Free-Form Re-From
Em, well, no, Bob. It's that the mainstream media and the nonmainstream media and the semi-mainstream media and everyone who reads any of them cannot abide that she's totally unqualified to be president. On top of that, she leaves the impression of being a nut-cutting Machiavellian jerk. On which subject, the best line of last week's hurricane was Jay Leno's to the effect that it was blowing so hard somebody saw Elizabeth Dole's hair move.
The question that fascinates me most, though, is this: Why didn't Dole write that letter to Time, or to The New York Times, considerably more of a national newspaper than that bipartisan house organ The Washington Post? Answer: Because Dole has the opinion that all pols get nominated by a clique of Washington insiders. After all, he did.
Dole turns out to be right. Let's look at some of the "outsider" candidates who are being bandied about as ones to "shake up" our political "establishment." Pat Buchanan for instance. There's no doubt he has his share of supporters in the heartland, but this is a man who's spent half his life working in various White Houses and half his life as a television pundit. You don't get more establishment than that.
And couldn't the Reformers have found a better match? While he now focuses largely on trade, it's the GOP's tolerance of abortion that first caused Buchanan to blow his wig. So now he's fleeing into the arms of a party that declares abortion off the political table.
But if the mating dance between Pat Buchanan and the Reform party is fraught with hypocrisy on both sides, it's the Reformers who deserve the lion's share of the blame. In the past two weeks, the Bush camp has been sending emissaries to Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura in an effort to keep Buchanan from getting the Reform nod, and Ventura's been playing ball with them.
Not that Ventura doesn't have a real problem, and a real reason to want to keep Buchanan out of his party. There are basically two constituencies in America who are drastically underrepresented in our present politics: populists who sense they've been screwed by the global economy, and libertarians who rightly see a kind of slo-mo putsch by regulatory authoritarians. The Reform Party represents neither of these tendencies, but it's a tempting vehicle for both of them to try to capture. That's why Jesse ultimately can't play ball with Pat. Jesse's a Lib and Pat's a Pop.
However, Ventura's negotiation with the Bushies is quite a Profile in Illogic. The Reform Party's raison d'etre is that the two-party establishment has degenerated into a club for backroom deals. And here's the most prominent member of that party engaging in backroom deals to protect the establishment wing of one of those parties. So desperate is Ventura, whose own hands are tied by a solemn electoral promise to serve out his full four-year gubernatorial term, that he has expressed a willingness to consider Donald Trump as the party's presidential nominee. That's even better! A party founded to stop backroom dealing might choose as its standard-bearer the single American who has bragged most obnoxiously about his prowess as a backroom dealer.
As was first reported here last month, it's the former Reagan consultant Roger Stone who's trying to manufacture a Trump candidacy out of thin air. "A lot of people," Roger says, "have questions about where Donald Trump stands on the major issues of the day."
Yeah, sure. Much as I like Roger, I can only reply: Name one.
I may still be giving the Reformers too much credit. There are indications that the party is merely a little pond in which the losers of Yesterday's Doctrinaire Liberalism can flap around as big fish. Former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker, than whom no liberal is more doctrinaire, was begging on his hands and knees for the nomination, which was denied him only when polling established that Weicker would pull about half a percent of the vote nationally. What's disturbing is that the Weicker boomlet?and boomlet may be too strong a word for it; let's call it a "boomlecule"?was centered in Minnesota, which is supposed to be, thanks to Ventura, the most dynamic of the state Reform parties. But all these guys sound like Weicker's kind of 1974-era Ripon Society Republicans. Here's Minnesota Reform Party founder Dean Barkley on Crossfire, explaining why Buchanan's such a bad match: "It's going to be very interesting whether or not he can take abortion, gay rights, some of those other divisive issues that, as a party, we don't believe are political, they're individual decisions, and put those on the back burner and market himself to, I'd say, the centrist wing of our party, to say that he saw the error of his ways and now he's going to be a true reformer and these issues should not be political issues."
Yecch! There's a lot of this kind of sanctimony about lately?in which the most contentious political ideas are decreed by their opponents to be beyond discussion. Take ABC's Charles Gibson, who interviewed Al Gore the other day and opened by mewing about how he didn't want to turn guns into a political issue. To which Gore replied: "Well, you said you didn't want to politicize it. I can assure you it is the last thing that I want to do and I don't want to get into a discussion like that." It amounts to an attempt to reach McCarthyite, speech-quashing ends through lovey-dovey, pseudo-ecumenical means.
Notice a resemblance? Lamontagne asked the Manchester Union-Leader. Huh? Huh?
But the New York Post had said in an editorial in November 1998: "Liberalism now has its own George Wallaces standing in schoolhouse doors, blocking poor children from the means of making choices of a sort taken for granted by nonpoor Americans (including liberalism's Wallaces)." They were only following the lead of Trent Lott, who the previous April had said Democrats were "standing at the schoolhouse door barring the way for a quality education for the children who quite often need it the most."
Already in the last days of 1997, the Reaganite political guru Ken Khachigian had averred that "trepidant [sic] Republicans and Democrats alike should realize that the cause of choice is as inevitable as the civil rights movement was in the '50s and '60s. In place of demagogues standing at the schoolhouse door blocking entry, today's demagogues are inside the schoolhouse blocking escape."
The summer before, Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, urging a school choice program for DC, had said that low-income parents testifying before a Senate committee were "confused by liberals committed to standing at the schoolhouse door to prevent their children from entering functional integrated schools."
In 1992, during the Bush administration, someone at the Heritage Foundation?probably my dear pal Marshall Wittman of Waco, TX, the ex-Angela Davis associate who has become the most quoted rightist in Washington?described Milwaukee vouchers opponent Bert Grover as: "a man standing in the schoolhouse door and saying 'never.'"
At any rate, for one Republican to accuse another of plagiarizing "standing in the schoolhouse door" is like a Clinton aide accusing some Democrat of plagiarizing the phrase "Medicare Medicaid Education and the Environment." It has been repeated to the point where it's gibberish. The most shocking thing is that Lamontagne didn't use it in his 1996 race. Maybe that's why he lost so bad.