Read Who Let the Dogs In? Online
Authors: Molly Ivins
Who Let the Dogs In? (31 page)
So in comes the happy TV crew to report that Bush has just addressed a group of young people and told them not to make the mistakes he made when he was young.
But what mistakes did he make, specifically and in great detail,
the television reporter wants to know. This is what he means by clarification of the issues.
Next, a print journalist asks in all seriousness: “But why does Bush keep bringing up this supposed misbehavior when he was young? Why does he dwell on it?” I was completely boggled; you could have knocked me over with Drew Nixon’s brain. Why does
Bush
bring it up? Why does
he
dwell on it?
This is a national press corps that has obsessed about the president’s sex life for fourteen months; while much of the world’s economy collapsed, our political press corps was completely caught up in a tawdry soap opera. Now, they come to Texas and bombard Bush and everybody else with questions about his private life, and they want to know why
Bush
is dwelling on it? Now that’s chutzpah.
If the media want to address Bush’s character, then they should address his character, not his sex life. The main thing about Bush is that there’s not much there there.
This is not a person of great depth or complexity or intelligence; he does not have many ideas. (Actually, aside from tort reform, I’ve never spotted one.) I don’t think he knows or cares a great deal about governance. Nevertheless, he is a perfectly adequate governor of Texas, where we so famously have the weak-governor system. Bush was smart enough to do what Bob Bullock told him to for four years, and it worked fine.
Bush is also a pretty nice guy. I really think you would have to work at it to dislike the man. His best trait is self-deprecating humor.
He’s above average; he’s more than mediocre. He has real political skills. If you separate the political part of public life (i.e., running for office) from the governing part (i.e., what you do after you get there), Bush is much better at the politics. This is true of many people in public life—in fact, a genuine interest in governance is relatively rare among politicians.
As proof of his political shrewdness, I submit two pieces of evidence: first, his careful wooing of the Hispanic community in Texas (such a refreshing contrast to that fool Wilson in California); and second, an extremely difficult balancing act keeping the Christian right, which controls the Texas Republican Party, from being perceived as the face of the party. (Most of Bush’s money comes from precisely the kind of rich Republicans who are horrified by the Christian right; anyone who has covered Texas Republican conventions during the past ten years knows how deep that split is.)
The single worst thing I can say about George W. Bush after five years of watching him is that if you think his daddy had trouble with “the vision thing,” wait’ll you meet this one. I don’t think he has any idea why he’s running for the presidency, except that he’s competitive and he can. On the other hand, most Republicans don’t want government to do much anyway, so Bush is perfect for them.
Anyone who thinks Bush’s sound-bite slogan “compassionate conservatism” actually means something programmatic should study the latest reports on poverty in Texas. Hint to national media people (courtesy of the Center for Public Policy Priorities):
• Texas has a much higher percentage of poor
working
families with small children than other states.
• More poor Texas families have a full-time, year-round worker than similar families in other states.
• Texas’ poor families are more likely to rely on earnings for a majority of their income, and less likely to rely on welfare, than similar families in the nation.
• Poor working families in Texas are much less likely to be covered by health insurance. They are less likely to receive unemployment benefits. More than half the poor families are headed by a married couple. One out of six Texans is below the poverty level. The child poverty rate is 24.2 percent, compared to 20.4 percent nationally.
In other words, poor Texans are doing everything Bush thinks they should—they work, they marry, they rely on themselves, they don’t get help from the government—and the upshot is that the state has more poor people, and those poor people are much poorer and less healthy than poor people elsewhere. Now
that’s
an issue.
And another good issue is Bush’s business record, where he very clearly did
not
take his own advice that we shouldn’t look to the government for help.
As for the rather silly argument that if George W.’s last name were Smith, no one ever would have heard of him—that’s quite true, but so what? His last name isn’t Smith. Get over it. Yes, he is ahead now on name recognition, and no, most people don’t know a single thing about where he stands. And whose fault is that?
April 1999
A
FEW
WEEKS
ago, a consoling clip from an Arizona newspaper arrived on my desk informing me that one member of the Arizona Legislature had said to another, “Gee, I didn’t know you were Jewish. You don’t look Jewish. You don’t have a big hook nose.” There was even a picture of the Jewish member helpfully labeled:
DOES NOT HAVE BIG HOOK NOSE.
A pal sent me this snippet because the last time I was in Arizona this sensitive state representative had managed to conflate homosexuality and cannibalism into a single menace, a confusion so remarkable I felt impelled to write about it. It’s always nice to know not all the morons are in the Texas Lege.
