Who Let the Dogs In? (18 page)

Clinton never gets credit for anything, so let me bravely swim against the entire Washington press corps and point out that Bill Clinton, faced for the past eleven months with the most hostile, nasty, relentlessly partisan Congress we have ever seen, has behaved like a real grown-up. In fact, I wish Virginia Clinton Kelley were still around so I could congratulate her on having taught that man good manners.

Newt Gingrich, who appears to have no sense of restraint whatever, has blamed Susan Smith’s drowning her two children in South Carolina on the Democrats. He has blamed the death of a three-year-old in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles on New Dealism, and he has called Democrats “morally bankrupt” while he himself has been embroiled in a series of ethical imbroglios, less than half of which were enough to drive Jim Wright from the same office.

It is true that while out on the campaign trail, at clearly political rallies, Clinton has taken some shots at the Republicans and engaged in a little ridicule of them. But when he is in Washington, speaking as president, he has been consistently mannerly, serious, and (in the opinion of this liberal populist) more than adequately ready to reach compromise. To blame Clinton now for the current budget impasse is outside of enough, and it’s damn time someone said so.

Lee Howell, former press secretary to Gingrich, said: “There is the Newt Gingrich who is the intellectual, appealing and fun to be with. And there’s the Newt Gingrich who is the bloodthirsty partisan who’d just as soon cut your guts out as look at you. And who, very candidly, is mean as hell.”

On November 29, 1994, Gingrich said: “We don’t particularly want to have a single ounce of compromise with those who still believe they can somehow improve and prop up and make work a bureaucratic welfare state.”

My own modest contribution to Gingrichiana is the observation that the man regularly accuses others of that of which he is guilty himself. In a recent attack on Clinton, Gingrich said, “When you have a president who is capable of making up whatever fantasies fit his current position, I don’t know how, as a serious person, you can do anything.”

I am informed that this is a phenomenon well-known to psychiatrists; I’ve never seen it so clearly or so often in politics before. Pardon me, but I see no reason to pretend to objectivity on this. The facts are there, and the record is there—we can all fairly blame Newt Gingrich for this fine mess.

November 1995

Pat Buchanan

S
ETTING
ASIDE THAT
Pat Buchanan is a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic anti-Semite, what wonderful news from New Hampshire! It’s the nuts! It’s the berries!

Yes, well, that is rather a large mound of manure there connected with his name, much of it justified, I’m afraid. There’s even more—he defends old Nazis or something.

But since Buchanan has just sent the entire Republican Establishment and half the Democratic Establishment as well into a wall-eyed, blue-bellied snit, what can we do but rejoice?

The good news is that Pat Buchanan—aside from being a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic anti-Semite—is a fairly likable human being. I mean, you’d much rather have a beer with him than Bob Dole or Phil Gramm.

Ask good liberals like Barbara Carlson of Minnesota or Al Franken, who works with Comedy Central—they can’t help it, in fact. They’d rather not, but they like him.

Numero Two-o, being of the Irish persuasion, Pat Buchanan joys in a good fight, just loves biff-bam-pow, rejoices in a slugfest, gets off on a mudfight. Good thing, since he’s in one now. What’ll be really fun is watching his fellow Republicans attack him for being a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic anti-Semite, which is not their native turf, as it were.

Somewhere in the Old Testament, it says, “I would that mine enemy had written a book,” and Pat Buchanan has. In it, he notes that his father’s heroes were Francisco Franco and Senator Joseph McCarthy, which is enough to frizz my hair right there.

On the other hand, I’d hate to have a lot of the stuff I wrote years ago taken out of context and twisted to represent my thinking. But Buchanan is in for it, so he might as well keep up his left.

As near as we can tell, Buchanan’s victory in New Hampshire is a pretty much pure win for economic populism. Neither the Christian Coalition nor the anti-abortion movement count for much there, especially compared to Iowa.

What’s even more interesting is that the state is not in an economic recession. That vote is a direct reflection of just how worried people are about their future in this two-tier economy. And there’s what Bob Herbert calls “a cosmic disconnect” between what people are actually worrying about and what the Republicans are doing in Washington.

There are two problems with Buchanan as a populist.

One is all the divisive garbage he brings with him. It’s exactly what has been used to destroy populist surges in the past—setting whites against blacks, natives against immigrants, men against women, straights against gays, Christians against Jews—divide, divide, divide—and lose. Look, Hispanic farm workers are not responsible for the savings and loan mess, blacks on welfare are not moving factories to Taiwan, lowering the tax on capital gains is not part of the “gay agenda,” and Jews, having been historically discriminated against, by and large support raising the minimum wage.

