Who Let the Dogs In? (34 page)

What I mourn is that none of the current candidates measures up to the glory years of the Ineffable Big George Bush and the Immortal Dan Quayle, who shall be forever revered for setting new standards in political language.

My personal favorite in the oratory sweepstakes is George W. Bush, who is rapidly developing a style that may yet become comparable to his father’s. He is a master of the perfectly opaque response. We now know that Ronald Reagan’s famous line in the 1980 campaign—“There you go again!”—was carefully scripted in advance. This leads to visions of an entire team of W. Bush speech writers cogitating on how to achieve the perfect nonanswer. Examples:

“Whatever’s fair.”

“Whatever’s right.”

“I’m all right on that.”

“Whatever is fair between the parties.”

And, a recent gem of opacity:

“I will take a balanced approach on the environment.”

That last one was Bush’s death-defying leap to separate himself from all the candidates who have promised to take an unbalanced approach on the environment.

During an impassioned speech in support of free trade this month, Bush said, “If the terriers and bariffs are torn down, this economy will grow!”

Another great moment with Bush the Younger was his answer to the question, “Do you support affirmative action?”

Said the governor: “What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think vulcanize society. So I don’t know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that’s my position.”

In South Carolina he told supporters: “This is still a dangerous world. It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mential loss.” OK, maybe it was “menshul.”

the
Financial Times
of London noted that the Education Governor revealed the urgent need for higher standards in subject-verb agreement when he said, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

If you cast your mind back to the long-gone days of 1992, you may recall that after four years of Big George’s pronounless prose, Bill Clinton was considered something of a wonder because he spoke in complete sentences. Indeed, in complete paragraphs. People actually wrote about it at the time: “He speaks in complete sentences.”

Of course, that was compared to Big George, who once delivered this complete sentence: “It’s no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or the other.” And a more typical bon mot: “To kind of suddenly try and get my hair colored, and dance up and down in a mini-skirt or something, you know, show that I’ve got a lot of jazz out there and drop a bunch of one-liners, I’m running for the president of the United States. I kind of think I’m a scintillating fellow.”

And this happy thought on the recession: “Coming off a pinnacle, you might say, of low unemployment.”

We were also accustomed to hearing from Dan Quayle in those days (“If we don’t succeed, then we run the risk of failure”), so we’re starting from a low threshold here—the rhetorical equivalent of having Dick Morris shape domestic policy.

The Nation
recently described Al Gore as “an attack chihuahua” for a series of observations that cannot be described as in the positive vein. Gore accused Bill Bradley of being a quitter, a hypocrite, a disloyal Democrat, a “left-of-center insurgent,” who would break the bank with his “throwback” health-care proposal while addressing “only a small number of things at a time.”

The Nation
notes that Gore is a charter member of the Democratic Leadership Council, which campaigns for privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare and school choice. This has not prevented Gore from assailing Bradley for proposing a debate on Social Security reforms and voucher experiments.

The only thing to be said for Gore’s performance is that he can get through an entire debate without using the word
whatever.

According to
The Dallas Morning News,
during the last debate in Iowa, when Alan Keyes accused Bush of doing nothing when the town of El Cenizo adopted Spanish as the language for all official business, Bush replied, “No es el verdad” (That’s not the truth). That would, of course, be “la verdad” in Spanish.

Reminding us all of Jim Hightower’s line when he was informed that Governor Bill Clements was studying Spanish: “Oh, good. Now he’ll be bi-ignorant.”

January 2000

Blushing for Bush

W
ATCHING
OUR HOMEBOY
George Dubya as he wends his way—somewhat unsteadily—toward the presidency is a nerve-racking procedure. Face it, our reputation is on the line along with the governor’s. All of us know that twenty million Texans can’t be brought to agree on anything, including whether the guys who died at the Alamo were heroes or fools. Nevertheless, we are all being painted with the Bush brush, so whenever he makes a cake of himself, all of us get the blame (“Those Texans, so ignorant”).

Relatively speaking, Bush is one of our better representatives on the national scene. In Washington, which seems to have been deeply scarred by LBJ’s occasional lack of couth, we are still regarded as a tribe of Visigoths. (“And then, he lifted his shirt and showed us the scar!”) Every time Governor Preston Smith, who had a terminal West Texas accent, went on television, I used to wince: “Our biggest problem after this hurricane is all the day-brees we got lyin’ around.” So, Dubya Bush doesn’t seem like anyone we’d have to blush for.

