Who Let the Dogs In? (12 page)

The hundred-day thumb-suckers (as “think pieces” are known in our trade) fall roughly into four categories: (1) Clinton’s full of energy and ideas and, despite some setbacks, has had a lot of success; (2) Clinton is a disaster; (3) In the long view of history, taking all this from the judicious, balanced point of view for which I-the-Writer am so noted, Clinton’s glass is half-empty; and (4) One hundred days is a ridiculous standard on which to judge any president.

I especially like No. 4. When in doubt, wee-wee on the premise. That’s my motto, too. All in all, the twenty-seven pounds of analysis is a study in the premise that there-is-no-such-thing-as-objectivity.

I am charmed by the extent to which we all seize upon those facts and events that conform to our point of view.
The Wall Street Journal,
which I for one consider a veritable Bible on the topic of political humor, chose to object to the president’s sense of humor.

Specifically, its writers didn’t care for his joshing at the White House Correspondents’ annual dinner. (I believe it is a matter of historical fact that no one has actually been funny at the White House Correspondents’ dinner since the Kennedy administration.)

It seems, among other errors noted by the
Journal,
the president hurt Rush Limbaugh’s feelings with a remark that could be construed to imply that not only is Limbaugh a sexist, which he is, but also a racist, which he is not. This is the same Rush Limbaugh, a delicate flower of refined sensibilities, who refers to feminists as femi-Nazis, such a cute and appealing word play it could never offend anyone.

I’m awfully sorry Limbaugh’s feelings were hurt. Especially since he would never take a cheap shot himself at either Bill or Hillary Clinton.

The blizzard of insider wisdom dumped on our heads by the hundred-day mark leaves me with an uneasy feeling. Clinton is either being faulted for being the opposite of George Bush (Clinton tries to do too much, whereas Bush never tried to do a damn thing about domestic problems) or for the same things for which Bush was faulted as though they were brand-new (Clinton still hasn’t named all his appointees; it took Bush more than six months).

I am left with the impression the media are not being quite . . . fair.

I suppose I should be proud of my colleagues, in a way. Conservatives whined so long that the media were unfair to Reagan and Bush that at least now we can claim equal-opportunity, bipartisan unfairness.

But the media’s collective treatment of Hillary Clinton still amazes me. There is, for example, nothing exceptional about the article inside
Time
about Clinton, but the cover shows her with her head at what we assume is a combative tilt, and the headline is “Ascent of a Woman: Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most powerful first lady in history. Does anybody have a problem with that?”

It’s certainly an in-your-face question. But nothing in the ensuing article indicates that she is aggressive or abrasive or shrill or any of those other words so beloved of journalists writing about strong women.

Let’s see, when was the last time we saw a
Time
cover so at variance with the story it was supposed to illustrate?

Oh, yeah, I remember, that doozie of a photo of Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi wearing black leather in what appeared to be a shabby men’s room, with the headline, “Whither feminism?”

Oh, well, what’s journalism without stereotypes?

May 1993

Ol’ One-Vote Bill

N
EW
YORK
— Sometimes I feel like the last citizen left in America who thinks Bill Clinton is doing a fairly good job. Talk about being able to caucus in a phone booth. . . .

Clinton was at the National Governors Association meeting the other day, griping to his former fellows about how Washington works and “the air-filling bull that we hear so often in the nation’s capital.”

“People who try to work together and listen to one another instead of beating each other up are accused of being weak, not strong. The people that really score are the people that lay one good lick on you in the newspaper every day instead of the people that get up and go to work, never care if they’re on the evening news, never care if they’re in the paper, and just want to make a difference,” Clinton said.

Well, Ol’ One-Vote Bill has been through some rough fights recently, so I guess he’s entitled to wax a little sentimental about his halcyon days in Little Rock, when it was all for one and one for all, or so it seems to him in retrospect.

But I spent some time in Little Rock last year talking to Arkansas legislators about Clinton’s leadership style, and so far I’ve seen nothing that either surprises or disappoints me.

The best description I got of him came from a state senator who said, “He’s like one of those broad-bottomed children’s toys that when you tump it over, it pops back up. No matter how many times you push it down, it pops right back up again. That’s Clinton. We reject one of his plans, and he comes right back at us saying, ‘OK, then, why don’t we try to do it another way?’ ”

I liked the sound of it then, and I still do. This is not the truly artful, Machiavellian arm-twisting and screw-tightening many of us were raised to admire in politics.

