Who Let the Dogs In? (8 page)

In every campaign speech he gives, George Bush is guilty of massive hypocrisy. In every campaign speech he gives, he twists his opponent’s words (as he does on Clinton’s stand on the Persian Gulf War), he twists his opponent’s stands, and he twists his opponent’s record. He is guilty of hypocrisy about the Clean Air Act, the civil rights legislation he was finally forced to sign, the tax bill he agreed to (“Congress twisted my arm,” he whines).

Sure George Bush is a decent individual—he’s polite, he’s loyal, he’s kind to his children, and he has that endearingly goofy streak (did you catch his reference to “90/90 hindsight” the other night?), but in his public life, George Bush has been anything but an exemplar of principle and integrity. When has George Bush stood for anything in his public life except the protection and advance of George Bush? To suggest otherwise is a sick, sad joke.

October 1992

The 1992 Vote

L
ITTLE
ROCK
— I can think of one and a half reasons to vote for George Bush. The first is entirely selfish. But then, they tell us this is the year of the “What’s in it for me?” voter.

What’s in it for me as a political humorist is that George Bush is just fabulous material. Bush-speak, the thing thing, that gloriously daffy streak he has—“Read my lips,” 90/90 hindsight, “the manhood thing.”

Lord, but I would miss that goofy, preppy, golden retriever–like part of his personality, those moments of transcendent dorkiness when we all stand there trying to believe he’s just said what he did.

If you have any mercy in your hearts for those who make a living being funny about politics, take pity on us. Mark Russell is going to commit suicide if we elect Bill Clinton.
Saturday Night Live
will fall on its collective sword. Russell Baker will molt and decline. Mike Royko will be stuck with Chicago, and I’ll be stuck with Texas.

Not that Texas isn’t more than enough, but Bush has been
such
a boon.

The half-reason is foreign policy, and for none of the usual reasons cited by either Bush or the conventional wisdom.

I don’t think Bush had do-squat to do with ending the cold war. Forty-four years of bipartisan American foreign policy and its own internal weakness killed off the Soviet Union. If any one person deserves a lot more credit than anyone else, well, they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Mikhail Gorbachev for a reason. He was the one who put his life on the line.

Likewise, it seems to me that Bush’s leadership during the Persian Gulf War is canceled out by his stupidity in having armed Saddam Hussein in the first place. However, I do think Bush deserves credit in an area in which he hardly ever gets it, and that’s south of our border.

I grant you that saying his policies in Central America are better than those of Reagan is damning with the faintest praise in all of human history. And I’m willing to grant that the North American Free Trade Agreement, as now negotiated, may well result in the faint sucking sound of jobs going south. But I still say that Bush—with his “Hello, Jorge, this is George” style of telephone diplomacy—has done better than any president since Kennedy (who mostly had plans rather than accomplishments) in improving our relations with both Mexico and Latin America.

Except, of course, for Bush’s ongoing drug-war follies. There is immensely more the United States could do to help both our neighbors and ourselves south of the border, but the beginning, the minimum, has to be what Bush has accomplished.

He has recognized the importance of the region and given Latinos the respect they deserve and accorded them the dignity they must have.

And for the rest? Even if Bush has finally, belatedly developed some ideas, some weak domestic agenda, what makes anyone think he would have any better luck putting it into place next term than he has in this one?

Gridlock government will not only continue, it can only get worse with a bunch of sore-loser Democrats dominating Congress.

As a lame duck, Bush will have even less clout. His judicial appointments won’t get any better. The rot of cynicism and corruption that infected the second Reagan term will be back in spades.

And frankly, this Iraq-gate mess is so rank, I’m afraid Bush will be impeached over it. Not the failed policy with Saddam Hussein—that was just a dumb mistake—but the cover-up.

Like Watergate, the initial mistake was not as poisonous as the lies that followed. The Bush administration has clearly jacked around with the prosecution of a criminal case, this immense BNL scandal out of Atlanta, and they’re going to get nailed for it. The taxpayers have been nailed for a billion bucks. Just what we need, a second-term administration totally absorbed in an impeachment fight while the economy continues to unravel.

And if you really want to depress yourself, there’s always the possibility that Bush will croak and leave us stuck with Quayle. Although personally, I have always thought God would never be that unkind.

As for the Perot option, damn, damn! I wish with all my soul that had worked out. I would have loved that more than anything in the world. An anti-establishment populist with no strings on him, owing no one, not having to dance with a single special interest, just going up there to do the will of the people.

That is the dream of my life. We may never get this close again, and it is breaking my heart. I would have given my left arm for Ross Perot, and my right as well—except for one thing.