But one national columnist, writing this week about how Bush favors the concealed-weapons law—and the amendment to the law that allows concealed weapons to be carried in church—wrote, “Apparently Texans feel so naked without their guns that they cannot even take time off to pray without the reassurance of their little metal friends nestled somewhere warmly on their persons.” Another columnist decided not long ago to blame all twenty million of us for “bloodthirsty criminal justice officials. . . . Texas, where liberals are required to carry visas and compassion is virtually illegal . . . a state perfectly willing to execute the retarded and railroad the innocent . . . by far the most backward state in the nation when it comes to capital punishment . . .” etc.

So when Bush commits a gaffe, we all look bad, which brings us to the unfortunate matter of Jean Poutine, who is not the prime minister of Canada.

Some joker from a Canadian radio comedy show told Bush he had been endorsed by “Prime Minister Poutine of Canada.” Whereupon Bush thanked the prime minister for his support and said how important our neighbors to the north are to us all. Unfortunately,
poutine
is a form of Canadian junk food made with potatoes, cheese, and brown gravy (sounds awful). Granted, you can’t find a quorum of Texans who know who the prime minister of Canada is, so this sounds at first like another one of those stupid “gotcha” quizzes. But any Texan who’s ever been involved in national politics does know that no foreign head of state would ever make an endorsement in either a primary or a general election.

Ever heard the phrase “that’s an internal political matter”? If a head of state were to violate this long-standing diplomatic tradition, it would be a matter for stiff notes between state departments, apologies demanded—for all I know, breaks threatened in diplomatic relations and ambassadors recalled. It would be a whale of a flap. Why didn’t Bush know that? True, the United States has been known to favor one side or the other in a foreign election. Among other memorable episodes, we worked to defeat Salvador Allende in Chile in the seventies, with the usual dubious results. But we do things like that
covertly;
we don’t have the president instructing citizens of other countries on how he wants them to vote. Think of the ruckus.

March 2000

The 2000 Vote

A
S
GENERAL GEORGE PATTON
said of war, “God help me, but I love it so.” I realize that the only people in America having a good time right now are political reporters, but we haven’t had this much fun since Grandpa fell in the fish pond. What could be more exciting than David Broder and Tom Oliphant trading thoughts on whether a heavy black voter turnout in north Florida will make all the difference?

OK, Nader voters. Let’s talk.

I’m voting for Ralph. I’m voting for Nader because I believe in him, admire him, and would like to see his issues and policies triumph in our political life. I’m also voting for him because I live in Texas—where all thirty-two electoral votes will go to George W. Bush even if I stand on my head, turn blue, and vote for Gus Hall, the late communist.

I know that many of my fellow Nader voters are young people and probably don’t want to hear from a geriatric progressive. (We had to walk three miles through the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways.) But I have learned some things just from hanging around this long, and with your permission, I will pass them on.

When I was your age, I was, I suspect, far angrier than most of you. Some people I loved died in Vietnam—it was an ugly, bad, nasty time. We’ll not go into it again, but in 1968, I could not bring myself to vote for Hubert Humphrey. So I helped elect Richard Nixon president by writing in Gene McCarthy; and if you ask me, thirty years on, it’s hard to think of a worse turn I could have done my country.

Nixon was a sorry, sick human being, with a gift for exploiting lower-middle-class resentment, envy, and bigotry for his own political purposes. This country remains a nastier place today because of Nixon.

None of that has any particular relevance to the election in 2000. Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy, and George W. Bush is no Richard Nixon. What’s more relevant here is my forty years’ experience in Texas electoral politics.

Not to Texas-brag, but we are No. 1 in the art of Lesser Evilism. I have voted for candidates so putrid that it makes your teeth hurt to think about ’em. Why? Because they were better than the other guy.

So here you are, trying to spot that fine hairsbreadth of difference between the sanctimonious Gore and the clueless Bush, ready to damn both of them in favor of a straight shooter like Nader. Here’s the problem: Government matters most to people on the margins. If I may be blunt about this, we live in a society where the effluent flows downhill. And the people on the bottom are drowning in it.

And it is precisely those citizens—whose lives sometimes literally depend on the difference between a politician who really does have a plan to help with the cost of prescription drugs and one who is only pretending that he does—whose lives can be harmed by your idealism.

The size of a tax cut doesn’t matter to people in the richest 1 percent. They’re in Fat City now; they don’t need more money. But the size of a tax cut makes a real difference to Bush’s oft-cited example of the single mom with two kids making $22,000 a year.