Who Let the Dogs In?

by Molly Ivins

  One, the media have been so hideously unfair to Clinton that they are now in an incredible box. They can’t savage this nice, young Bush boy the way they did Clinton, or the sheer ugliness and unfairness of it will turn everyone against the media, not against Bush. On the other hand, if they dismiss Bush’s “youthful indiscretions” as he wants them to, they abandon all hope of appearing even-handed.

  Numero two-o, what’s missing here is the right-wing echo chamber and amplification system. There is a fascinating study in the spring issue of The Public Eye, put out by Political Research Associates in Boston, of the right-wing media chain that often starts with some story or nonstory dug up by an outfit funded by Richard Mellon Scaife.

  But before we get ourselves off into “vast right-wing conspiracy” territory, may I make a suggestion? Both the media and the nation will be spared enormous travail if we stop pretending that politicians are here to provide moral leadership. That way, we won’t have to listen to little Georgie Bush, the frat boy, lecture us all about responsibility and purpose and family values and moral uplift and chastity and abstinence and all the rest of it. Instead, we can sit down and try to figure out whether he’s smart enough to run the country.

  You want moral leadership? Try the clergy. It’s their job.

  September 1999

  Off Your Duff

  HERE’S A STORY FOR all you nonvoters who won’t have anything to do with politics because it doesn’t make any difference to you who wins.

  A few weeks ago, I lost my prescription sunglasses. Can’t do without ’em in Texas. I went out to the jiffy optical place to order a new pair. Nope, they said, no can do—the prescription for your eyeglasses is too old.

  I see just fine with the glasses I have now, but it had been in the neighborhood of five years since I’d last had my eyes checked, so whatthehey, I toddle off for an eye exam. Turns out that no change in the prescription is needed, so they ask why I came in. Oh yeah, reports the ophthalmologist, they passed a new law: You can’t get glasses made on any prescription that’s more than a year old.

  I have to admit, that little piece of special interest legislation went right by me. I don’t even want to think about the lobbying on that one, but rest assured that our legislators did this for our own good, because we should have annual eye exams even if we’re seeing fine, and you can bet that the campaign contributions track so well on this one that we can see ’em without glasses.

  So I’m out 110 bucks even before paying for new glasses. I look forward to a frequent reoccurrence of this happy event, since I either lose a pair or the dog chews one up at least once a year. Even if you have health insurance, yours may not cover the standard eye exam unless you’ve purchased separate vision insurance.

  The moral of this story is: Don’t sit on your glasses, and don’t sit on your duff come election time—find a candidate in favor of campaign-finance reform.

  Further evidence of the wisdom of this excellent advice: Our fearless Republican leaders in Washington were wanting to give us a $792 billion tax break. Actually, they wanted to give the $792 billion to rich people and to a whole lot of special interests that give big campaign contributions.

  They seem to have forgotten that there’s more than one way to take the burden off the shoulders of taxpayers. For example, we could charge the oil companies the going market price for drilling on federal land, which happens to be owned by you and me. Instead, we let the oil companies set their own payment for drilling on our land. Is that a sweet deal or what?

  According to a former oil-company executive who testified before Congress on this, the companies always set that payment $4 to $5 per barrel below market. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has been trying to get this changed, but Babbitt doesn’t make big campaign contributions. Our own Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose campaign contributions from oil companies in the past five years total $1.2 million, has successfully fended off Babbitt by passing midnight riders on appropriations bills to stop any change in this sweetheart deal.

  Last week, the Senate—despite a noble effort at filibuster by Barbara Boxer of California—passed Kay Bailey’s rider yet again by a vote of 51–47. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who does favor campaign-finance reform, stood there and read aloud the oil company contributions to various senators before the vote, and you should have heard them howl. How dare Feingold suggest their votes are for sale, uncollegial conduct, bad taste, you’re a fink, Russ, etc. These honorable members felt that Feingold should be ashamed of himself for doing such a tacky thing. This bunch clearly knows dog about shame, so I suggest that Feingold pay them no attention.

  And speaking of the honorable members of Congress, I trust it did not escape your attention that they have once again given themselves a raise: $4,600, on top of the $3,100 cost-of-living “adjustment” they got last year. They are at $141,000 a year, putting them in the top 5 percent of all earners, not counting their almost free health care, haircuts, etc. But you’ll be happy to know that they’re still whining about the cost of maintaining two homes, the cost of living in D.C., etc. Before you waste any sympathy on them, check out how many of them took their spouses to the Paris air show at our expense or went to “fact-finding” golf tournaments at lobbyists’ expense.

  On the theory that gritching alone will not improve anything, here’s a positive suggestion for world betterment: I move that we pay members of Congress precisely the median wage in this country. Fifty percent of Americans will earn more than they do, 50 percent less. The median goes up, they get a raise. What could be fairer? Median is currently a little under $50K for a family of four. Welcome to the real word, honorable members.

  In closing, may I say I am heartbroken to hear that my man Dan Quayle is dropping out of the race for presadent.

