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| Now Entering The Lists |
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| Republicans Field The Clown Team |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, March 17, 1999. There is little in the way of dignity left to the Republican Party. What shards and fragments remained were rolled up and burned by the field of Presidential candidates the party has fielded this year, and fielded with neither shame nor embarrassment nor sense of deficiency. To dispose of Texas Governor Bush first, here is a man elevated by what he was not: he was not his father, but had that handy name. He had no actual resume, like his father, but had blundered about to end up in a family business. He was not a real conservative, but a compassionate one, which is the prototypical oxymoron. More to the point, Bush has serious lapses in his past, lapses forgiven his father but in the days of Monica and Democrats breathing cleansing fire, it will not survive the election. As he says, when he was young and foolish, he was young and foolish. How difficult to expect that to fly unexamined this year by those burned by the Starr Chamber. Elizabeth Dole is such a scripted personality that she makes Ronald Reagan look like Billy Crystal. She is unlikely to survive actual debates, actual situations that demand spontaneity, which is to say, her temper will not survive the campaign and we will be confronted with the image of former Senator Dole, all viagra'd up and no place to go, given her headache. Senator Dole, by the by, has en-tered my pantheon of decent people by his activities after his defeat. His advertisements for the Avon Bridge group were self-deprecating and funny. His Viagra ads, while melodramatic and all, took guts to open himself to the kind of easy slam someone like me just made, and it was for a good, if lucrative, cause. The ad would have been better had it been Strom Thurmond, but not much. Then we have Dan Quayle. This guy is so utterly clueless, it is difficult to imagine a less connected man to the country he would lead. Probably a decent enough clod, but he is intrinsically stupid in the tradition of Indiana Republican Congressmen like the egregious Dan Burton. That he was a vice president is a horrifying memory. Patrick Buchannon avoided the draft for Vietnam with bad feet, and has an unverified reputation as a pub brawler. I don't believe it. I know bad acting when I see it, and this guy is the prototypical bully fully in the Joe McCarthy mold, given an issue and the time. Posturing over abortion, lamenting ethics and morals nowhere evident in his life or public stands, Buchannon is fortunately hampered by his illusion of intelligence. He despises the class of people he rose from, and except for the very stupid among them, a large percentage, he cannot control his condescension and disdain. Unfortunately for him, they are the only group that can tolerate his archaic and foolish isolationist positions. Easy answers for the untroubled brow. He is a wannabe lynch mob leader. The scariest entry, though, is the Religious Right's Man of the Hour Gary Bauer. Resembling nothing so much as a walk on from Babylon 5 or Yoda as a young man, Bauer encapsulates the Ameri-can Religious Rights' total removal from reality, and their idea of a man on horseback. He accentuates his white, white skin by hiding under flagstones. He mouths mantras, not ideas. He publicly yearns for a mythical past where alcoholism was a family secret and women were a family burden to be mar-ried off ASAP. He is a fascist. In America, that will always get you votes. One of the most interesting, in the Chinese sense, is Steve Forbes, a man so intent on reducing his own tax burden he'll run for President to do it. Here is a man who yearns for a past century, but is now utilizing the spin-doctors and image-makers of this one to promote his silly thoughts. He has been made over with a new hairstyle to reduce his resemblance to an enlarged planaria rolled in feathers, further removed from contact with the public by campaigning on the Internet, and told, unlike every-one else, to occasionally wander off message, because people can only stand hearing about a fixed rate income tax for so long, apparently the 35 seconds it takes for them to realize Forbes will make out like a bandito and they'll pick up the slack. But he has no other message. He does not understand people or their problems, and clearly doesn't care. This is a major geek to make Bill Gates seem suave and Richard Simmons virile. They have Lamar Alexander. The name sings. Then, the Republicans have actually fielded a man named Bob Smith, who polls at 2% in his home state of New Hampshire. They offer John Ka-sich, an Ohio Congressman, who wants to be Steve Forbes. They offer Senator John McCain, whose most gripping attribute is that he was a POW for five years in Hanoi, and who told the funniest if cru-elest joke of the last decade: why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Janet Reno is the father. When found out, he blubbered an apology to the President, a fellow adulterer. Nonetheless, here is the best example that hardship does not necessarily provide character or taste. At least his hardship was not mythical. These are the entries of a party in trouble. |
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