The guy’s a wrong ’un. He is just not a democrat. The other night on television with David Frost, he kept saying, “I’m the only one who listens to the people.” Bull. Perot listens to no one. Or more precisely, what he means when he says “the people” is the people who tell him, “Ross, we love you.” Everyone else, he’s x-ed out.

It’s his way or nothing. That’s why he quit the first time. He gutted his own corps of volunteers except for the ones who would tell him exactly what he wants to hear. That squirrelly little part of his brain that will never allow him to admit he’s wrong about anything comes up with these fantastic rationales for his own flaky behavior. A Perot presidency would be like the time of the papist plots in England. Conspirators sighted everywhere, evidence no object.

Look, I’m not a shrink, I can’t tell you why he’s like this. I just know from studying his record that Perot is not temperamentally suited to lead this country. He does not have the patience. He does not have the knowledge, and despite his seeming common sense (when he’s not sitting there with springs coming out of his head), I don’t think the man has the first idea how to go about getting anything done in D.C. Worse, he couldn’t and wouldn’t stand having anyone around him who did know.

George Bush once said the key thing we should watch, the one thing that would tell us more than anything else, was who he chose for vice president. Bush chose Dan Quayle. Perot chose Admiral Stockdale. Stockdale is ad-mirable in many ways, but he is not a democrat, and he could no more function as president than he could put on a pink tutu and dance
Swan Lake.

So that leaves Clinton. I reserve the right to make fun of Bill Clinton from now to infinity, but he is bright (actually, amazingly bright), and he has a sense of humor about the world and about himself. He genuinely likes people, even the ones who don’t grovel at his feet, and he listens, which is an unusual trait in a politician.

He is a serious student of how you get government to work. In fact, that is the great passion of his life. More than that, I don’t guarantee. Clinton is gonna have to dance with the people what brung him, and I do not know if he has the political courage to change that system. So maybe the best solution is to go out and vote for him and make sure he knows we
all
brung him.

Finally, to all my old friends and to all my old enemies concerning what I fear will always be the Defining Moment for our generation, I think the question now is not whether you went to Vietnam or whether you didn’t, whether you fought in the war or whether you fought against the war. I think the only question is whether we can find a president smart enough never to make a mistake like that again.

November 1992

Dan Quayle I

M
ADISON
, WIS.
— How nice. Vice President Dan Quayle has joined the Lost Values Task Force, also known as Doing Nothing.

In a speech Monday that may yet prove to be the high-water mark for disconnection-from-reality for the entire four years of the Bush-Quayle administration, the veeper gamely blamed the Los Angeles riots and all other manifestations of urban unrest and social decay on—declining values.

Not the sky-high unemployment rates, not the rotten schools, not the lack of housing, or the lack of opportunity, or redlining, or the health-care double-bind that keeps mothers on welfare. In sum, not on poverty at all, but, as he put it, the poverty of values.

He also managed to blame Murphy Brown, but, in a memorably charitable moment, he allowed, “It would be overly simplistic to blame the social breakdown on the programs of the Great Society alone.” Have to agree with that, don’t you? But said the veep, “It would be absolutely wrong to blame it on the growth and success most Americans enjoyed during the 1980s.”

Unfortunately, Quayle is wrong. Most Americans did not enjoy growth and success during the eighties, and those who enjoyed it least were the urban poor, who just rioted. Perhaps this is even more relevant than Murphy Brown; what do you think?

During the past two years, we have gotten several studies of the economic impact of the eighties, all of them grim. The latest studies show that 60 percent of the wealth created in that decade went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. An additional 14 percent of the wealth went to the richest 2 percent. And yet another 20 percent of the new wealth went to those in the richest 20 percent, leaving 6 percent of the new wealth to be spread among the remaining 80 percent of Americans.

The vice president says the answer is two-parent families, but according to a study done by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, based on Census Bureau data through 1989, two-parent families are having to run harder than ever just to stay in place. Their income in inflation-adjusted dollars rose 8 percent between 1979 and 1989. That includes all income levels. It was a rate of growth one half of that in seventies, one fourth of that in sixties, and one fifth of that in the fifties. The study did not show the effects of the current recession, which obviously worsened the trend. Every study of the poorest people in America shows them losing ground sharply, in both income and job opportunities. Watts today is worse off than Watts in 1964. If any of this is Murphy Brown’s fault, Quayle should inform Miles Silverberg soonest.

I certainly agree with the vice president that some people in this country have lost their sense of values. On the other hand, that’s not all that happened to them. For example, homeless people didn’t lose their sense of values until we stopped building low-income housing. Kids didn’t start hanging out on street corners in the ghetto all day until manufacturing jobs started to disappear. (It is a little-known fact that America’s school dropout rate, always high, was disguised for years by the fact that school dropouts could get manufacturing jobs, which years of struggle by the unions had made into high-pay employment.)