Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts Read online

  And why are we going to vote for W.? Because his mother says he’s a good boy, that’s why. And because unlike Al Gore, that stiffy, W. is a real fella, a bit of a reformed party animal who sowed some wild oats before he was tamed by good women—first his mother, the most popular white-haired woman in the world, and then his wife, by all accounts and appearances a paragon of conventional middle American (Midland, Texas) womanhood. In one of the best lines of his superb acceptance speech, W. said, “I know grace because I’ve seen it, I know peace because I’ve felt it, and I know forgiveness because I’ve needed it.”

  We are asked to vote for W. as a way of redeeming ourselves from the goofiness of our own youth, from the guiding hedonism of our age, captured by the old hippie mantra “If it feels good, do it”—not to mention, at least not directly, that popular overage flower child in the White House. If W. could straighten up, settle down (after Laura threatened to leave him and take their twin girls), and give up boozing and partying and who knows what all else, to embrace what conservatives like to call “core values,” then we can, too.

  W. asks us to rise to the standard set by Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation,” the folks who helped win WWII, then built the suburbs, the interstate highway system, and the hole in the ozone layer, just as he is living up to the standards of his father, the WWII fighter pilot whose dignified service in the White House was interrupted by the first baby boomer president. It helps that the vast majority of baby boomers already have, living in their suburban homes, nurturing their retirement accounts, sending their oldest children off to college (as W. and Laura are), and paying whopping sums in taxes to Uncle Sam. We are asked to finally accept, as W. has, the fact that we’re all grown up—and accept our tax cut as reward.

  Coming up for air after a week of total immersion in this production, swimming upstream through what H. L. Mencken once called the “Niagra of bilge,” it certainly looks to me like W. is the man of the moment. Next week I’ll be holding my nose and diving into the Dem-fest in Los Angeles, into the ring cycle of the real pros out in Hollywood, no less. I might just surface believing the twenty-first century demands Al Gore. But I doubt it. The Republicans have zeroed in on the one thing the Democrats cannot defend, their kryptonite…that is, Bill Clinton’s dick.

  There’s no nicer way to put it, which is the point. Content as I am with our national prosperity, in agreement for the most part with the current administration’s liberal social agenda, a believer in abortion rights (although appalled by abortion), the election keeps coming back to Slick Willy’s slick willy. Yes, I wish Ken Starr and the rabid right-wing Clinton haters behind him had never brought it up. Yes, the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal was trivial in the greater scheme of things, and Clinton is not the first commander in chief to discover the aphrodisiac of power. Yes, Republicans certainly share a large measure of blame for the poisonous partisanship in Washington, and had no business pushing the matter to impeachment…but what in God’s name could Clinton have been thinking, playing sexual games in the White House with a ditzy, love-struck intern? What the Republicans realize is that no matter how high the president’s favorability ratings, and no matter how angry people are at Starr and the GOP for their mad impeachment effort, America remains appalled by Clinton’s behavior…both the scandal and his classic mealy-mouthed self-defense, which produced that one line for which Clinton is doomed to be best remembered: “That depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is.” Not exactly Lincolnesque. And Gore will pay the price.

  The enduring vision of Bill Clinton’s dick was behind Gore’s decision Monday to name Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate. Lieberman, something of a moral gadfly, was the first Democrat to publicly slam the president for his behavior in the Lewinsky episode, back when Hillary was blaming the whole thing on a right-wing conspiracy. But it’s not going to be enough. If Gore had stepped out in those early days and chastised the president himself, that would be one thing. He who stands beside a giant is doomed to look like a dwarf. Give Gore points for loyalty, and a strong turnout of Jewish voters, but that will be small compensation home in Tennessee come January.

