Peggy Noonan

A Time to Get Serious

-- Newsweek Magazine: August 24, 1992

Mr. President, remember the scene in that movie you liked, “Moonstruck,” in which Cher slugs the very fine and decent but also dispirited Nicolas Cage and says, “Snap out of it!”? That is our text for today.

You are George Herbert Walker Bush and you have been serving your country and keeping high its ideals since the day you were born. You went out to defend it with your life when you were an 18-year-old boy. You chucked security, got in the car, dug the oil, created a business, gave people jobs, got an ulcer worrying about the payroll, met it every week, kept trucking, went to Congress, went to China, protected the CIA in its toughest days, served a great man named Reagan with quiet, dogged loyalty, became a landslide president of the United States, went to victorious war against a nut with nukes, helped transform the Soviet Union—and kept, all this time, all these years, the honest, yearning love of your children and your wife.

You have lived a life. And now this—this Elvis impersonator, this boomer on a bus, this guy who calls his climb up the greasy pole “answering the call of public service,” as if he were sacrificing ambition for good works, as if politics were a nunnery and not a whore. Well.

And his friends, the newspaper poets! Back there tap-tap-tapping in the back of the plane, and every time they see Clinton their eyes shine because what they’re really seeing is . . . The house in McLean and the phone call in the night, the journal entry: “The president called again tonight, I knew why he was up, alone. Sarajevo. Again.”

Buttheads with laptops! Going for the Bradlee Cup! That’s what you think of them in your less charitable moods. Well, stay less charitable for a minute.

Mr. President, Clinton says you’re washed up. He says you’re through, you’re yesterday, and a new generation tempered by zip and disciplined by zero is going to run the country. And he will—right into the ground! You going to let him? Or are you going to teach him a little lesson in respect?

(Phew. It’s not easy doing a Roger Ailes impersonation.)

Four years ago today you were working on what we all thought was the most important speech of your career. We were wrong. This is. It’s also the most challenging. A lot has changed in the last four years. Last time you were up against a man caught somewhere between inept and inert. This time you’re up against a savvy young pol.

Both the Democrats and the Republicans think that you’re in trouble because of the economy. But it’s more. People are angry about the costs and demands of government, angry that no one has the courage to cut spending. They are uneasy about our culture, about its increasing coarseness, vulgarity, violence. If people had seen the past three years that you were led by discernible principle, if they had been able to see that you were thinking long term, long range, they’d have stuck with you from boom to bust. But they didn’t, so they haven’t.

A hunch: You know what a lot of voters feel, deep in their hearts, with a certitude that finds no expression in focus groups? They think this election is a white-guy fistfight over power. That’s all. Two groups of guys in suits who want power. Stephanopoulos does, Teeter does, Carville does, Rich Bond. Bush, Clinton. People hate it. It makes them think that you’re none of you serious.

The Democrats ceded seriousness to sentiment at their convention. But seriousness is your salvation. It means that if you win, you win with meaning, if you lose, you lose with class. The first gives you a mandate, the second adds heft to your historical reputation. Here are some ideas:

Put the contest in context: The ‘92 campaign is a fight, on the one hand, between a solid Republican Party that has in your lifetime done an amazing thing: it has changed history for the better; it is the party that helped change an evil empire into a benign cluster of democracies; that unleashed a historic economic boom, and that spoke, again, for our country and the world, of the rightness of freedom.

On the other side, an evolving Democratic Party that has not evolved enough to lead. Their policies are new ideas wrapped in old entanglements, with the obvious left—The Groups, The Unions—quiet now, but poised to move in a Clinton administration. Nothing will change the Democrats but more history; their evolution is incomplete.

You think this. But you’ll say it better.

Your biggest problem? ‘Read my mind’: Four years ago you said: The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again. And I’ll say to them: Read my lips. No new taxes.

Once FDR made a campaign pledge in a speech in Philadelphia. Later he broke it. When his image handlers wondered what to do he merrily instructed them to deny he was in Philadelphia. My advice: Don’t deny you were in New Orleans, tell people why you did what you did.

You said you’d fight the congressional Democrats’ desire to raise taxes by pushing back and refusing. Instead you compromised, trading taxes for spending controls.

Everyone has his reasons, and you had yours. But you never told them to the people. All they saw was a guy jogging by the cameras, saying, “Read my hips.” Your worst public moment as president.

Explain it. You knew you had to get the deficit under control, and the deficit is a spending problem. You felt facing the Democrats off to a standstill would get you nowhere, produce nothing but a daily argument, like a bad marriage. “[The people] did not send us here to bicker,” you said in your Inaugural, and you meant it.

So you held back from a war with Congress that had to be fought. You put your personal credibility on the line, you broke your word—but only in hopes it would break Congress’s habits. It didn’t. They’re still spending, the deficit is growing, but you learned something: never again. (This, as Kissinger used to say, had the added benefit of being true. You will never do it again.)

A mistake stays a scandal until you explain it. And this is a mistake to be turned to your advantage. It was the Democrats, Bill Clinton’s party, who insisted on the tax raise. Now they condemn you for giving them what they begged for. What will Clinton do when a Democratic Congress tells him to raise taxes even more than he intends?

Say what you did right: There’s plenty. But this year the Republicans have had trouble going positive—about themselves. One reason: good news that is old news is not news. How do you make it interesting that Republicans arrested inflation when inflation hasn’t mugged anyone lately? One way is to be terse, true—and funny. Give people something they can get a smile or a laugh with when they quote it to the neighbors. People want to fight on your side—a good line is ammunition.

