Read Who Let the Dogs In? Online
Authors: Molly Ivins
Who Let the Dogs In? (20 page)
When in the course of human events, fate throws a girl like I into a book tour at the very moment the media have gone into their worst feeding frenzy since the Dead Diana, the consequences are fairly gruesome. My least favorite form of televised bear-baiting is when they put me on some program with other women who are bound to disagree with my contention that political skills and an upright private life are not necessarily connected. “Let’s watch the girls have a catfight!”
Two days in Washington, D.C., convinced me that the entire city has gone bonkers. The folks at the White House say Kenneth Starr is an obsessive maniac; Starr’s people say Clinton is the moral equivalent of pond scum, that he has gotten away with God-only-knows-what by dint of vast conspiracy, cover-up, intimidation, and bribery.
These two immense powers sit pulsing hatred toward one another across the entire city. If a person tries gently to suggest that perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between, both camps begin booing and hissing.
OK, disgusting as it is, let’s look at the “character” issue. The gross abuse of this important word is a large part of the problem. Character does not mean sex. It is possible to have an unhappy home and still conduct the rest of one’s life with perfect probity. Likewise, it is just as possible to be a person of impeccable moral character, say Jimmy Carter, and still not be much of a politician. Of course, we have a right to look for both in our elected leaders—a dimension of moral leadership along with a shrewd, practical politician. But how often does an Abe Lincoln come along?
Thirty years of covering politics have given me a healthy respect for political skills, for the art and craft of finding that tiny sliver of daylight in the huge wall of obstruction that prevents anything from getting done about anything.
I submit to you that Lyndon Johnson was a superb politician. Had it not been for the fatal error of Vietnam, I believe Johnson would have gone down as one of the greatest presidents in our history. Think of government as a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption, perhaps the most complicated, least straightforward piece of machinery ever devised: Lyndon knew which buttons to push, which levers to press, which handles to crank, and where to kick the damn thing to get it to whirl around and turn out something that would actually help people. But as a human being, he was a miserable specimen. Who but Lady Bird ever could have put up with him?
I’ve known a lot of exceptionally decent people in politics, and I’ve known a handful of great politicians: The two are not mutually exclusive, but it is also true that they rarely overlap.
What to do?
Say it’s a life-or-death situation: You need open-heart surgery, and you’re looking for the best doctor you can find. This doctor is going to be cutting your heart: You want to know where he or she got his training, what his success rate is, what his peers think of his skills. I submit to you that you don’t particularly care if he cheats on his wife.
All I’m trying to say here is that I don’t think the press corps is particularly well qualified to go around passing judgments on other people’s private lives. (In fact, most of us are singularly ill qualified to do so.) I think we should stick to what we do know, which is looking at a politician’s record and reporting what’s there. And Clinton’s record is damn peculiar.
Sometimes politicians can be divided into those who are good at running for office and those who are good at governing. Clinton is obviously amazingly good at the former, not so great at the latter. Yet he is an intelligent man and genuinely knowledgeable: a true policy wonk. His greatest strength in governance is persistence.
An Arkansas state senator once told me Clinton reminded him of one of those broad-bottomed children’s toys: You tump it over, it pops back up; you tump it over, it pops back up again. He’d propose some grand scheme to make Arkansas a better place, and the Lege would peck it to death—costs too much, leads to new taxes, more bureaucracy, etc. They’d all vote no and assume the scheme was dead. But Clinton would always come back next session with a new way to achieve the same goal: George, I took care of that part you didn’t like; Mary, look what this will do for your district; Sam, you’re gonna like this amendment. And lo and behold, it would get done: not in the best or most efficient way, but in the way that was politically possible.
That’s an art, and I think it deserves respect.
Look at Clinton trying to get the public schools fixed. One third of American schools are somewhere between dilapidated and flat falling apart—holes in the roof, broken windows, kids tripping on broken linoleum and bad stairs. Estimates as high as $100 billion to fix them, new schools also needed, no way the local districts can handle this. First, Clinton asks Congress for a $5 billion appropriation to fix the schools. Typical Clinton—way too little, a mere gesture at the problem. R’s immediately reject the proposal—costs too much, balanced budget, local control sacred. Goes down in flames.
So he comes back this year: new approach on same problem. He wants $20 billion worth of bonds with a special tax break. Buy these bonds, you pay zero in federal taxes. Use private capital to fix the schools. Money is to be handled by the states and school districts: George, I took care of your problem with local control. Districts can use the federal bonds to leverage their own. Now we’re looking at $40 to $50 billion to fix the schools. We’re talking real progress.
