Monday, Jul 7, 2008
Stand back as she holds forth on Bush's bumbling ineptitude, Gore's shameless demagoguery and other reasons she's voting for Nader. Plus: Major league media assholes, Anne Heche and more!
Sep 13, 2000 | Greetings, Salon readers! My column returns, as promised, after summer hiatus when I worked on book projects.
Politics was, of course, the season's main event. Americans are staggering under the weary load of a presidential campaign that seems to have been going on for years -- which it has, ever since Monica Lewinsky's snapped thong shook the foundations of the White House.
Since I live in a must-win swing state (Pennsylvania) that could determine the election, I've been bombarded with ads, which began during July's Republican Convention here in Philadelphia with the Democrats' well-crafted but brazenly defamatory assaults on Gov. George W. Bush and his Texas record. But all's fair in love and politics. It was up to the Republicans to respond with ads bolstering Bush's accomplishments (are there any?) and introducing him as an authoritative and well-rounded presence to a Northeastern electorate that doesn't know him from Adam.
Alas, the principal distinction between the political parties these days seems to be that Democrats are media-savvy -- and indeed incestuously intertwined with the Hollywood glitterati -- while Republicans are still living in the dinosaur age of communications, where good intentions are s-p-e-l-l-e-d out as tediously as in a one-room schoolhouse. In this age of the image, Republican operatives have the visual sense of Mr. Magoo.
The first Republican counter-ad, which is still running and running here and may lead to mass suicide by maddened voters, bizarrely resembles a Democratic attack ad. Ostensibly promoting Bush's commitment to educational reform (one of his few solid positives), it shows him standing stiff as a department-store dummy during his convention acceptance speech, as he squints and mush-mouths through a few sentences while inept cutaways flash generic children in generic classrooms. Never in my political memory has there been a major ad so amateurish and self-destructive, fixing a view of the Texas governor as stolid and stupid in the minds of Pennsylvania voters.
Hence I'm not surprised in the least by the Republican nominee's recent slide in the polls. Actually, Bush would probably make a competent, if not great president. He's no verbal whiz, but as I said in this column last spring, much of the national electorate is sick and tired of the glib, smartass Ivy League establishment and its alumni network of casuistic lawyers and snide media coteries. Maybe the country could use a nice, stiff dose of West Texas dust and the old, strike-it-rich romance of black crude. (See "Giant," the 1956 film now a TV staple, where the oil baron is played by rebel icon James Dean.)
While I strongly agree (evidently with a plurality of male voters) that the U.S. military urgently needs rebuilding after its gutting and demoralizing misuse by the Clinton administration, there is little else in the Republican platform that I as a pro-choice feminist Democrat can identify with. There is something very wrong with a party that has stifled and stunted one of its brightest stars, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, because of her moderate views on abortion. Whitman, whose articulateness and command of the issues far surpass Bush's, should have been our first female president.
On the other hand, despite having voted twice for Bill Clinton, I loathe the present leadership of the Democratic Party, which has been corrupted by the ruthless Clinton sleaze machine. I'd like to put the entire Democratic National Committee out to sea without an oar (see Giricault's "Raft of the 'Medusa'"). What a bunch of slimy hypocrites, proclaiming the cause of "the People" while condescending to them. Al Gore's convention acceptance speech last month nauseated me: the shameless demagoguery and chicken-in-every-pot false promises; the amoral use as stage props of pre-selected persons in the audience, including a near-hysterical couple with a baby with a birth defect; the shockingly cursory attention paid to national defense and international affairs -- which shows exactly what's wrong with the Democratic Party, with its unctuous pose as Mother of Many Teats to the suffering masses.
My dilemma as a voter is that while I endorse the populist principles of the Democratic Party at its best (Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter look awfully good at this distance), the present party is overrun by slick, white, upper-middle-class bureaucrats, lawyers and flacks spouting divisive identity-politics propaganda. At the start of the primary season, when I supported Bill Bradley (for whom I voted), I still felt that Gore was superbly prepared to assume the presidency, despite his troubling record of exaggerations, fibs and unnecessarily sycophantish endorsements of the disgraced Bill Clinton. But Gore's manic, undignified scramble for a persona and his ruthless lies about Bradley's record have poisoned my view of him, perhaps irreparably.
At this time, I don't think it's necessarily in the best interest of the country to protract the Clinton-Gore scandals for another four years. While it's theoretically possible that Gore could still convince me that he's fundamentally a person of character and integrity, I am currently planning to vote for Ralph Nader. This country's political dynamics and discourse would be vastly improved by a strong third-party alternative -- which neither the Reform nor Libertarian parties, or even the present Green Party ticket on which Nader is running, has yet been able to provide.
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