  The smell of pending victory was behind the buoyant optimism at the FUC (an unfortunate acronym, but not without a certain Maileresque aptness). It stands with Philly’s other sports arenas in the middle of nowhere, at the basement of South Philadelphia surrounded by acres of macadam, bordered to the north by the old Spectrum and Veterans Stadium, to the south by the Navy Yard, to the west by a smelly oil refinery and a vast auto junkyard, to the east by Interstate 95 and the Delaware River. It’s a perfect location for security, because a few high, temporary fences were enough to keep all but the invited almost a half mile away. Inside the fence were byzantine levels of further security, each with its own long, rectangular, color-coded pass. Access to the press seats in the FUC was purple; to the floor, yellow. Green passes allowed technicians access to the works backstage, gray passes were for telephone workers, blue for security. There were nineteen categories of media credentials, and fourteen for nonmedia, and to make matters worse, new passes were issued for each session, so the yellow floor pass for Monday morning’s session was obsolete by Monday evening.

  Passing through the outer perimeter of security required the low-prestige, red, limited-access pass, which also granted admission to the bustling international media village camped outside the FUC itself. This consisted primarily of four interconnected, blue-carpeted, air-conditioned media tents, which were the size of airplane hangars, and a trailer park for the more equipment-laden TV operations. CNN had a complex of trailers just to house its catering needs, which says something about how far that cable network has risen in the world (and started me wondering about job openings). The spaces between these trailers and tents were roped together by tangles of fiber-optic and power cables as thick in places as Dennis Hastert’s waist, like the exposed entrails of some emerging colossus. Inside the tents the various news operations were partitioned off with flimsy curtains, so you could peer through at the portable newsrooms of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Knight-Ridder, Hearst, Gannett, and the other big boys, each of whom imported not just dozens of reporters, but editors, researchers, technicians, and clerks to tend their temporary computer installations.

  Much was made at this convention about the cutback in coverage by the major broadcast TV networks—ABC relegated its convention coverage the first night to a peek during halftime of Monday Night Football (a preseason game, yet!) and CBS actually cut away from vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney during his acceptance speech Wednesday night to resume its normal inane weeknight schedule. Where CBS once had eight reporters roving the convention floor with sci-fi headsets, only gray-haired Ed Bradley roamed the aisles during this one, looking glumly forlorn. Pundits ascribed this erosion in broadcast TV attention to the diminished drama of the event. What was once rough-and-tumble politics in prime time was now more akin to a coronation ceremony, sans any real royalty. But the truth is that with cable channels like C-SPAN and MSNBC, and with the collection of streaming Internet channels, this convention was arguably the most thoroughly covered political event in history.

  Everybody’s favorite place in the media village was the carnival tent, the west end of tent 4, which housed the stage sets for cable TV stations, Internet alley, and rows of radio booths, where there was a steady parade of celebrities to feed the insatiable maw of new media. Carl Bernstein was there, looking like an elder statesman, pasty, chubby, and wrinkled, but still ready to pounce. There was the funereally dapper Senator Orrin Hatch, with his tiny well-groomed head perched atop his high-collared shirt like one of those African tribesmen who stretch their necks, and a pale, rotund Jerry Falwell, taking the decline of his Moral Majority’s influence with hearty good cheer—“Now is the time for us to keep our mouths shut,” he said, biding his time. There was Ollie North, leaning into his radio mike with the intensity of an infantryman storming a pillbox, like he w
as about to take a gap-toothed bite out of it. Sam Donaldson came over to do an interview, and sat perched on a stool under the bright lights, his perfect hair seemingly glued in place, looking like nothing so much as a smooth airbrushed Robert Grossman caricature of Sam Donaldson.

  There was Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, cadaverous and grouchy, announcing that he’d come “because you have to see it to believe it…so grotesque is the carnival taking place here.” The Republicans’ most prominent nonperson, Newt Gingrich himself, came strolling down the alley between the media tents like he’d stepped right out of a Thomas Nast cartoon, his round frame and thick shock of white hair so familiar that the convention’s volunteer workforce kept stopping him and asking for autographs, or to pose for pictures. In another country, Gingrich would by now have been taken off someplace and shot, but this is America, where after your image has been airbrushed out of the official party photo you become a high-paid commentator for a TV network—in Gingrich’s case, Fox.