If you can’t get it done one way, get it done another. That’s a smart politician. That is not a faithful husband.
If we can’t have both, take your pick.
May 1998
F
ROM
HERE IN THE
have-no-mercy-liberals camp, the political weather continues delightful. What could be more fun than watching Republicans turn on one another, snapping and snarling, throwing left hooks, right jabs, and mud pies? Splendid doings.
From a strategic point of view, I suppose I should want House Speaker Newt Gingrich to stay where he is, considering that he’s both hateful and incompetent. But I must admit to a mild case of Greater Good here: I’d really like for America to see Gingrich in its rearview mirror, because I think he’s a nasty piece of work who has brought American politics even lower than it would otherwise go. It’s a good-of-the-nation moment.
The same might be said for our Texans in the House leadership, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay. Personally, I’ve always wondered what it says about Republicans that those two were chosen for leadership positions in the first place. Armey is an ideologue of no noticeable political skill, and DeLay has been so clumsy and heavy-handed in his abuse of power that it’s been painful to watch, whether you’re for him or against him. Let the caucus decide.
In the meantime, a wonderful corrective has appeared on the horizon—an astonishing piece of journalism so timely and so much more important to what is actually going on than all this political blather that I’m tempted to announce it in terms of “Lo, a star in the East.”
In a typical item from the blather front,
The New York Times
sees internal Republican politics as leading to “still larger victories for minimal government and taxes, unfettered free enterprise and a return to conservative Christian values.” That’s almost a mantra (along with the fashionable new cliché, “conservatism with compassion”—the Bush brothers’ theme song) that somehow Republicans need to “get back” to their core values of less government and lower taxes. What’s wrong with this picture?
The answer is to be found in the current and forthcoming issues of
Time
magazine, in which the superb investigative team of Don Barlett and Jim Steele is unleashed on the subject of corporate welfare. Holy mackerel—what a story.
While the R’s and the D’s sit here having this silly pretend-debate (education, the environment, and Social Security, chant the D’s; less government and lower taxes, chant the R’s), what’s really going on is being ignored by everyone. They’re all giving away the store—to big corporate campaign donors, of course.
Even for those of us who regularly follow corporate welfare, the Barlett-Steele investigation is mind-boggling. To what depth, breadth, and height can corporate welfare reach? And how much is it costing every one of us? Barlett and Steele not only dug out the answers, they dug out still more astonishing information. The system doesn’t even work; it’s not producing jobs. All these taxpayer rip-offs, subsidies, tax abatements, low-cost loans—all for nothing.
While state and local governments have caved in to this folly to an extent that’s beyond stupid and well into acutely embarrassing, the feds are still the biggest Uncle Sugar of them all, handing out $125 billion in corporate welfare during a time of robust economic growth and corporate profits. It’s insane. Barlett and Steele’s conclusion is that the corporate welfare system exactly mimics the most criticized aspects of traditional welfare programs: It “is unfair, destroys incentive, perpetuates dependence, and distorts the economy.” But instead of rewarding the poor, it rewards the powerful.
Corporate welfare also penalizes the rest of us; for every tax advantage given to a corporation, the tax burden shared by the rest of us is that much greater. Just in federal taxes, it is the equivalent of all the income tax paid by sixty million individuals and families. Lower taxes, anyone?
At the state and local levels, the folly knows no bounds. The investigators found cases in which governments gave away $323,000 in taxes and services to secure a $50,000 job that couldn’t yield that much in taxes over several lifetimes.
And as usual, the system is weighted toward the biggest (and biggest contributors): “Ten million jobs have been created since 1990. But most of those jobs have been created at small- and medium-sized companies, from high-tech start-ups to franchised cleaning services. Fortune 500 companies, on the other hand, have erased more jobs than they have created this past decade, and yet they are the biggest beneficiaries of corporate welfare.”
This is my idea of extraordinary political journalism—investigating the real effects of politics on our lives. True, it has nothing to do with spin, counterspin, or Monica Lewinsky, but it sure does make a lot of difference to the people of this country. I think they’ll appreciate knowing about it.
November 1998
Y
OU
MUST ADMIT,
this is the most curious political phenomenon of our lifetimes: After five years of investigation by Kenneth Starr, one solid year of media frenzy, and three months of impeachment proceedings, President Clinton’s job approval rating is 72 percent, and Republicans now rank below Larry Flynt in public esteem. And their response to all this is: “More! More!” Kind of hard to know what to say to them.
And here am I in concert with Pat Robertson: Please, stop!