Who Let the Dogs In?

by Molly Ivins

  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

  AND 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.”

  The Kennedy-Kassebaum bill would have fixed these problems—until the Newtzis fixed the bill. They decided to lard it up with special-interest provisions. The most glaring example is medical savings accounts, a device that allows health insurance companies to skim the cream off the low-risk pool and leave everyone else with higher premiums. This insurance-company dream is the brainchild of the Golden Rule Insurance Co., which—according to Representative Cynthia McKinney—contributed $1.4 million to Republicans. And, according to the Associated Press, J. Patrick Rooney, an executive at Golden Rule, has contributed $103,000 to Gingrich and GOPAC. Imagine that.

  March 1996

  The 1996 Vote

  CHICAGO — As someone who is seriously considering, for the first time in my life, simply not voting for president (I don’t need a line that says, “None of the above”—I need a line that says, “It makes me vomit”), I am still finding sweet consolation in the belated appearance of some intelligent defenders of President Bill Clinton.

  I honestly do not know if I will vote for the man—in part because I don’t think I need to; he’s going to win anyway. But I remain chapped over four years of watching Clinton absorb more unmitigated garbage—both from right-wingers who wanted him to fail before the git-go and from the media—than any human being short of Adolf Hitler should ever have to endure. Garrison Keillor said in The Washington Post, “If Clinton had been president in 1863 and had gone to Gettysburg and given that speech, the press would have written, ‘Clinton Seeks to Burnish Image at Cemetery Dedication: Hopes Talk Will Distract Public from Whitewater Rumors.’” (Which reminds me: On the actual occasion of the Gettysburg Address, one newspaper reporter wrote, “President Lincoln also spoke.”) To misquote Linda Ellerbee: And so it has gone.

  It’s awfully hard to pick the lowest moment. Vince Foster’s suicide—now, there was a gem. An absolute stampede by paranoid conspiracy-mongers and would-be Woodwards-and-Bernsteins to take a not-unusual tragedy—archetypal gifted perfectionist, unable to bear his failure to meet his own impossible standards, slides into depression and kills self—into whatever seamy tale would most damage Clinton (make that “the Clintons”).

  Then, there was the froo-fraw over how Clinton was exploiting—yes, milking—Commerce Secr
etary Ron Brown’s death for political mileage. I mean, all that mourning stuff went on for a whole week. Bound to be politically motivated! Right—the whole deal could have been cut down to three days if the folks in Bosnia had just been a little quicker about scraping whatever was left of Brown’s body off the side of that mountain. It was definitely Clinton’s fault.

  Next came the stupendous scoop by the actual Bob Woodward about how Hillary had an imaginary conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt—revealed to an astonished world only months after the first lady wrote all about it in her widely syndicated newspaper column. Quel daring journalism.

  Of course, one could go on for pages with examples of equally fair and balanced coverage by the same Washington press corps that was declaring Representative Newt Gingrich a political genius just eighteen months ago. (If you really want to hear all of it, nestle down and listen to James Carville for a few hours.)

  Hey, I’m no wizard; I’m a good little conformist at heart. I probably would have thought Newt “Beach Volleyball” Gingrich was a political genius myself if the Washington press corps had not trespassed beyond the border of sanity by writing admiring profiles of his henchpersons from Texas—Representatives Dick Armey of Irving, Tom DeLay of Sugar Land, and Bill Archer of Houston. Nobody (outside the Beltway) is that dumb.

  Then, there is the Mother of All Scandals, that teeny-tiny drop in the Old S&L Bucket, Whitewater. Gene Lyons, the Arkansas reporter who is no more gaga about Clinton than I am, has been fighting a valiant rear-guard action on Whitewater for years now. With commendable patience, using textbook methods of journalism, he has relentlessly exposed every nutty conspiracy theory, every exaggeration, every carelessness, and every distortion by saying over and over again: “Here are the facts; this is what the record shows.” For an example of Lyons at his best, see the August 8 issue of The New York Review of Books, which debunks yet another Clinton-is-a-sleaze bookette. (There’s money in them thar bookettes.) This one sounds like the best Clinton bookette since ex–FBI agent Gary Aldrich so brilliantly demonstrated why no one should believe what’s in an FBI file. And that, in turn, raises one of those rare Clinton screwups where the press did not get excited enough.

  I don’t have Lyons’ patience. I watch the reporters go down to Arkansas, which they all assume is Dogpatch with L’il Abner geeking around at Moonbeam McSwine, from Washington, that stainless bastion of sea-green incorruptible politics. They remind me of the French cop in Casablanca, who was shocked to find gambling in the back room. I think the word I want is hypocrites.

  Also entering the list of intelligent Clinton defenders is Taylor Branch, chiefly known as the superb biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. (Parting the Waters). His piece in the current issue of Esquire is written with the almost painful scrupulosity that marks all his work.

  Soon to be out: Martin Walker, the ridiculously smart correspondent for The Guardian of Britain, looks at Clinton’s record from an international point of view, which you would never catch anyone in our provincial media corps doing.

  So, if Clinton is all this much better than the American media have ever hinted, how come I’m such an unhappy camper? Read the welfare bill.

