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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Clinton debased the presidency and Gore became a hysterical chameleon. A lazy Bush may be just the prescription America needs.
Jan 17, 2001 | After last fall's rancorous post-election stalemate, the numbed Republican victors have been moving through the transition toward this week's inauguration with all the beauty of a mudslide, while Democratic special-interest groups yammer and yap like ravenous hellhounds. President-elect George W. Bush still seems tentative and oddly depressed, while the outgoing president, Bill Clinton, bounces around the country in undignified overdrive. I'm counting the minutes until Clinton, who debased the presidency and tore the country apart, leaves office.
If only one had the exhilarating sense of new beginnings that normally comes with a changing of the guard. But out of some strange psychological stagnancy, Bush has lazily surrounded himself with advisors and appointees from long-gone Republican administrations. It's baffling why someone who urgently needs to prove to the world that he has a political identity separate from that of his president father wouldn't make a more vigorous effort to bring in fresh blood. Bush has simply played into the hands of critics who claim he wasn't ready for the presidency. Was his web of close personal and professional associations really that thin? And it's dismaying that in this age of communications the president-elect has thus far failed to meet an elementary standard of articulateness for public figures.
But a bland, bumbling Bush may be better for this country than the hysterical chameleon and monstrous panderer that Democratic nominee Al Gore turned into last year. Given the upsurge in partisan warfare and racial animosity fomented in Florida by Democratic operatives after the election, I wish history could be rewritten: if only we could return to the height of the Monica Lewinsky crisis in 1998 and this time firmly force Clinton out. The Democratic establishment was cowardly and irresponsible in backing off from insisting that Clinton resign. The nation would have been spared two horrendous years of inquests, divisiveness and legislative paralysis.
Furthermore, Vice President Al Gore could have assumed the presidency before being overwhelmed by a national campaign and unraveling before our eyes. Had he risen to the presidency by default in 1998, Gore would have gained in stature and experience in the job and, without the burden of the Clinton scandals, might have been easily reelected. It was Gore's own bizarrely frantic behavior and gross fabrications on the stump that eventually repelled me and many other Democrats who bolted to Ralph Nader. The Democratic leadership has only itself to blame for Bush's election.
The Usual Suspects of the p.c. era of the 1980s are cranking themselves up into high dudgeon again over Bush's Cabinet nominees. One had hoped that, with the rise of libertarianism in the 1990s, we had blessedly evolved away from the sterile polarization of left versus right. Are the warhorse feminazis beating the shrubbery to rake up another pasteboard Anita Hill to ambush Bush's nominee for attorney general, John Ashcroft? If so, stay tuned for a replay of the poisonous psychodrama where race is used as a cynical cover for the real liberal monomania, abortion -- as if the entire universe revolves around a single issue affecting the private conduct and personal convenience of heterosexual Western women.
As a pro-choice member of Planned Parenthood, I detest the way the abortion-rights crusade has crippled the women's movement and distorted American politics because of the fanaticism of feminist leaders who are unembarrassed agents of the Democratic party. As I have repeatedly argued, feminism worldwide limits and damages itself when it ties itself to one political party.
If the current face of the Republican party is dreary, the face of the Democratic party is just plain ugly: ranters crying fraud in Florida but ignoring rampant irregularities in Democratic districts in big cities elsewhere; media flacks calling for counting every vote but overlooking massively uncounted absentee ballots (in states where the outcome was not in question) so that Gore's popular-vote margin remains inflated; and now the emergence of Sen. Hillary Clinton as the most grandiose exponent of limousine liberalism in decades.
After her election to the Senate last fall, Hillary had a golden opportunity to shed her bad press and recreate herself -- to surprise her critics and win back disillusioned admirers (like me). Instead she went wholehog down Marie Antoinette Boulevard by angling for an inflated book contract and spinning off on a shopping spree for yet another mansion. The Clintons, forever schmoozing with the rich and famous, are fake populists with distorted values.
The opening tone of the Bush administration is about to be set by the Senate hearings for the Ashcroft nomination. Since I know nothing about Ashcroft, I am waiting to see what evidence there may be to support the rabid allegations about his supposed racism. The race card has been mightily overplayed in recent months, and race relations in this country are seriously strained. As is clear in prior columns, I reject the implication by any group -- gays, Jews or blacks -- that it has special status or privilege in determining national policy on any issue, foreign or domestic.