  The very symbol of slash-and-burn Republicanism W. wants America to forget, Gingrich is cheerfully unapologetic about his short-lived revolution. We had a long talk about it, and when I suggested that the wheel of fortune had turned quickly for him (five years ago he was Time’s Man of the Year; today he is a private citizen, banished from the official ranks of his own party), Gingrich corrected me in that am-I-the-only-one-bright-enough-to-see-this? rhetorical style of his: “It didn’t happen fast,” he said. “My becoming speaker was part of a twenty-year plan,” whereupon he summarized for me his steadfast climb to power, which he says he conceived of from the beginning as a military-style campaign—“Politics is, of course, war.”

  In his case, as Gingrich sees it, the brilliance of his “Contract with America” campaign spread him and his troops so thin that they failed to adequately plot out the moves and countermoves needed to sustain their momentum, and “events” (i.e., Bill Clinton) outflanked them. Realizing that his army was now mired in a losing defensive position, Gingrich wisely chose to retreat from the field. He is now embarked on his next twenty-year campaign, which involves absorbing a lot of information about new technology and trends, writing books, teaching courses on the Internet, and positioning himself for the next wave of political inevitability. Gingrich claims to have been talking about W. themes like diversity and education years ago, but I must have missed that part of his old agenda.

  Gingrich thinks big. You ask him a question about the international space station and he talks to you about the failure of China’s Ming Dynasty to take advantage of its overwhelming sea power. He reminded me of a pudgy kid I knew in college who was so determined to impress with the breadth of his knowledge that I once encouraged him to wear a beanie with an asterisk on top—“because you’re a walking footnote.” Don’t count out General Gingrich. There are second, third, and fourth acts now in American life.

  On Tuesday night the Republicans squirmed through another primetime address by Colin Powell, who has achieved such unique status in American life that the Republicans are obliged to listen to him even though they don’t like what he has to say. Twelve hours after Powell urged the party to listen to the voices of all African-American leaders, no matter their political stripe, as though to fulfill the GOP’s worst fears, the Reverend Al Sharpton marched into the carnival tent, an impeccable gray suit draped over his ponderous belly and the rust-tinted waves of his helmet hair reaching to his shoulders, halted, and then watched wordlessly as the inevitable knot of cameramen and reporters arranged itself around him like iron filings to a magnet.

  “I’m an equal opportunity activist,” he announced. “Inclusion is not choreography, inclusion is real power sharing. Anyone can put minorities onstage; the question is whether the Republican Party is ready to put them at the table.” By the look of him, before inviting the Reverend Al to the table they had best prepare a heroic spread. Sharpton was last seen jovially squaring off before radio mikes against Falwell, two men of God who won’t be gliding through the eye of a needle anytime soon.

  I say give the Republicans credit. The big parties get this one shot every four years to project their identity to the nation, and the GOP has suffered the consequences of having been on the wrong side of the civil-rights movement now for long enough. Somebody who matters (the party says it was W. himself ) realized that the core values of the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. have long been embraced by mainstream Americans. Those still holding out against ethnic and racial integration in this country are living in trailers and recruiting from state penitentiaries. So it was high time Republicans tried to work themselves out of that hole. The effort may have been a bit extreme, but then, wasn’t it a prominent Republican who once said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is not vice”?

  “Are you looking for a black delegate to interview, honey?” asked Nora Reese, an orange-haired woman in a bright red dress festooned with buttons and ribbons from Warner Robbins, Georgia, on Monday afternoon, the Republicans’ day of diversity. “All you reporters are looking for black folk today, and I think there’s not enough of us to go around!”

  Indeed, only 4 percent of the delegates were African-Americans. Inside of one ten-minute period last week there were two African-Americans, a Latina singer, and a rabbi onstage. About the time the Philadelphia Boys Choir opened with an African chant Wednesday it felt like enough already. But only a hopeless C-SPAN addict was seeing as much of the convention as I was, and I suppose the strategy was to guarantee that anyone in America who tuned into the convention, no matter how briefly, had a better-than-average chance of seeing a Republican of color at center stage.

