Who Let the Dogs In? (15 page)

I recall Abe Rosenthal, then editor of
The New York Times
and, Lord knows, not a man I often agreed with, once mildly suggesting that the new mayor of New York should be given a chance to mess up before we attacked him. In that particular case (Ed Koch), I thought we held off far too long, but I agreed with Abe’s premise.

Quite a disconcerting number of the brethren here were claiming the Clinton administration was a disaster before the man had even been sworn in.

I am puzzled by the Washington press corps’ reaction to affirmative action by the Clinton administration—not reverse discrimination, but affirmative action.

I thought it was a good idea to have an administration that “looks like America” instead of the usual suits. Look what’s already happening on the Hill now that it looks a little more like the rest of America. When the family leave bill was being debated, Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the “mom in tennis shoes,” put in her oar by recalling when she had to quit her secretarial job because she got pregnant. When they were discussing the Zoe Baird problem of people not paying Social Security taxes on their domestic workers, Representative Carrie Meek of Florida allowed as how she had been a domestic worker at one point in her life, her mom was a domestic worker, and so were all her sisters. Not a point of view normally heard in the corridors of power from the suits.

So why isn’t it a good idea for Clinton to go out of his way to find a qualified woman attorney general (Zoe Baird not included)? How did this press corps get so conservative that they object to change on principle? Change is what this country rather stunningly clearly wants.

I am uneasily reminded of the last time this press corps failed to understand a president (for kindness’ sake, we will draw a veil over the performance of this press corps during the Reagan years). Jimmy Carter was a president the press just never cottoned to. Like the senators during the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, they just didn’t get it.

Actually, it was pretty simple. Jimmy Carter has been out of office for thirteen years now. And every day for thirteen years, that man has gone out and behaved like a good Christian—for no money. Because that’s who he is, and that’s who he always was. But that was too simple for Power Town.

July 1994

The New Regime I

T
HE
MOST FUN GUY
to watch in the New Regime is House Speaker-elect Newt Gingrich. The reason you want to keep an eye on Gingrich is that he plans to improve your morality, and he’s just the fellow to do it.

You may not have had the improvement of your morality in mind when you voted to get the government off your back Tuesday, but here in the New Regime, many things are wondrous.

Gingrich explained to
The New York Times
the other day that the country has been in a state of moral decline since the 1960s and that he plans to root out the remnants of the counterculture and the Great Society. Said Gingrich: “Until the mid-1960s, there was an explicit, long-term commitment to creating character. It was the work ethic. It was honesty, right and wrong. It was not harming others. It was being vigilant in the defense of liberty.”

Yep, you want to know right from wrong, you check with Newt here in the New Regime because Newt knows.

Gingrich spent the first part of the dread 1960s at Emory University in Atlanta, at a time when many who felt strongly about morality were involved in the civil-rights movement. He was not. Like President Clinton, being a graduate student—in Gingrich’s case, already married with children—kept him out of Vietnam. He went to Tulane, where he was also not involved in the preeminent moral issue of the late 1960s. Like Clinton, the only nonpolitical job he has ever held was teaching college: Clinton taught constitutional law at the University of Arkansas; Gingrich taught history at West Georgia College.

Gingrich, the man who put term limits in the Contract with America, was first elected to Congress in 1978 after two earlier, unsuccessful races. He was, of course, strong on family values. In 1980, he filed for a divorce from his wife, Jacqueline, after eighteen years of marriage. While they were separated, she had her second operation for cancer. Gingrich went to see her in the hospital to discuss the terms of their divorce. In 1993, Jacqueline sued Gingrich for failing to pay his $1,300 monthly alimony on a timely basis and for failing to pay the premiums on a life-insurance policy for her. He settled the lawsuit by agreeing to give Jacqueline the first $100,000 coverage in his life-insurance policy. Gingrich remarried in 1981.

In the famous flap about the House bank, Gingrich was found to have bounced twenty-two checks, compared with Speaker Tom Foley’s two.

But easily the most notable contribution to our political life made by Gingrich during his congressional career has been the level of rancor and vitriol with which he practices politics. So impressive were Gingrich’s thrusts at the opposition that in 1990, the GOP issued a list of them—words that Republican candidates should use to describe their opponents so they could be successful, like Newt. The words are:
sick, pathetic, traitor, welfare, crisis, ideological, cheat, steal, insecure, bizarre, permissive, anti-(issue),
and
radical.

Let’s look at that list again because we’re going to be hearing quite a lot from Mr. Gingrich, and not only in person. As he has announced, he will be using Rush Limbaugh and Christian-right radio and television programs to communicate his ideas.
Sick, pathetic, traitor, welfare, crisis, ideological, cheat, steal, insecure, bizarre, permissive, anti-(issue),
and
radical.