  August 1996

  Clinton’s Report Card

  NO ONE,” THE EDITORS of The New York Times argue, “can doubt [the president’s] commitment to using government to spur the economy, protect the environment, defend the cities, promote racial justice, and combine compassion with fiscal prudence.”

  Fine. Here, then, are a few notes from no one.

  Perhaps the best gloss that liberals and progressives can put on the first Clinton administration is that the president would have liked to use the government for the purposes outlined above, but only if no one with power and influence objected overly much. It’s not that Clinton won’t fight for anything but that each issue represents a precise mathematical calculation: popularity of an issue times its political importance minus the number of enemies it has, divided by the power of those enemies to disrupt the rest of Clinton’s agenda. For liberal causes to make any progress in the second Clinton administration, their proponents must first subject themselves to the same disciplined analysis.

  It ain’t pretty. A whopping 16 percent of Americans now admit to the label “liberal.” According to the musings of some senior administration advisers, the campaign issues that have at least a fighting chance of enactment in the next four years include:

  • Political Reform. Clinton promised in his first inaugural address to “reform our politics so that power and privilege no longer shout down the voice of the people.” He lied. This time, however, having recognized the potential explosiveness of the issue, as well as Al Gore’s vulnerability in 2000 regarding it, advisers swear that Clinton means it. Indonesia-scam aside, Republicans will be loath to look like shills for corporate corrupters if Clinton takes the issue center stage.

  • Poor Kids. If the welfare reform bill is to be in any way defanged, it will happen because of “the children.” Clinton is genuinely eager to ameliorate the bill’s harsh treatment of immigrant kids and further beef up its child care provisions. If he is truly ambitious, he will challenge Congress to invest not only in “empowerment zones” but in transportation resources, to allow former welfare recipients who don’t have cars and can’t afford trains and express buses to travel to areas that need workers. If he were someone else entirely, he might even challenge the private sector to invest in the worker training programs that Congress gutted in his 1993 budget. But never mind that.

  • Health Care. Kids rule here as well. A movement is afoot to pass a new tobacco tax to pay for universal health coverage for children. Given all the money Philip Morris spread like manure on Bob Dole’s candidacy, Clinton might want to do it simply for revenge. Gore would probably go along just to prove he hates tobacco as much as he said he did when he made everybody cry in August. And of course Hillary’s on board—unless she’s behind bars. Tobacco pushers are even less popular than liberals.

  • Workers’ Rights. This is the progressives’ sleeper issue. Americans hate sweatshops and they hate child labor. They hate the idea of foreigners taking away jobs with exploitative practices and they could be driven crazy over the idea of, say, Indonesian influence-peddlers buying themselves sweetheart deals that put U.S. workers out of business. With labor rejuvenating itself and Gore’s campaign vulnerable to a Perot/Buchananite explosion around the issue of workers and wages, Clinton could be forced to see the wisdom of vigorously enforcing the GATT rules already on the books. That means, in the case of, say, Indonesia, a country’s special trade preferences could be withdrawn until it allows collective bargaining and discontinues its practice of ending worker disputes with bullets and prisons. Much could also be done to put the fear of The Market into the minds of the leaders of China, Colombia, Mexico, and Pakistan as well. The issue works particularly well in conjunction with political reform. Do the calculations yourself: Without campaign contributions, how many votes does Indonesia have?

  December 1996

  Your Cheatin’ Heart Surgeon

  TWO SOLID WEEKS on the road talking about nothing but the president’s dick. Not that I haven’t tried to change the subject. Valiantly, if I say so myself, I keep trying to point out that with all due respect to the president’s private parts, we do have bigger problems in this country. No go. The media are just obsessed. Happily, the rest of the country is taking all this in stride, making useful distinctions to which the media are oblivious.

  When in the course of human events, fate throws a girl like I into a book tour at the very moment the media have gone into their worst feeding frenzy since the Dead Diana, the consequences are fairly gruesome. My least favorite form of televised bear-baiting is when they put me on some program with other women who are bound to disagree with my contention that political skills and an upright private life are not necessarily connected. “Let’s watch the girls have a catfight!”

  Two days in Washington, D.C., co
nvinced me that the entire city has gone bonkers. The folks at the White House say Kenneth Starr is an obsessive maniac; Starr’s people say Clinton is the moral equivalent of pond scum, that he has gotten away with God-only-knows-what by dint of vast conspiracy, cover-up, intimidation, and bribery.

  These two immense powers sit pulsing hatred toward one another across the entire city. If a person tries gently to suggest that perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between, both camps begin booing and hissing.

  OK, disgusting as it is, let’s look at the “character” issue. The gross abuse of this important word is a large part of the problem. Character does not mean sex. It is possible to have an unhappy home and still conduct the rest of one’s life with perfect probity. Likewise, it is just as possible to be a person of impeccable moral character, say Jimmy Carter, and still not be much of a politician. Of course, we have a right to look for both in our elected leaders—a dimension of moral leadership along with a shrewd, practical politician. But how often does an Abe Lincoln come along?

  Thirty years of covering politics have given me a healthy respect for political skills, for the art and craft of finding that tiny sliver of daylight in the huge wall of obstruction that prevents anything from getting done about anything.