Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
The very symbol of slash-and-burn Republicanism W. wants America to forget, Gingrich is cheerfully unapologetic about his short-lived revolution. We had a long talk about it, and when I suggested that the wheel of fortune had turned quickly for him (five years ago he was Time's man of the year; today he is a private citizen, banished from the official ranks of his own party), Gingrich corrected me in that am-I-the-only-one-bright-enough-to-see-this? rhetorical style of his: "It didn't happen fast," he said. "My becoming speaker was part of a 20-year plan," whereupon he summarized for me his steadfast climb to power, which he says he conceived of from the beginning as a military-style campaign -- "Politics is, of course, war."
In his case, as Gingrich sees it, the brilliance of his "Contract With America" campaign spread him and his troops so thin that they failed to adequately plot out the moves and countermoves needed to sustain their momentum, and events (i.e. Bill Clinton) outflanked them. Realizing that his army was now mired in a losing defensive position, Gingrich wisely chose to retreat from the field. He is now embarked on his next 20-year campaign, which involves absorbing a lot of information about new technology and trends, writing books, teaching courses on the Internet and positioning himself for the next wave of political inevitability. Gingrich claims to have been talking about W. themes like diversity and education years ago, but I must have missed that part of his old agenda.
Gingrich thinks big. You ask him a question about the international space station and he talks to you about the failure of China's Ming Dynasty to take advantage of its overwhelming sea power. He reminded me of a pudgy kid I knew in college who was so determined to impress with the breadth of his knowledge that I once encouraged him to wear a beanie with an asterisk on top -- "because you're a walking footnote." Don't count out General Gingrich. There are second, third and fourth acts now in American life.
On Tuesday night the Republicans squirmed through another prime-time address by Colin Powell, who has achieved such unique status in American life that the Republicans are obliged to listen to him even though they don't like what he has to say. Twelve hours after Powell urged the party to listen to the voices of all African-American leaders, no matter their political stripe, as though to fulfill the GOP's worst fears, the Rev. Al Sharpton marched into the carnival tent, an impeccable gray suit draped over his ponderous belly and the rust-tinted waves of his helmet hair reaching to his shoulders, halted, and then watched wordlessly as the inevitable knot of cameramen and reporters arranged itself around him like iron filings to a magnet.
"I'm an equal opportunity activist," he announced. "Inclusion is not choreography, inclusion is real power sharing. Anyone can put minorities on stage; the question is whether the Republican Party is ready to put them at the table." By the look of him, before inviting the Rev. Al to the table they had best prepare a heroic spread. Sharpton was last seen jovially squaring off before radio mikes against Falwell, two men of God who won't be gliding through the eye of a needle anytime soon.
I say give the Republicans credit. The big parties get this one shot every four years to project their identity to the nation, and the GOP has suffered the consequences of having been on the wrong side of the civil rights movement now for long enough. Somebody who matters (the party says it was W. himself) realized that the core values of the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. have long been embraced by mainstream Americans. Those still holding out against ethnic and racial integration in this country are living in trailers and recruiting from state penitentiaries. So it was high time Republicans tried to work themselves out of that hole. The effort may have been a bit extreme, but, then, wasn't it a prominent Republican who once said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is not vice"?
"Are you looking for a black delegate to interview, honey?" asked Nora Reese, an orange-haired woman in a bright red dress festooned with buttons and ribbons from Warner Robbins, Ga., on Monday afternoon, the Republicans' day of diversity. "All you reporters are looking for black folk today, and I think there's not enough of us to go around!"
Indeed, only 4 percent of the delegates were African-Americans. Inside of one 10-minute period last week there were two African-Americans, a Latina singer and a rabbi on stage. About the time the Philadelphia Boys Choir opened with an African chant Wednesday it felt like enough already. But only a hopeless C-SPAN addict was seeing as much of the convention as I was, and I suppose the strategy was to guarantee that anyone in America who tuned into the convention, no matter how briefly, had a better-than-average chance of seeing a Republican of color at center stage.
The truth is that Republicans do have something valid to offer African-Americans. Condoleezza Rice, W.'s wunderkind foreign policy advisor and former member of the elder Bush's National Security Council, not to mention Russian scholar, concert pianist and expert figure skater, put it succinctly when she said she had chosen to be a Republican because it was a party that "sees me as an individual, not as part of a group." It is high time that a black person not be regarded as a race traitor for believing that welfare is destroying African-American families or that vouchers might give urban black families an alternative to sending their children to failed public schools. It is patronizing to view African-Americans as a predictable left-wing, Democratic voting bloc, and as the ranks of America's black middle and upper classes continue to grow, so will diversity of political opinion. I surveyed the locker room of the Philadelphia Eagles on Election Day 1992 and provoked a bit of a scuffle between black players who were loyal to their Southern Democratic roots and those who, with their million-dollar bonus money, found the elder Bush's "read my lips, no new taxes" promise irresistible. The socio-political landscape was evolving right before my eyes. The fact that the Republicans are moving to take advantage of it is just smart politics, and certainly in keeping with the basic principle of "liberty and justice for all."