  September 1999

  Clinton’s Merits

  DON’T KNOW HOW many of you heard President Clinton’s speech at the World Trade Organization. Except for C-SPAN junkies, I doubt anyone was watching. But it is high time somebody said the obvious out loud: The son of a gun is good.

  How long has it been since you heard Clinton make a whole speech? I’ve been catching him on the tube in snippets for so long that I’d forgotten just how effortlessly persuasive he actually is. There he stood, the No. 1 Free-Trader in the Whole World, facing all the opposition. By the time he finished, he was on their side and they were on his side. He is a superb politician.

  Anyone volunteering a kind word for Clinton nowadays has to issue the obligatory disclaimer. In my case, it’s easy, since I barely agree with him 50 percent of the time.

  He’s not my kind of Democrat and never has been. But at least I have the sense to recognize the man’s merits, whatever his failings.

  He is an amazingly skilled pol at the top of his game. I know—everybody hates politicians so much that to say someone is a great one is a form of cussin’ him out. Nevertheless, I do admire real political skill, and Clinton has it in spades.

  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone better. Maybe Lyndon Johnson on a roll, or Bob Bullock in good health. Too bad that Clinton had to spend most of his presidency on defense. I would have liked to see him quarterback a Democratic Congress for the sheer interest of the exercise.

  Don’t ask me to explain what went wrong between Clinton and the Washington press corps. I’ve never understood it. I don’t want to drag anyone through the Late Unpleasantness again, but as near as I can tell, about half the D.C. press corps is totally wiggy on the subject of Clinton. Otherwise rational people—like Chris Matthews, Chris Hitchens, George Will, there’s an army of them—are so obsessed by Clinton’s moral failings that they cannot see his performance, what he actually does with the job.

  I’m sorry that Clinton is so flawed. That’s truly a shame. As Mr. Shake-speare said, “. . . and the elements / So mixed in him.” But I still don’t see why that prevents people who presume to have some grasp of objectivity from seeing what’s right in front of them. Clinton is such a master
that he has played a Republican Congress to a dead standstill for six years now—and often with no cards at all in his hand (mostly due to his own stupidity during the Late Unpleasantness).

  And what a set of Republicans. It’s not as though he’s had to deal with constructive citizens who happen to differ with him on the issues—your Robert Tafts, your Bob Doles, your Margaret Smiths, or such as that. Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution—God save us.

  Lord knows, the Republicans have saved Bill Clinton. Time after time after time, they are so blinded by their hatred of Clinton that they do themselves in. I’m sure it’s a mercy, but it’s also a peculiar phenomenon.

  I’ve already said my piece on the Clinton-haters. I suspect it has something to do with sex or sexual envy, which always makes people irrational. But there has already been far too much parlor psychoanalysis and idiot psycho-babble about Clinton. When the content-analysis mavens at the schools of communication go through coverage of the Clinton administration, my bet is that they find a lot more psychobabble than they do actual reporting on what he’s done:

  • A seven-year economic boom (and some of the credit for that should go to George Bush the elder), marred by a terrible maldistri-bution of wealth, mostly caused by stupid tax policies. If Clinton had had a better Congress, it wouldn’t be such a problem.

  • Some nice peace work here and there—Northern Ireland, the Middle East.

  • One bozo military adventure. Clinton’s bombing of the drug factory in Sudan ranks right up there with the time that Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada to save us all from some Cuban construction workers. Kosovo is a disaster, but Kosovo was going to be a disaster no matter what we did.

  • Almost certainly should have done better with Russia; there was an awful lot of capitalist hubris in this country after the cold war ended.

  • Some very graceful and deft diplomatic work. The Republicans keep complaining that Clinton apologizes for our foreign policy mistakes when he goes abroad. We had a lot of mistakes to apologize for. What, you thought the Greek junta was a swell bunch?

  • A big failure on health-care reform, though I still think that lobby money is what really killed that bill. But note the interesting way that Clinton works as a pol. He really is an incrementalist. He got a full children’s health insurance program through a Republican Congress (much credit to Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch). He signed a lousy welfare reform bill and then quietly went back and fixed many of the worst provisions in it. The guy just keeps chipping away.

  Given the amount of personal abuse the man has taken, his resilience is just extraordinary. Apparently, he really does get up every day and start over.

  We’ve never seen him get mad in public, and I have often wanted to congratulate his late mother on his manners. Would that Trent Lott’s momma had done half that well. Given the circumstances of his presidency, Clinton deserves a medal just for being generally cheerful.

  On the sleaze factor, I don’t know that one can blame Clinton so much as the whole system of campaign financing. By 1996, the floodgates were wide open; it was ally-ally-in free on the money.

  The Republicans didn’t look any better. Who can forget the immortal testimony of former GOP chairman Haley Barbour that while sitting on the deck of a junk in Hong Kong harbor, he had no idea he was being offered foreign money?

