Who Let the Dogs In?

by Molly Ivins

  I like getting lectures on values and hard work from Dan Quayle, who recently charged the taxpayers $27,000 for a golfing weekend (took the company plane). I think Dan Quayle knows a lot about values. For example, frat-boy Quayle made lousy grades in college, but he got into law school anyway by using family pull to take a slot reserved for a minority student on scholarship. He supported the war in Vietnam, thought it was a fine war; he just thought somebody else should fight it, and that’s why he used family pull to get into the Indiana National Guard, so he wouldn’t have to go. As Dan Quayle told us during his 1988 debate with Lloyd Bentsen, his grandma used to tell him, “Dan, you can grow up to be anything you want to be.” His grandmother was Mrs. Martha Pulliam, one of the richest women in the country, owner of several newspapers, part of a very powerful and influential family. So you see, Dan Quayle is in a position to tell us all about what’s wrong with moral values in the ghettos and the barrios; and all about how any kid in this country can grow up to be anything he wants to be, as long as he works hard and gets good grades in college and serves his country and joins the same fraternity as George Bush and keeps up his golf game at the taxpayers’ expense.

  Dan, shut up.

  May 1992

  Dan Quayle II

  THERE IS NO shortage of symptoms that Things Are Going to Hell, so it’s a bit like bringing heat to Houston to point out one more. Still, this is such a vacuous little quirk, I’m distressed by it. Two political books have come out this spring, and the mediocre one is doing quite well while the superb one is getting little attention. Not an unusual tale in publishing, but still worth decrying, methinks.

  On display everywhere, with a first printing of 750,000, on the bestseller lists, is Dan Quayle’s woodenly written, self-justifying compendium of twaddle called Standing Firm. Even the little touches of malice aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Everyone’s to blame but Quayle for all his problems.

  While Quayle was veep, I was often asked if the press wasn’t treating him unfairly. I said I’d be inclined to agree, except that I’d covered him during the ’88 campaign and found him dumber than advertised. I privately thought he was dumb to a point that was alarming. Now Quayle informs us that wasn’t him in ’88—he knows he was awful, but his handlers made him do it. I’m sorry, but there was no way to know that at the time. And that first impression did stick.

  On the strength of this book, I’d say Quayle isn’t as dumb as advertised, and he has a legitimate grievance, having been publicly ridiculed as a borderline moron for years. What doesn’t change is one’s sense of his limitations. As Peter De Vries once observed of a character, “Deep down, he’s shallow.” Quayle is the quintessential suburbanite whose world is divided into “us”—who play golf at the country club, vote Republican, love our families, go to church, and are mighty white—and “them”—who by implication not only don’t believe in God or love their families but who he actually claims “treat people worse” than conservatives.

  Quayle quotes as unfair what seems to me a genuinely perceptive description of him by George Will: “that the conservatism I’d demonstrated was less a creed than ‘an absorbed climate of opinion, absorbed in a golf cart.’ ” I suspect you’ll wind up agreeing with Will if you read this book. The most amazing part is Quayle’s heated defense of his service in the National Guard on the grounds that he wasn’t given any special treatment to get in; he shows not the faintest awareness that the entire war was fought on a class basis. The book does contain a few giggles; my favorite is the description of “Lee Kuan Yew, an impressive public figure, a true geopolitical thinker.” That’s Lee Kuan Yew, the dictator of Singapore.

  Quayle’s book is in astonishing contrast to Madeleine Kunin’s memoir, Living a Political Life. Kunin served in the Legislature and then as lieutenant governor and then governor of Vermont for six years before bowing out. Her book is infinitely more reflective than Quayle’s, about both government and political life, and also stands in striking contrast to Quayle’s placid, imperturbable good opinion of himself. If you want to study how much difference being an economically comfortable white male makes in the American psyche, compare these two books. Kunin suffered agonies of self-doubt, constantly questioned herself as to whether she was doing the right thing, and dealt constantly with the challenge of being female in a male world.

  “It was shocking to me to see how susceptible I continued to be to that most chronic symptom of female insecurity: feeling like a fraud,” writes the woman who was three times elected to the highest office in her state. She writes beautifully about the seductive nature of power, the struggle to keep her sense of self and of others free from the effects of power.

  Compared with Kunin, Quayle still looks like a shallow frat boy. This is the first book written by an American woman who has succeeded in politics, and its searing honesty sets an extraordinarily high standard for the new genre. I’d also recommend it to anyone who has ever considered running for office at any level. It’s as realistic an account of the troubles and rewards as I’ve ever come across.

  May 1994

  The Baptist Boys

  ON THE CLINTON BUS, CORSICANA, TEX. — It is a show, and a good one at that. I’d recommend it for everyone, regardless of political persuasion, who enjoys vintage American politics.

  Our political life is now so dominated by television that it’s wonderfully pleasant to be able to wander down to the courthouse—or the mall—in your own hometown and listen to the guy who wants to be president while he’s out there sweating in the sun with everyone else.