Contrast that with the colorful band of inept hooligans who gathered in Philadelphia to enact that now sacred adjunct to the ritual of our national political conventions, street protests. This traveling crew, straight from window-busting in Seattle, can now add to its list of accomplishments having been thoroughly outwitted by the Philadelphia Police Department, which until last week was most recently famous for whaling the bejesus out of a handcuffed perpetrator under the watchful eye of a TV news camera, and for having systematically falsified crime statistic reports to the FBI for decades -- thereby claiming imaginary status as the American city with the fewest incidents of violent crime.
There wasn't a whisper of violent crime in Center City last week, as every member of the department was placed on duty, along with help from the state police and the feds. The cops were ready for trouble, but not in the old head-busting tradition. The protesters had issued invitations. By inviting reporters to their strategy sessions and working out details of their clever arrest-evading tactics on the Internet, the activists assured that everyone was well-apprised of their intentions. They actually made the Philadelphia police look good.
My vote for hero of the week is John "Ten-Speed" Timoney, the pug-faced Philadelphia police commissioner, newly imported from New York, where he was a favorite with the literary crowd in part because of his devotion to James Joyce (although this may speak more of Celtic loyalty than literary inclination). It wasn't so many years ago that another Philadelphia police commissioner made national headlines by appearing at a street demonstration straight from some official function dressed in a tuxedo with a nightstick thrust theatrically in his cummerbund. Frank Rizzo went on to become mayor, a path conceivably open to Timoney now, after thoroughly disarming the polite majority of protesters by speeding from trouble spot to trouble spot on a bicycle, wearing short pants, a polo shirt and a (safety first!) helmet. Even the image gurus on W.'s payroll could not have invented a more friendly but industrious way of presenting the police effort.
When a few hundred protesters assembled on Broad Street on Monday for an unauthorized protest march through the center of the city, daring the fuzz to respond in the old-fashioned, truncheon swinging way, Ten-Speed showed up and politely cleared a path for them. And when the hardcore made their move to disrupt traffic Tuesday, Timoney's troops moved in with calm assurance, steering rush-hour traffic around the blocked intersection while systematically picking off the ring leaders of the event and escorting them into waiting vans -- as if this sort of thing happened once a week. One protester was heard to shout, "This is what a police state looks like!" an inanity I will kindly chalk up to youth and inexperience overseas.
The cops were so well prepared that they even had special hacksaws to cut through the piping and chains protesters used to link their hands and make it hard to arrest them one at a time. Good detective work led the police to a warehouse where protesters were manufacturing props for their street theater, and, more importantly, to some of the intellectual masterminds (I use the term facetiously) of this farce. One jailed, the protest leaders came up with the self-defeating strategy of refusing to leave jail until every case was processed, thereby assuring that the bulk of them would remain confined until the last GOP delegate had flown home, fulfilling Timoney's fondest wishes.
The commissioner's exploits grew to the status of legend when he plowed his bicycle into an anarchist demonstrator who was doing his bit against The Machine and Global Capitalism and all that by trashing the vehicle of one Reginald Case, a maintenance worker who had spent his day repairing an air conditioner in a high rise. Inspecting his damaged Toyota Camry, Case complained, "I didn't do nothing to nobody." I don't know, but are anarchists supposed to make sense? I spent some time in Somalia in 1997, a country with no government, and encourage anarchists longing for the experience to check it out. Don't carry with you anything of value.
Breaking up the vandals, Timoney ended up in the middle of a brawl and was left with enough scrapes and bruises to abandon his bicycle, and endear him to lovers of law and order everywhere. The Camry trashers were among 285 arrested that day, effectively clearing the streets of trouble for the remainder of the convention. By the end of the week Ten-Speed's department had even won approval from the local American Civil Liberties Union legal director, Stephan Presser, someone more accustomed to suing cops than praising them.
"It's probably smart tactics," said Presser, speaking of the way Timoney targeted ringleaders of the protests for arrest. "And it probably succeeded, if you look at the speed at which the city resumed to normalcy. I don't see that there's a constitutional question here. It just makes good sense on the part of the department."
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