THE OLD MANRANTS ABOUT POLITICS...
THE OLD MAN
In a Saturday, October 27th editorial, entitled “A Clean, Germ-Free Candidate,” The New York Times speculated:
Perhaps voters will decide that instead of goodness and honesty and marital fidelity, they want experience or TV dynamism or a tough hide on the hard issues.
A pity that from a nation of more than 270 million, we can not find just one person who has it all.
Many observers pose the question, how could this Lewinsky scandal have been allowed to happen? Doesn’t the phrase “damage control” mean anything to the Clinton team?
Monday morning quarterbacks wonder why Paula Jones had to be insulted into taking action as she did. Then, why wasn’t her suit settled as quietly, as cheaply and - most importantly - as early as possible? No suit, and there would have been no civil deposition. Why did Bob Bennett have to goad Linda Tripp into her surreptitious taping of Monica Lewinsky? Why did the President not draw the line and refuse to appear for his deposition before the grand jury? Or having decided that the President would testify, why did his handlers then draw the line and insist that he do so by closed circuit television resulting in the videotape that filled the airwaves? Why did the President and his supporters have to vilify Ken Starr and drive the avuncular looking special prosecutor to throw the kitchen sink and all the dirty laundry into the House Judiciary Committee? And why didn’t the President simply tell the truth somewhere along the line?
David Kendall, once the President’s attorney, was most strongly identified with the take-no-prisoners strategy of stone-walling, denial and slander directed at the President’s opponents that seems to have served him so poorly. While Kendall surely deserves plenty of the responsibility for this failed approach, I believe it overlooks the pivotal role of the President’s closest advisor. That of course is the First Lady.
When Hillary Rodham Clinton was put in charge of the administration’s bold health care proposals at the outset of this administration, some wags advised, “Don’t hire someone you can not fire.” Good advice. The President might have salvaged that policy initiative had he been able to ditch the person he had placed in charge, attached some blame to her, and then proceeded in the best political fashion to offer up some sort of compromise. Lord knows that would not have violated his political instincts. Tough to do though when the person you have to dump is your wife.
And very tough to tell your closest advisor the truth when it amounts to confessions of marital infidelity and that advisor happens to be your wife. I have always believed Hillary Clinton to be a shrewd and ruthless partisan. She can flash her toothy if somewhat homely smile, but do not look for a reflection of that smile in her eyes. As she looks warily about for enemies of her husband’s and her administration, she seems ready to lash out mercilessly against those she deems her foes. At the same time, she is smart enough to know when to hold her fire if she is given the information she needs to make an informed decision.
And there you have the flaw in this White House, even more than the President’s sexual appetite and wanton indiscretion: an advisee unable to share with his advisor the critical information she needed in order to render her best advice. This war room was doomed from the get-go.
Hillary is ambitious and it is interesting to contemplate her future. I doubt that she plans to round out her career serving as hostess of the nation’s first X-rated Presidential library. Will she be best served by remaining married to this man? I suspect that the Presidential bedroom was a frosty place, even before the events of 1998. I think their relationship has long found its sustenance in things political, more than passion or romance. And I predict it will be political considerations that will dictate the future of that relationship once this couple leaves the White House, whenever that may be.
If there is any passion between these two people now, it must be her fury at his humiliation of her, perhaps even more at his managing to grab the brass ring and then totally and unbelievably screw it up. As her husband embarrassingly shambled around looking to apologize to whoever will listen, even more than being married to a shameless libertine, it must have galled her to be associated with someone who now seems to be a symbol of ineptitude.
Nothing the President does in his last two years in office can repair any of that.
Dick Morris, himself a sudden casualty of libido-induced indiscretion that forced him from his position as President Clinton's political advisor, offers a decidedly more cynical vision of the First Lady's future here.
Although I share an alma mater with him and his wife (and Senator Lieberman as well, for that matter), I neither know President Clinton nor am a supporter of his. I voted for another candidate in both general elections although not, as I recall, the one proffered by the Republican Party.
I once aspired to elective office, but being witness to this spectacle we call politics has finally cooled my ardor for that sport. Still I remain interested, and call myself now a disgusted observer of political events.
My path and that of the President and the First Lady crossed, but it was they who crossed over my path. A year elapsed between my departure from and their arrival at one of America’s great universities. This is a heavy burden for some of us. What do you say when someone observes, “Well, Bill graduated four years after you did. He is the President of the United States, the leader of the Free World, the most powerful person on Earth. What is it that you do?”
I must confess that I have a nearly insatiable appetite for the salacious details of the various scandals that swirl around this man. This is the Springer Era, and somehow it all seems appropriate. But I believe there is a higher purpose to this than our entertainment, although that would be enough. The Republican takeover of Capitol Hill has been a tremendous disappointment - I naively expected some new politics, not the old politics with new but decidedly not prettier faces; meanwhile the glib, affable man in the White House, the man bred to be a politician, finds himself hobbled and ineffective... and life is great. Virtually every indicator shows that things are going swimmingly. Is this a coincidence? I am surprised that more pundits have not commented on how well things are going after several years of Congressional preoccupation with the scandals and the President (and more importantly, all the President’s men) busy playing defense, or offense (double entendre) as the best defense.
While they are all distracted, perhaps we should try to sneak in a Constitutional amendment that might institutionalize an arrangement such as this. Why not simply allocate several billion dollars every year for Congress and the Administration to steal from, something to keep them busy, with the simple proviso that they not pass any more laws? It would be worth it.
Every four years New Hampshire holds the nation’s first Presidential primary. The next one will be in February 2000 (more or less; it is impossible to pin down the exact date, as state law mandates that it occur at least seven days before any other state's primary, a move to fend off late-blooming wannabe's).
It is preceded by Iowa’s first-in-the-nation party caucuses. Preservation of my state’s position as host of the first primary contest is a large local political issue, and this one issue welds Granite State Republicans and Democrats alike together in a common front. For some the status is important for economic reasons. Let’s face it, all those political and press entourages blanketing the state bring in a lot of dollars. For others it is our “fifteen minutes;” our tiny state is cast into the spotlight for a moment every four years. And for many of us it is simply the notion that the plain, straight-forward folks of New Hampshire are entitled to a shot at these people who would be President. I mean, every American citizen ought to be able to have the candidates in his or her living room before casting the ballot, but this can not be. So we are proxies for the rest of you, and many of us take this responsibility very seriously.
But there is one more reason not to sacrifice New Hampshire and Iowa’s unique positions as gatekeepers to the nomination process. They are both small states, largely disregarded for the remainder of each quadrennium, but they are both states which also feature some of the most severe winter weather in the nation these candidates would purport to rule over. I, for one, am amused to see politicians from all over the country, but even more so those from places like Florida and California, Texas and Georgia, bundled up in heavy coats, swathed in scarves and mufflers, bedecked in funny winter hats, braving the elements that we up here take for granted... and forcing themselves to smile through it!
This, my fellow Americans, is our revenge, in advance. Our little state metes this out on behalf of all of you. After the election and the inauguration, when you see these types start to behave in the only way they know, issuing self-important proclamations whilst gorging themselves at the public trough, take some solace from the pictures you saw on the news of them shivering in New Hampshire, their feet wet and cold in the slush with the wind whipping snow at their ever-smiling faces, as they scraped up the first, all-important votes. And let us hope that this vision will be enough to fortify us and carry us through another four years.