  That the entire show is carefully orchestrated for television is just one of the facts of contemporary life.

  Clinton is an exceptionally good campaigner. I make this observation in the same spirit in which one would note that Joe Montana is an artist on the football field, even if one were a Cowboys fan. What is, is. The “liberal media” is not inventing Bill Clinton.

  A couple of notable things about Clinton as a campaigner: His stamina is incredible, and he tends to get stronger as the day goes on. He blends gentle ridicule of the whole Bush era with a “We can do it” pitch that is actually classic Reagan—we’re the optimists; they’re the pessimists.

  He has a standard litany of what he plans to do if elected. To my surprise, the one that crowds like most is the national service idea. Clinton wants to set up a national college trust fund, so any American can get a loan to go to college. Then, he emphasizes, the student will have to pay back the loan, either with a small percentage of his or her earnings after graduation or by giving two years to public service—as a teacher, as a cop, working with inner-city kids, helping old folks. As the list goes on, the applause swells. “We can rebuild this country, we can save our cities, we can do it, we can!”

  Clinton and Al Gore have a lot of material to work with, given George Bush’s record, his dingbat mode, and his latest goofy proposals. Both men needle the president constantly and are rapidly turning the “family values” convention to their own advantage. Meanwhile, the Bush team, now under Jim Baker, is already quicker at responding and has now dropped family values.

  Bush probably made a mistake when he told the evangelical crowd in Dallas last weekend that the Democrats left G-O-D out of their platform (that was before Baker nixed “family values”). An Episcopalian really should know better than to try to out-Bible a couple of Baptist boys. Both Clinton and Gore can quote Scripture to a faretheewell, but the ever-magisterial Barbara Jordan, daughter of a Baptist preacher, used it most witheringly at the enormous rally in Austin. “Everyone who calleth to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will not get in. Who will get in? Those who do the Lord’s work.”

  Much of the Texas tour, viewed as a whole, is an exercise in inoculation.

  The Clinton campaign fully expects Bush to go on television with massive negative ad buys. In Texas, two obvious targets are guns and gays—if past Republican performance is a reliable indicator, the gay-bashing will be done below radar, on radio.

/>   Clinton tried to defuse the gun issue (he supports the Brady bill, the seven-day hold on gun purchases) by citing Ronald Reagan’s support for the Brady bill and touts it as a common-sense measure to help law enforcement.

  The Republicans’ Texas attack plan, entitled “September Storm,” contains a memorable wincer. The R’s refer to the political operatives with whom they plan to flood East Texas as “Stormtroopers”: You don’t have to be Jewish to flinch at that lack of historical sensitivity.

  There are three qualities that make Clinton such an effective campaigner—energy, stamina, and joy. Of the politicians I have watched, he is most like Hubert Humphrey and Ralph Yarborough. He loves doing this—he gets energy from people.

  A lot of politicians, Lloyd Bentsen, for example, move through crowds smiling and shaking, but the smile never reaches their eyes, and you can tell they’d much rather be back in Washington cutting deals with other powerful people. In his book What It Takes: The Way to the White House, writer Richard Ben Cramer suggests that Bush despises politics, considers it a dirty business, and consequently believes anything is permitted.

  The different thing about Clinton is that he listens to people as he moves among them—Humphrey and Yarborough were always talking. Clinton listens and remembers and repeats the stories he hears.

  I have read several of the poetic effusions produced by my journalistic colleagues about Clinton’s bus tours and laughed. On Thursday evening, in the late dusk, moving among the thousands gathered on the old suspension bridge over the Brazos in Waco, I realized why so many of us wax poetic about these scenes.

  It’s not Clinton who’s so wonderful—it’s America.

  August 1992

  Class War

  LOS ANGELES, CALIF. — All right. Once more, Vietnam.

  For those of you who are too young to remember; for those of you too old to have felt it intensely.

  There were no good choices in those years. Early in the war, you might have believed in it. You might have been like John Paul Vann. Or even David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, because the press believed in it, too, at the beginning.

  But by 1969, no one believed in it. We had been told too many lies about why we were there. God knows the men running the war had long since stopped believing in our stated purposes there. David Beckwith, Dan Quayle’s press secretary, said the other day that even Dan Quayle was opposed to war “as it was being fought” by 1969.

  And what did he do to stop it? He voted for Richard Nixon, who had a “secret plan” to end it. More than twenty thousand Americans died in Vietnam after Nixon was elected, not to mention millions of Vietnamese.

  There were no good choices. You could go to jail. You could go to Canada. Or you could go to Vietnam and kill or die for a cause you didn’t believe in. You couldn’t get conscientious objector status until later in the war. But you could get out of it if you were middle- or upper-class.

  Because Vietnam was, from the American side, a class war from the beginning. It was planned that way.

  General Lewis Hershey was in charge of the Selective Service System. His infamous pamphlet, “Channeling,” made it all too clear that young American men had been divided into future members of the professional classes and cannon fodder. If Bill Clinton had stayed in Hope, Arkansas, and never gone to college, his butt would have been shipped to ’Nam. When Clinton says he got an induction notice while he was at Oxford but didn’t pay much attention to it, of course he’s telling the truth. No one was going to draft a Rhodes scholar, for God’s sake, and everyone knew it.