  The truth is that Republicans do have something valid to offer African-Americans: Condoleezza Rice. W.’s wunderkind foreign policy adviser and former member of the elder Bush’s National Security Council, not to mention Russian scholar, concert pianist, and expert figure skater, put it succinctly when she said she had chosen to be a Republican because it was a party that “sees me as an individual, not as part of a group.” It is high time that a black person not be regarded as a race traitor for believing that welfare is destroying African-American families or that vouchers might give urban black families an alternative to sending their children to failed public schools. It is patronizing to view African-Americans as a predictable left-wing, Democratic voting bloc, and as the ranks of America’s black middle and upper classes continue to grow, so will diversity of political opinion. I surveyed the locker room of the Philadelphia Eagles on Election Day 1992 and provoked a bit of a scuffle between black players who were loyal to their Southern Democratic roots and those who, with their million-dollar bonus money, found the elder Bush’s “read my lips, no new taxes” promise irresistible. The sociopolitical landscape was evolving right before my eyes. The fact that the Republicans are moving to take advantage of it is just smart politics, and certainly in keeping with the basic principle of “liberty and justice for all.”

  Contrast that with the colorful band of inept hooligans who gathered in Philadelphia to enact that now sacred adjunct to the ritual of our national political conventions: street protests. This traveling crew, straight from window-busting in Seattle, can now add to its list of accomplishments having been thoroughly outwitted by the Philadelphia Police Department, which until last week was most recently famous for whaling the bejesus out of a handcuffed perpetrator under the watchful eye of a TV news camera, and for having systematically falsified crime statistic reports to the FBI for decades—thereby claiming imaginary status as the American city with the fewest incidents of violent crime.

  There wasn’t a whisper of violent crime in Center City last week, as every member of the department was placed on duty, along with help from the state police and the feds. The cops were ready for trouble, but not in the old head-busting tradition. The protesters had issued invitations. By inviting reporters to their strategy sessions and working out details of their clever arrest-evading tactics on the Internet, the activists assured that ev
eryone was well apprised of their intentions. They actually made the Philadelphia police look good.

  My vote for hero of the week is John “Ten-Speed” Timoney, the pug-faced Philadelphia police commissioner, newly imported from New York, where he was a favorite with the literary crowd in part because of his devotion to James Joyce (although this may speak more of Celtic loyalty than literary inclination). It wasn’t so many years ago that another Philadelphia police commissioner made national headlines by appearing at a street demonstration straight from some official function dressed in a tuxedo with a nightstick thrust theatrically in his cummerbund. Frank Rizzo went on to become mayor, a path conceivably open to Timoney now, after thoroughly disarming the polite majority of protesters by speeding from trouble spot to trouble spot on a bicycle, wearing short pants, a polo shirt, and a (safety first!) helmet. Even the image gurus on W.’s payroll could not have invented a more friendly but industrious way of presenting the police effort.

  When a few hundred protesters assembled on Broad Street on Monday for an unauthorized protest march through the center of the city, daring the fuzz to respond in the old-fashioned, truncheon-swinging way, Ten-Speed showed up and politely cleared a path for them. And when the hardcore made their move to disrupt traffic Tuesday, Timoney’s troops moved in with calm assurance, steering rush-hour traffic around the blocked intersection while systematically picking off the ringleaders of the event and escorting them into waiting vans—as if this sort of thing happened once a week. One protester was heard to shout, “This is what a police state looks like!” an inanity I will kindly chalk up to youth and inexperience overseas.

  The cops were so well prepared that they even had special hacksaws to cut through the piping and chains protesters used to link their hands and make it hard to arrest them one at a time. Good detective work led the police to a warehouse where protesters were manufacturing props for their street theater, and, more important, to some of the intellectual masterminds (I use the term facetiously) of this farce. Once jailed, the protest leaders came up with the self-defeating strategy of refusing to leave jail until every case was processed, thereby assuring that the bulk of them would remain confined until the last GOP delegate had flown home, fulfilling Timoney’s fondest wishes.