Let me tell you a possibly apocryphal Lyndon Johnson story. Supposedly it was late in Johnson’s presidency, and the city of Wichita Falls had done dog-all about integrating its schools, not a move. So one day, Lyndon phones the mayor of the Falls and says, Tom, do y’all really want to keep Sheppard (the local air force base)?

Of course, Mr. President, we certainly do, said the mayor.

Schools. Integration. Tomorrow, said Lyndon, and hung up. And the next day, they integrated the schools.

Now I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s told admiringly by people who like to see political power wielded with a heavy hand in a good cause. But those of you who recall the dark side of Lyndon’s use of power (the reigning authority on the dark side is Robert Caro, two volumes so far) will also remember that we used to yearn for a better way to do things. For lack of a better description, we thought it would be nice if someone tried democracy for a change.

Lyndon, who liked to put people in a vise and twist till they screamed, used to say in public, “Let us reason together.” In private, what he said was, “When you’ve got their peckers in your pocket, their hearts and minds will follow.”

Bill Clinton actually believes in getting people to reason together, reach a consensus on a good plan, and then go forward.

Sometimes these different ways of using power are described in gender terms. Ann Richards says one of her frustrations with the Texas Legislature is that boys are taught from early on to win—and when someone wins, someone else loses. Richards thinks girls are socialized to find win/win solutions. My favorite example is what any smart mom does when there are two kids and one cookie. The first kid gets to divide the cookie, and the second kid gets first pick of the halves. You can generally count on the moms of the world to find solutions where nobody loses.

To my mind, while Clinton is not batting a thousand (he’s barely batting .500), he deserves bonus points for taking on the toughest problems. We’re looking at twelve years’ worth of domestic problems that have been allowed to fester without action, and he’s the spoon that’s stirring the pot in Washington. He apparently just never counted on whatever is in that pot in Washington becoming more like cement than soup.

So Clinton’s plans have been tumped over a couple of times now. The last thing we need is for him to start feeling sorry for himself. What we need and what he needs to do is pop back up again and try to find another way to get it done.

I’m sure Vince Foster’s suicide made Washington look a lot darker to Clinton, but if I’m right that his greatest strength is persistence, he’ll be back.

And those of us who always yearned to see power used in less coercive ways need to quit describing the president as “weak” because he doesn’t club people over the head instead of getting them to reason together. The fight Clinton faces on health care is going to make the budget fight look like patty-cake. The amount of money being spent by the forces that find the status quo quite profitable, thank you, is staggering. My money’s still on Clinton to find a way to at least start to fix this mess.

August 1993

The First Year

A
TLANTA
— Having come to Atlanta for one of those “First Year of the Clinton Presidency” thumb-sucking sessions, I offered my own profession-centric view of the world by focusing on Clinton and the media. I felt obliged to review the record for this august occasion, and what’s depressing is that there’s so much evidence to support what I already thought: This president is getting trashed.

As an opinion writer who spent twelve years being generally unhappy with the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, I consider myself an expert on trashing presidents. I once wrote an entire column on the subject of how to describe the Reagan quality that was then politely referred to as his being “disengaged.”

“So dumb if you put his brains in a bumblebee, it would fly backwards” was one of my offerings. And Bush inspired several unkind reflections on my part; his inability to express himself clearly in the English language was fodder for many a column. How I miss him.

But I think you’ll agree that there is a qualitative difference between wondering what Bush actually meant when he said something incomprehensible and a radio talk-show host telling jokes about Hillary Rodham Clinton performing oral sex. I think we have a problem here, folks.

The difference between the way Bill Clinton has been treated by the press in his first year and the way Reagan and Bush were treated is not a matter of one’s political perspective. By now, there are several media studies comparing exactly the same story—“President makes major policy proposal” or “President signs bill”—and the wildly different treatment that Clinton has received.

On the theory that the press is always sycophantic toward someone who has come in with a big electoral majority—at least for a while—I went back to our last minority president, Richard Nixon. The exit polls in ’92 showed that had Ross Perot not been in the race, his vote would have split evenly between Bush and Clinton, leaving Clinton with a clear majority. When Nixon was first elected in ’68, the situation was far muddier: The George Wallace vote was also a Robert Kennedy vote, one of those populist phenomena that always confound pollsters. Of course, the country was in turmoil after ’68, the Year Everything Happened. Opposition to the war actually escalated in ’69, Nixon’s first year in office, but it was not yet considered Nixon’s war, so the vituperation was not aimed at him. Press and popular opinion were to give the guy a chance.

Somewhat closer to the mark is the first year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Although Carter was cut far more slack than Clinton, who has been under steady and very heavy media fire since before his inauguration, there were undercurrents of the same vein of attack.