  As I recall, five men from Harvard were killed in Vietnam. There were a hell of a lot more from Odessa, Texas. For those of us who opposed the war, the rank unfairness of who had to go fight it was part of what we hated. When Dan Quayle joined the National Guard, 1.26 percent of Guardsmen were black.

  Joining the Guard was a way to stay out of Vietnam, period. Yes, there were a few Guard units sent to ’Nam, and boy were they surprised. I had to laugh when I saw the quote from Retired Colonel Robert T. Fischer of the Indiana National Guard in last Sunday’s New York Times: “Headquarters detachment just didn’t take every turkey off the street. It was where the general was, and there were some of those guys they just didn’t want. If they walk in the door and he looks like a dog and has hair down to here, you send them to another unit. When some trash bag came in the door, there were ways around these things without breaking any rules.” They took only nice, clean-cut boys with connections, like Quayle.

  When the long, miserable folly of Vietnam finally ended, I thought America would never do anything that wrong again. But we managed one more piece of cruelty and stupidity with regard to that war—we failed to honor and in some cases mistreated our own men who had fought it. Ten years later, Vietnam veterans gave themselves a homecoming parade. I don’t know how many of you were there; the crowds were thin. There were no socko military bands because the government didn’t spend a nickel on it. It was the weekend The Wall was dedicated that the vets held their own homecoming. The only member of the government who came was that fool John Warner from Virginia, may it not be forgotten. Do you remember how they looked, the Vietnam vets, rolling down the avenue in wheelchairs, straggling along in no formation? Almost all of them had hair down to here: Many wore bandanas around their foreheads. They must have looked like trash bags to Colonel Fischer. I don’t think more than 1 percent of them could have gotten into the Indiana National Guard even at that late date.

  After all that long history of unfairness and insanity, I did believe no more indignities could be heaped on that particular pile. Wrong again. Now, for political purposes, lies are being told once more. Quayle, who supported the war and took an easy out, now claims to be “proud” he “served,” while Clinton was leading “anti-American” demonstrations in England. Not anti-American, Mr. Quayle, anti-war. Bush says Clinton called the entire American military “immoral.” He didn’t: He called the war immoral. It was.

  No one who loved someone who was killed in Vietnam, and Bill Clinton did, ever confused being anti-war with being against those who served there. Many of us who love this country hated that war and still believe the highest patriotism was to oppose it. Mr. Bush now implies that someone who has not served in a war is unfit to be president, might be too easily inclined to risk American lives. I believe the opposite, although you could cite Ronald Reagan as evidence of Bush’s thesis.

  Clinton worked against the war in Vietnam; Al Gore served in it: I believe they each represent the best of our generation. One thing all of us of the Vietnam generation know for certain is that we cannot prop up a government that does not have the support of its own people. But the price of that lesson was too high.

  September 1992

  The Year of the Woman

  NEW YORK— The most conspicuous contradiction of the convention is the contrast between the Democrats’ “Year of the Woman” emphasis and the punishment tour Hillary Clinton is on. Here are the Democrats featuring one woman candidate after another—bragging about their Senate candidates, massing their House candidates for photo ops, Ann Richards chairing the convention, Barbara Jordan keynoting, all hands being pro-choice out the wazoo—and poor Hillary is assigned to the Cookie Wars.

  Family Circle magazine started the cookie fight by distributing the chocolate chip cookie recipes of both Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton and asking people to vote on them. Sample batches of the cookies are being distributed, and partisan Democrats vote for Hillary’s chocolate chips without even tasting Mrs. Bush’s. Hillary Clinton, who is under orders from her husband’s handlers not to say anything controversial or even substantive, has taken on the cookie project with characteristic zeal and intensity. This woman now knows enough about the making and distribution of chocolate chip cookies to become the next Famous Amos. If Clinton loses in November, she can make her cookie business into a Fortune 500 corporation.

  But precisely because she has the smarts and the drive to do things like that—to
become one of the best lawyers in the country or, if she chose, to be as formidable a political candidate as any of the women the Democrats have so proudly featured at the podium—she’s considered a menace to her husband’s campaign. His image guys (note: guys) want her to stay home and knit tea cozies lest the Great American Public take alarm.

  Personally, I don’t think any of this has anything to do with Hillary Clinton, who seems just as nice as she can be (I base this on all of two encounters with her) and has specialized in the area of law that helps children. It does, however, say a great deal about the ambivalence and confusion in this country over the changing roles of women. Wicked Women are a running theme in our culture, from the femme fatale of the nineteenth century to the castrating bitch favored in current films about career women who don’t have enough sense to give it all up for a chance at marriage and motherhood. The Republican attack machine, a formidable instrument, stands ready to paint Hillary Clinton as someone akin to the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction, some ambition-crazed female without an ounce of natural warmth.