Such language, here in the New Regime, will be helpful in solving problems, such as how to get health-care coverage for forty million Americans, how to get people off welfare, how to create decent-paying jobs and give people the skills to do them.

Mickey Kaus of
The New Republic
gives us a typical example of how Gingrich does politics. You may recall the flapette late in the mercifully over elections concerning a memo written by Alice Rivlin, one of the most consistently realistic deficit hawks in the Clinton administration. Rivlin outlined a number of options for further cutting the deficit and still finding ways to invest in programs, particularly job-skills programs. Among her options was cutting Social Security benefits to the wealthy. This was seized upon by Gingrich, who promptly raised an enormous furor about how Clinton was planning to cut Social Security. Clinton brilliantly riposted that he wasn’t planning to cut it but that the Republicans were. Are not, are so, are not, they argued, which was the level of debate we got throughout the elections.

Kaus went and found Gingrich’s 1986 Social Security proposal that advocates cutting off Social Security for everyone in the country under forty and then passing a national value-added tax of $200 billion per year. But—this is the beauty part—the accusation that Gingrich leveled at Rivlin and Clinton was hypocrisy. Which brings us to the First Rule of Newt-Watching: Whatever he accuses his opponents of, look for carefully in his own behavior.

Gingrich recently told a group of lobbyists he was, to put it crudely, shaking down that his election strategy was to portray Clinton Democrats as “the enemy of normal Americans” and proponents of “Stalinist measures.” I’m fond of hyperbole myself. But when politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as “enemies,” it’s time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country. Stay alert.

November 1994

The New Regime II

A
W
, ARMEY! DICK,
my man, what’s wrong? Dr. No going soft! No fun, no fair.

Here I’ve been telling everyone how fabulous the new Texans at the top of Congress are going to be. Wait’ll you see, I gloated. Bill Archer! Tom DeLay! And best of all, Dick Armey! This guy makes Newt Gingrich look like a fuzzy, cuddly bear.

I guaranteed it. The reason I guaranteed is because Newt Gingrich has already achieved the improbable effect of making Bob Dole seem cuddly. I’ve already started thinking of him as Uncle Bob. This is the same Dole about whom Jay Leno joked just last winter, “It’s so cold in Washington, people are huddled around Bob Dole for warmth.”

When Gingrich started muttering about putting millions of children in orphanages to be raised by a government that he believes can’t do anything right, some of my compatriots here on what passes for the left were chilled to the bone. But no, I cried, you’ll learn to love Noot! Just wait’ll you get a good look at Armey.

I spoke with confidence, having followed Armey’s career faithfully from his first campaign in the old mid-Metroplex, when he ran on a platform of abolishing Social Security. Not many people, even at that high tide of Reaganism, were advocating the abolition of Social Security, and I knew I had a live wire even then. Abolish farm subsidies! Torch the Capitol! Go, Armey!

One of my all-time favorite Dick Armey moments was when he looked at Hillary Rodham Clinton during a health-care reform hearing and said: “I have been told about your charm and wit, and let me say, the reports on your charm are overstated and the reports on your wit are understated.” That was my man Armey—a noted authority, all agree, on both charm and wit.

But now,
now,
damned if we’re not getting a kinder, gentler Dick Armey. He no longer advocates phasing out Social Security. He’s not even going to fight for abolishing agricultural subsidies. Aaaawwww, Dick.

Where is the Dick Armey of yesteryear, the one who called the Family Leave Act “yuppie welfare”? The man who said the Clinton health-care program was “a Kevorkian prescription for the jobs of American men and women”? Heck, Armey used to say he was “embarrassed” ever to have been a college professor because so much education is “pure junk.”

For a while, I was even working on the theory that Armey’s scorched-earth approach to politics was genetic: He has a son, Scott, who has distinguished himself as a Denton County commissioner by pushing for prayer in the schools, an issue that some constitutional purists would consider outside the purview of county commissioners.

What do we get now? A kinder, gentler Dick Armey. Now we get Dick Armey telling
The Dallas Morning News
that in his early years in the House, he “risked being labeled a bomb-thrower, a loose cannon,” but he learned that “you can be so ideologically hidebound you can cut yourself off from the process.” He says that in 1990, when he was shut out of the budget summit, he learned that you have to have “a place at the table.” And so he ran for the No. 3 spot in the Republican leadership and learned to play the game. And now, here he is at No. 2, just another perfectly good bomb-thrower we sent to Washington, only to have him turn into a politician. Sure, Armey insists that he has learned about Washington from being in the Congress since 1984. I say it’s another reason for term limits.