The high point was Pat Buchanan’s speech, the only Republican oratorical effort chock full o’ nifty ideas. Religious warfare, for example. Gad, think of the fun we can have-mass slaughter in the name of God, killing for Christ, pogroms, heretic hunts. We, too, can at long last enjoy the charming ambience of Northern Ireland and Lebanon.
Cultural cleansing, there’s another fab proposal. Why should the Bosnians have all the fun? We can have a cleansing of our very own right here at home. In the Battle of Stalingrad portion of his speech, Buchanan set forth his program for the inner cities: M-16s. We will retake the cities, block by block from the Americans who have, with fiendish cleverness, infiltrated their own country.
That Buchanan’s story about the young army troops who saved the home for the elderly from mob menace turned out to be untrue is a mere trifle. At the Republican convention, we approached truth in a larkey spirit, with imagination, flexibility and insouciance. Nor were we hobbled by hypocrisy. We felt perfectly free to call Bill Clinton a draft dodger. Never mind that Clinton, who hated the war in Nam, finally signed up for the draft lottery out of conscience. Whereas Buchanan, that fearless Commie killer, couldn’t go because his knee hurt.
Tuesday night shall be passed over in merciful brevity. Jack Kemp seems to be a nice man with silly economic ideas. Two hours of bad buildup to Phil Gramm’s excruciatingly boring lecture. But look at it this way, he wasn’t nearly as nasty as he can be.
Wednesday we got wives. Marilyn Quayle gave us a bizarrely foreshortened version of some debate among upper-middle-class white women about whether they should choose fulfilling careers or be true to their “essential natures” by staying home with their children. The fact that most American women work because they have to, at lousy jobs for lousy pay, does not seem to have made it onto her radar screen.
I can’t help it, I’m a Barbara Bush fan. The press was all atwitter about how Mrs. Bush was being “combative…… feisty” and even “nasty.” Oh poot, she’s always been tough as old boots: I like her anyway, or maybe on account of it. If the press was dumb enough to think she was nothing but a sweet, white-haired granny in the first place, let them eat chocolate chips.
Thursday brought us an unusually surreal exercise, even for Dan Quayle. First he steals Al Gore’s theme line, and then he reprises his own most memorable public humiliation by stealing Lloyd Bentsen’s “you’re no JFK” bit. Will someone hire the poor man a speechwriter who doesn’t plagiarize?
His hour come round at last, George Bush stood before us, ready after four long years to reveal his Vision Thing. This was the speech that would definitively define his domestic agenda. This was the speech that would unveil his bulletproof plan for getting us out of the recession. And also tell us who the hell has been president for the last four years.
Speculation, fed for days by Bush’s campaign advisers, was rife. Would he announce a dramatic tax cut as a stimulus? Would he match it with a spending cut, perhaps even in the supposedly untouchable entitlement programs? Maybe he would even knock ever ne out with some selfless, statesmanlike version of the Perot plan-the stark truth at last, pain for everyone for patriotism’s sake–showing a heretofore unimagined degree of political courage? Voodoo or Keynes? Politics or guts?
The start was boffo! Fifteen minutes on foreign affairs, his forte, in which he took sole credit for everything good that’s happened during his watch except the birth of a couple of long-awaited babies in Bolivia. What the hell, this is politics and you get to do that. Now comes the Vision Thing:
Congress is awful and the other guy is a louse.
OK. That was the Congress-and-Clinton bashing bit. Now the Vision Thing:
Congress is super-awful and the other guy’s a dreadful louse.
All right, now here it comes. George Bush’s plan to get us out of this mess:
Congress is just dreadfully awful, it has never done one single thing except prevent George Bush from carrying out all his perfectly wonderful plans, and the other guy is the worst louse in history.
Bound to be an economic plan in here somewhere. He has to come up with one. He’s in deep doodoo. And the voters care only about the economy. Ah, here it comes, right now, this is it, my pencil’s poised, here it comes: Zip. There it went. I consult my notes.
A capital-gains tax cut, plus Congress is awful and the other guy is a louse. That was it. Same damn tax cut for his rich friends Bush has been pushing since the Bronze Age, with no chance Congress will pass it because it will not do one bit of good. Some vague one-sentence pledge got the headlines. I’ll cut taxes if they cut spending. What taxes? What spending.? But that was all. More mush from the wimp. In the clueless mode again.
He went on again about a balanced-budget amendment. The man has never submitted anything remotely resembling a balanced budget. If he wants one, why doesn’t he come up with one? He seems to think an amendment is like pixie dust: you sprinkle it on and–poof–the deficit disappears. He wants a balanced budget and no new taxes. You look at the numbers and tell me if this fool can add.
I’ve spent too many years listening to Texas legislators mangle English, the favorite blood sport in our state, to mistake bad grammar for low IQ. But Bush’s hopeless incoherence whenever he speaks without a TelePrompTer does seem to me related to some impairment in his ability to think clearly. I suspect the reason no one knows what he really stands for (except a capital-gains tax cut) is because he doesn’t, either.
Many of the lies at the convention were told so often, they lost their power to startle. “What?! Clinton raised taxes 128 times?! That can’t be right!” Became instead, Clinton-who-raised-taxes-128-times. Likewise, the initially odd sound of “Gays-who-are-demanding-special-treatment–and– special-preferences-under-the-law” stopped being astonishing (“They are?! I didn’t know that! Well that’s terrible, I don’t agree with that.”). In fact, no gay organization has ever asked for special preferences, hiring quotas or any form of affirmative action under the law.
I live in Austin, Texas. Last Dec. 9, the newspaper for which I had worked for 10 years bit the dust. The Dallas Times Herald was a classic example of the ’80s. It was bought sequentially by entrepreneurs leveraged up to their eyeballs. Every penny it made for the last years of its life went to pay off the interest on those debts. When the paper, still making money, could no longer cover the interest, it folded. Just under 1,000 full-time employees were on the street.
Most of us, at least from the news side, are OK now. One friend who hasn’t landed yet is the best copy editor I ever worked with. His wife, a teacher, got cancer the summer before the Herald died. Because her health insurance was through the local school district, he couldn’t leave the area. The last letter I got from him, he asked me to let him know if I heard of any openings on the Austin paper. “I could come down five days a week; I’ve got a tent I could sleep in. And then go back to take care of her on the weekends. I’ll take any job that’s open. I have a little business now, mowing lawns.”
George Bush told the convention the American people don’t want a health-insurance system. “Who wants health care with … the efficiency of the House post office and the compassion of the KGB?” he asked.
Many of the genuinely nice Republicans I met in Houston won’t recognize themselves in the description of a convention dominated by hatemongering and fearmongering, all done for political purposes. But it was there, it was real, and it was what that convention was about.
