has no real grasp of any political issue other than the economy and how it directly affects them. In fact,
James concludes that, between the knee-jerk party-line voters and the indifferent majority, elections are decided by between 3 and 7 percent of the electorate. Get
their
attention and approval and you win.

Neither hero nor heroine quite agrees on what happened at the end. The dull look of the economy should have been enough to eject an incumbent President, but Mary thinks that Bush was done in, ultimately, by Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel, who, on October 30, 1992, produced sufficient smoking revolvers to convince 3 to 7 percent of American voters that Bush was up to his ears in the Iran-contra capers of the Reagan era. If, as the Bush campaign kept chattering, the election was based on “trust” (I think the word they meant was “plausibility”), then Bush lost on October 30. A
Time
magazine poll reported that 40 percent thought Clinton was lying about his draft status, but 63 percent thought Bush was lying about Iran-contra. That did it, somewhat helped by the debates, where Clinton came through as “caring” while Bush looked at his watch (Mary is angry that the public thought this was a sign of boredom at the debates, when it was really a signal to the questioner to
cut off a long-winded Clinton answer), and the small but imperfectly formed Perot failed to get onto the high stool assigned him: he managed the first rung but not the second and so ended up leaning, oddly, against—what else? the impossible dream. Of such stuff is our little history made.

Mary is shattered by Bush’s defeat. James is more thrilled at not losing than winning, although “I always fall in love with my candidate.” A last meeting with the Clintons. Falstaff with Henry the King. Everything is changed. Prince Hal is no more. James will not serve in the Administration. There is a fond farewell, then James goes home to Mary.

James still checks in at the White House, as Woodward reports. Mary is now prime-time, big-time television. Mr. and Mrs. Clinton are currently suffering the trials of Job. George Bush is alone with his memories, of which, perhaps, the most vivid he describes to Mary: They are aboard his campaign train through Ohio and Michigan.

“He called me into the back car, had something he wanted to tell me.

“ ‘I’ve been mooned. I’ve been mooned!’

“ ‘Oh, my God.’

“He thought this was incredibly funny. ‘Yes, an entire family. Mother, father and children. Can you imagine?’ ”

One can imagine very easily. But it was not the good man from Kennebunkport, Texas, who was being so honored. Rather, it was the system that he and Bill and James and Mary represent. Moonie power is bound to prevail in the end—or so we optimists believe as we wait, impatiently, for the James and Mary film,
The Mooning of the President.

The New York Times Book Review

18 September 1994

* 
C
LINTON
–G
ORE
II

Four years ago, I wrote that “nothing less than earthly intervention (by Perot?) can prevent the Clinton–Gore team from assuming, as the Chinese say, the mandate of Heaven.” Now history seems ready to repeat itself: Clinton will defeat Dole, whose original choice for a vice-presidential running mate, I can now reveal, was God. Why not? God has expressed no preference for either party, and on abortion, not even Pat Buchanan can instruct Him in those uterine mysteries the far right so furiously celebrate in the eldritch caverns of Eleusis, Mississippi. But God had other fish to fry.

In 1992 I compared Arkansas Clinton and Tennessee Gore to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, which was how they were presenting themselves to the folks. Actually, Clinton (Yale Law School) is plainly avatar to the Artful Dodger, while Gore (Harvard) is wealthy heir to a dour political dynasty. But each presents himself as an old-style southern moderate, while each has that haunted look of the southern lad who knows, as he enters middle age, that no amount of jogging and dieting will prevent him from one day becoming unelectably fat.

Usual question: What are the Clintons really like? Here is William Jefferson Clinton (né Blythe) on the subject recently: “Hillary was born forty, and she’ll always be forty. . . . I was born sixteen, and I’ll always be sixteen.” So he has engagingly remained. There is a famous picture of him at about that age, shaking President Kennedy’s hand at the White House. The boy Clinton is radiant. “How,” one can imagine him thinking, if not daring to ask, “do you get laid around here?” In a candid mood, the thirty-fifth president could have had a lot of tips for the forty-second. After all, at heart, Kennedy was a sophisticated nineteen-year-old with a ravenous sexual appetite, while Jackie was as old as Mother Nile. For some, power is quite enough. For Mrs. Thatcher, to be alone with her boxes was, surely, world enough and time. But Clinton seems almost in the Kennedy class of innumerable brief encounters with that majority of the electorate
which, appreciatively, favors him by an astonishing 24 percent over Dole, while with the male minority he barely holds his own. Women like men who like women, no matter how exasperating. When there was a rumor that Hillary had flung a lamp at her husband, a White House aide solemnly acknowledged that this was true. “Not only did she throw it,” he said, “she hit him with it, and we have buried him in the Rose Garden. We never thought you people would notice.”

Clinton’s disposition is also highly mercurial. One of Clinton’s most useful aides is the small but exquisitely formed George Stephanopoulos. When the First Magistrate is in a rage, he seizes his youthful adjutant and begins to hurl him around the room. As the stoic youth ricochets off the wall like Buster Keaton, he gamely serves his president until the storm is passed and they can move more serenely on to some seminar, at which they will eat lots of fried things together.

As Clinton moves—majestically now—through his campaigning, he seems sure of his reelection. Certainly, this time around, the earthly Perot poses no threat to anyone except perhaps the Dole–God dream ticket, and even then, a well-aimed thunderbolt could send him scurrying back to his home planet, Texas.

Thunderbolts of human rather than divine construction are on all our minds these days. Foreigners find mystifying the amount of mayhem permitted in the United States despite ever more draconian laws against something loosely called terrorism. There is now one gun for each of the country’s quarter billion citizens. As yet, each man, woman, and child has not got his gun, but that day of perfect equality is bound to come. After all, according to one of the most powerful buyers of politicians, the National Rifle Association, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Meanwhile, the gun lovers have now learned how to blow up federal buildings with only farm detritus, while easily manufactured pipe bombs can cause a good bit of havoc in a public park. Clinton, after choking up on television at the thought of terrorism’s innocent victims, rushes to join Congress in making laws intended to remove the protecting shield of the Bill of Rights from any citizen tagged as a potential “terrorist.”
But no candidate dares explain to the American people
why
the country is apparently spinning into chaos, because to do so would be to confess that there are, in effect, two governments of the United States. There is the visible (official) one, which is powerless to do anything about the economy short of waging—but never declaring—a war, preferably on a very small country, like Panama. Then there is the invisible government, the actual ownership of the country—currently (and uncharacteristically) at sea almost as much as its employees in Congress. Could it be that times
have
changed?