Trouble is, I can’t think of anything else encouraging about the seventy-sixth session of the Texas Lege. I’ll put our morons up against theirs, anytime.
Representative Arlene Wohlgemuth, one of our top contenders, opposed a resolution noting that 1.5 million Texas children do not have health insurance. She said they might not have health insurance because their parents are so rich they can afford to pay cash for medical care. “Their parents might be making $1 million a year. It is still our right in this country not to have health insurance,” she said.
The right not to have health insurance is one of the most undercelebrated rights we have in this great nation, and we are all grateful to Arlene for pointing it out to us.
Perhaps the high point of the session was the day the Democratic minority in the Senate left the chamber en masse, decamped to the rotunda of the Capitol, and there proceeded to hold hands and pray. Led in prayer, I might add, by Senator John Whitmire of Houston, who has not heretofore been much noted for Christian leadership. (Whitmire has taken offense at my astonishment over his new incarnation as a spiritual leader and informs me he is known as “John the Baptist.”) The proximate cause of this Democratic re-course to The Lord was that they couldn’t get the hate crimes bill out of committee. And the reason they couldn’t get it out is because gays and lesbians were included in the bill, and that presented a huge problem for George W. Bush, who is running for president. Because, you see, it would upset the many fundamentalist Christians who would vote in Republican primaries if killing “sinners” was somehow especially illegal. I know this because Senator Drew Nixon explained it to Senator Rodney Ellis, sponsor of the hate crimes bill. Senator Nixon knows his onions when it comes to sin, he being our leading convicted perp in the Senate, having done time for the unfortunate sin of soliciting a prostitute last year. He served his sentence in a halfway house and, may I add, is in point of actual fact one of the more useful and intelligent members of the Texas Senate.
I am in some danger of becoming fond of Senator Nixon, who has populist instincts. You may think incipient fondness for him reflects poorly on my judgment, but that’s only because you don’t know the other Republicans in the Senate.
Senator Florence Shapiro, one of the other Republicans, said the entire hate crimes bill was about one man, George W. Bush—all an effort to embarrass the governor. Actually, the hate crimes bill was about one man, and his name was James Byrd Jr., who was dragged to death behind a pickup truck near Jasper, Texas, last year because he was black. His corpse was recovered in chunks. In this year of Our Lord 1999, the Legislature of the state of Texas is still not ready to condemn hate crimes because that includes crimes against “queers.” A lesser person might be discouraged by that. The governor, incidentally, had no position on the hate crimes bill: That’s the governor’s usual position—he has no position. He has said, “All crimes are hate crimes.” As Representative Senfronia Thompson, House sponsor of the James Byrd Jr. Memorial Bill, asked sarcastically, “Is forgery a hate crime? Fraud? Prosti-tution? Armed robbery?”
The other big fight of the session was over whether to use federal money to give health insurance to the children of the poor (about 165,000 kids would be covered). The governor had no position. The House, the one that still has a Democratic majority, prevailed.
Governor Bush, the crown prince of the Republican Party, had one big goal this session: He wants to give $2 billion in property tax relief back to the people who own property in this state. Texas has an extraordinarily regressive tax structure; it weighs most heavily on those who are poorest. Poor people rarely own property. Nevertheless, property tax relief was the goal. And it was certainly aided by the fact that we in Texas have a handsome budget surplus this year. What better to do with it than give a property tax rebate to those who own property? They will get a cut worth as much as a Big Mac and fries every month! Meanwhile, Texas ranks fiftieth among the states (that’s last) in per capita spending, and that includes highways, the one thing we do well. If you were to exclude highway spending, Texas would rank where it so often does—behind Puerto Rico and Guam.
So what could we have done instead of a tax cut? Kindergarten. We thought it would be nice to have kindergarten in Texas. We keep reading all these studies about how important early childhood development is. Hillary Clinton—you should forgive I mention her name—has made a big deal about this, all this new research shows the early development stuff is critical. So we thought maybe kindergarten. But no. The Education Governor is not
that
keen on education.
July 1999
U
NDER
THE OLD
rules, before we wrote about something, we were expected to have some evidence that it was true. Under the new rules, the fact that there is gossip about someone is news, whether the gossip is true or not.
In the case of George W. Bush, the fact that he refuses to deny that he used cocaine has seemed to the entire press corps sufficient evidence—a charming latter-day version of “Have you stopped beating your wife?”
The media, as happens so depressingly often, are asking the wrong question. Bush himself stands there and begs us to ask it. “I have learned from my mistakes,” he says over and over. The question is:
What
did he learn?