  This administration’s indictment count is still well under the glorious benchmarks set by Nixon and Reagan. (Although I think we’re going to have to put Nixon in a permanent separate category. Did you read the transcripts of the tapes they just released? What a despicable human. In the long history of rationalization, have you ever seen anything more bizarre than someone as intelligent as William Safire carrying on about the moral leprosy of Clinton while still defending Nixon?)

  Whatever Clinton’s mistakes, they don’t seem to have stemmed from malice. I may be wrong, but I don’t see much mean in him.

  Whoever wins the election next year, I give him six weeks and one good screwup before someone in Washington has the simple honesty to say, “You know, Clinton coulda handled that with his eyes shut.”

  December 1999

  Comrade Donald Trump

  COMRADE TRUMP’S DANDY IDEA — “Soak the rich!” saith the Donald, that l’il lefty—has raised The Issue That Dare Not Speak Its Name. To wit, the obscene maldistribution of wealth in this country, also known as the Income Gap.

  While Comrade Trump proposes a onetime 14 percent tax on everybody with more than $10 million to his name—thus raising more than enough to pay off the entire national debt in one foul sweep—Brother Bush is marching militantly in the wrong direction. Governor Dubya wants more tax breaks for the rich. Sigh. Does not get it.

  The biggest break for the rich in the Bush package is the elimination of the estate tax, which Republicans have now taken to calling “the death tax” in one of those public-relations ploys they think will fool us all.

  (One envisions a pod of Republican shrewdies brainstorming: “Let’s call it ‘the death tax!’ Then they’ll think everyone has to pay it, and that will make it really unpopular!” What kind of mushrooms do those people eat?)

  It’s still an estate tax, and it still applies only to those who leave more than $2 million per couple, so Junior gets his first $2 mil without paying anything. Then the government takes 37 percent of everything over that, sliding up to a top rate of 55 percent on truly major estates.

  This is a sizable problem for all the Wifford Wasp Witherspoon IVs out there, but not noticeably burdensome to the rest of us. Besides which, you may have noticed that the flowering field of “estate planning” contains an astounding array of loopholes by which the very rich shelter their gelt from the tax man.

  Next Bush proposes to flatten the income tax by moving from five progressive rates to four—keep in mind that “flatter” means less progressive, which means less fair—and then adds insult to injury by lowering the rate for the richest taxpayers even more than he lowers the rate for the lowest-income taxpayers, thus making the total system even less fair. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, two thirds of the total tax relief in the Bush package will go to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans. How Republican.

  Now let’s look at this suffering top 10 percent and see just how terribly much they need a tax break. Keep in mind that they have been getting tax breaks steadily since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, with the following consequences: By 1997, the top 10 percent of the population owned 73.2 percent of the nation’s net worth, up from 68 percent in 1983. The figures keep moving rapidly, so by now it’s fair to guess that less than a fourth of the nation’s wealth is shared by the other 90 percent of us.

  Even more staggering, a 1995 study by the Federal Reserve says the top 1 percent of American households (that’s everybody with more than $2.3 million) own about 35 percent of the nation’s wealth, and that figure gets worse every year, too.

  Looked at from the other side of the Income Gap, we find that those in the bottom 20 percent have actually lost ground in the nineties, while those in the middle have benefited only very slightly, while simultaneously piling up a staggering degree of debt. Why would anyone deliberately aggravate what is already a ridiculous imbalance?

  We’ve just finished with a Congress that couldn’t bring itself to raise the minimum wage by a whopping $1 over three years. And I remind you that the R’s loaded even that pitiful gesture with $40 billion in tax breaks for the rich. Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, that nasty man, even tried to use the minimum-wage bill to sneak in an additional tax write-off for the three-martini lunch—what a highly developed sense of class justice he has.

  (I call Nickles nasty because, according to The Washington Post, he is one of the senators behind a whispering campaign against John McCain, claiming that McCain is unstable because of the years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison camp. If that doesn’t strike you as nasty, what does?)

  Back to our man Trump. Being new to Marxist thought, the Donald has
not fully grasped the finer points and wants to eliminate the estate tax himself. The bottom line for Comrade Trump is that his one-shot 14 percent wealth tax on those with more than $10 mil would cost him personally somewhere in the neighborhood of $350 million, but abolishing the estate tax would save him twice that. He may be a tyro leftie, but he’s not stupid.

  However, the notion of a tax on wealth bears close examination. Eleven European countries already have such a tax, including those devoted capitalists in Germany and Switzerland. As you know, in this country we tax only income, not wealth; but in Europe, they put a low tax (between 1 percent and 3 percent) on wealth in addition to income taxes.

  According to Professor Leon Friedman of Hofstra Law School, writing in the current issue of The Nation, if we put a 1 percent tax on the total assets of the richest 1 percent of Americans (now there’s a simple tax plan), it would net us $70 billion a year (more than half of what we take in now from all other sources), giving the feds a total of $200 billion per year with which to shore up Social Security and maybe even give a tax break to people who actually need one. Just 1 percent on the 1 percent.