The second problem is that Buchanan’s economic populism is rudimentary. It’s one thing to recognize that the gap between the rich and everybody else is growing like a cancer; it’s another thing to come up with useful solutions. It’s fine to jump on trade and economic globalization, but that’s only part of the problem, and not a very big part at that. Nor is git-tough jingoism the solution. Buchanan still favors trickle-down economics—he wants to cut inheritance taxes, the capital gains tax, and taxes on the rich.

The only people I see in public office trying to address what’s wrong with this economy are Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy. Reich has been valiantly struggling to get raising the minimum wage on his boss’ agenda and coming up with one improvement and suggestion after another on worker training. Kennedy came out with a multipronged plan earlier this month to attack what he calls “the quiet Depression,” which contains a lot of carrots as well as sticks to get corporations to Do the Right Thing. (Someday even conservatives are going to notice that Ted Kennedy is the most effective senator in Washington: He has a wonderful habit of getting Republicans like Nancy Kassebaum and even Orrin Hatch to cosponsor good legislation.) Kennedy’s plan covers the Federal Reserve Board, proposes a two-tier corporate tax plan to favor those that treat workers well, closes lots of stinky corporate tax loopholes, puts brakes on mergers and acquisitions, helps small business, helps labor, helps secure pension plans, and more. Buchanan would do well to study it.

Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress are so lost in loonyland that they’re now cutting off their nose to spite our face.

President Clinton nominated Felix Rohatyn, a guy so smart that Wall Street is in awe of him, to the Federal Reserve Board, where it was expected he would counter the right-wing monetarist Alan Greenspan. The Republicans wouldn’t even let the nomination out of committee because it might reflect credit on Clinton.

February 1996

The Newtzis

A
ND
NOW, LET’S
have a round of applause for that fun-loving, slap-happy gang in the U.S. House of Representatives: Newt Gingrich and the Newtzis!

What impresses me most about the Newtzis is their imagination. Time after time, this merry gang comes up with some measure that makes me stand back in all honesty and admit, “You know, I never would have thought of that.”

Just last week, they offered the country something it really needs. Now, just try to guess what it was.

Let’s see, our country desperately needs . . . a much more efficient system for dealing with child abuse, some help for working moms who are losing their minds trying to find reliable day care, uhhh, a higher minimum wage, of course, ummm, more Meals on Wheels, annnd . . .

No! Not even close! Give up? What they offered us was more assault weapons! Yes, just what we needed and wanted: more assault weapons. Now, admit it—you’re really surprised too, aren’t you?

Yes, indeed—by voting to repeal that weenie ban on seventeen types of assault weapons, Newt and the Newtzis have sought to improve the lives of every drug dealer in America, not to mention loony militia types holed up in the mountains. Now, that’s imagination.

And, coming up this week, a truly exciting way to improve the family! Yep, pro-family legislation from the Newtzis. This time, you only get three guesses.

They’re going to support the Earned Income Tax Credit for working poor families? No. They’re going to quit trying to cut Medicare so you don’t have to go broke taking care of your aging parents? No. They’ve decided that they love the Family Leave Act even though it was President Bill Clinton’s idea? No. Get ready . . .

The Newtzis are going to drastically cut the Legal Services Corp.! Isn’t that great?

What do you mean—how will that help the family? Don’t you see? Poor women won’t be able to get divorced anymore! They’ll just have to stay married to men who knock them around and beat their kids to a pulp. Great news, eh? If some poor woman marries a guy and then finds out he’s sexually abusing her daughters, there won’t be a thing she can do about it. Isn’t that grand? They’ll just have to go right on being a happy family.

And the fifty-two thousand cases that Legal Services pursued last year, getting deadbeat dads to cough up the money they owe for child support? Hey, no divorce, no problem with child-support payments, see?

As Anthony Lewis of
The New York Times
reminds us, the Legal Services Corp. was instituted in 1974 by President Richard Nixon to give some reality to the American concept of Equal Justice Under Law. To hell with that—if you can’t afford to pay a lawyer yourself, why should you have any rights at all? Been cheated by a landlord, injured on the job, held prisoner in a labor camp, working day labor for less than minimum wage? Tough. The law doesn’t apply to you, buddy.

See? It’s just like that song, “I-maag-i-naaaa-tion!” Creative lawmaking, that’s our Newtzis.

And here comes another creative move by the Newtonians: how to screw up someone else’s perfectly good legislation. You may have read about an impressive piece of legislation—written by Senators Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)—to plug up one of the most notorious and harmful holes in our health insurance system, such as it is. The bill would make it possible for workers who lose their jobs to keep their health insurance coverage—a rather critical problem, as you know, when the headlines announce almost weekly that tens of thousands of workers have been “downsized.” The bill would not only require insurance companies to sell policies to workers who lose their jobs, but it would also prevent them from dropping those with “pre-existing conditions.” Some analysts say that twenty-five million Americans would benefit from having portable health insurance; up to eighty million have “pre-existing conditions.”