They’re ba-a-ck: “Clinton says he’ll take back America and he will—to the Carter years.” That’s how Jim Pinkerton speaks of the Democratic ticket. Pinkerton, Mary Matalin, all the young, smart ones on your staff: they say to remind people the Democrats aren’t the answer, they’re the problem. You said it yourself: they’re not the fireman, they’re the arsonist. Drive it home.

War talk: In private you speak of Desert Storm with humility and quiet pride. On the stump your references take on a kind of agitated boastfulness.

Your normal approach to things is low key, modest, often wry. But your advisers tell you to show how you “feel” when you make a speech, so you “act” how you feel, and sometimes it doesn’t work because—you’re not an actor. (As a former adviser I feel free to say: Kill the advisers.)

You could use the war to make two points. (1) Tell about building the coalition against Saddam Hussein. You gathered together the civilized world. It was masterful. Underscore the fact that Clinton has nothing like your quarter-century experience in foreign affairs. (2) The war was fought with minimum loss of life because of state-of-the-art hardware that was only developed because Republicans led the nation the past 12 years. (Imagine people who two years ago had VISUALIZE PEACE on their bumper stickers in charge of the Pentagon budget!)

My only lobbying: Mr. President, we need a defense to protect our continent from a madman with a well-aimed missile. A week ago the Democratic Senate voted all of SDI down. You care about it. Fight for it in this speech.

The Democrats, the media, hate it. Do you know what regular people on the street know that the elites don’t? It is not possible for so many men to have so many unclear arms and no one will ever use one. It’s going to save lives someday.

No more tears: Some will say, show your heart. They’ll mean: Be personal and autobiographical and talk about the pain in this thing called life. You’ll refuse. On behalf of the American people, thank you.

When Al Gore was talking about his son at the Democratic convention I saw a television producer watching with tears in his eyes. At the end she turned to me and said, “That was so manipulative.” I said, “You were moved.” She shrugged. “I’m a mother, I got a cheap cry.” Everyone’s on to everything. Cheap tears win no votes.

Watch out: Democrats keep saying it will be a mean campaign and here’s a reason why: they still think they lost ’88 because of Willie Horton, and they still don’t understand that voters viewed Dukakis’s actions (refusing to meet with Horton’s victims, etc.) as . . . liberal arrogance.

The Democrats think it was all an ugly racist trick. The good news: this means they’re still confused about why people vote against them. The bad news: people who think you’ve been evil to them usually do evil in return.

And don’t forget the merry pranksters in the press. They are so hungry for ugly, in my view, that the smallest thing you do will be turned into a big thing. And they’ll goad you into the small thing. You’ll be walking through the plane to say hello to reporters and someone will ask, “How did you like the dress Mrs. Clinton wore on ‘Arsenio’ last night?” And you, wanting to be diplomatic but also not wanting to look like a weenie who’s afraid to have fun, will say, “Oh, the dress, well, not my favorite color, but . . .” That’s all they’ll need. He’s even attacking her clothing!

Mr. President, if a prankster baits you, wag your finger and give ‘em a little Ward Cleaver. “Now Beaver, it’s good to try and make life fun, but it isn’t nice to start trouble. Wally, I’d like you to talk to your brother about taking democracy seriously.”

The importance of belief: Some of your staff used to walk around calling the Reagan years “the pre-Bush era.” There are many names for such people; “historical idiot” is one. You know and feel that Ronald Reagan was, is, a great man. When your delegates hear his voice Monday night they will erupt in joy. They will shake their heads and say, “I miss his voice.” They’ll mean: I miss belief.

You have a chance to tell people, again, what you believe, what you intend, how you will achieve it. If you meet the challenge, voters will give you a second look.

People like to forgive. When a friend says, “I’m sorry if I let you down. But I know what went wrong and it won’t happen again and I’m asking for another chance,” you’d have to be ungenerous to turn the guy down. And you will be talking to the most generous people on earth.

Red Meat And Astroturf: Decoding The Convention

-- The Washington Post: August 23, 1992

In Houston last week, the delegates heartily repudiated Bushism in their platform and unanimously renominated George Bush at their convention. They had unity right from the start. They all arrived depressed, and they all left feeling better.

Now the race is a race, and the ambivalence is about to become energy. After all, nothing inspires troops like the possibility they will not die.

A prediction: This is going to be one of the great campaigns, a bruising contest, two groups of guys on a hill in the mud, wrestling in the rain for control of the ball. An inch-by-inch battle, and every week the observers will be saying, “This team is winning,” and then the next week, “That team is winning.”

When politics gets this tough and this tight, a wonderful thing happens, as if by accident. The talk turns to serious questions, they argue over serious issues, over different ways of seeing the world and how the American people ought to go about their pursuit of happiness.

We’re all going to remember this one. Keep the kids up—they’re going to see democracy in one of its great barbaric yawps.

[Header] Floor Mirages

The delegates stood during the opening program Wednesday night as a chorus sang “Proud to Be an American.” Men in straw hats with blue bumper stickers on the brim, women in leis and little elephant earrings—they looked around and half sang, half clapped. It was as if they were wondering: Where is the convention? Where is the convention I imagined when I imagined this week?

You look at the podium, at the network booths, at each other, smile and nod and finally show—happiness, or approval of the singers, by clapping or waving a clacker in the air. You find that a big challenge for delegates to modern conventions is to locate “reality.” Another is to locate what you feel when you are surrounded by the inauthentic—by artfully constructed platforms, TV network booths, films, by bright light and correspondents scanning the hall for a story and you realize you’re the story and you know something else: You’re not much of a story, you’re just a guy in a hat.

You ponder this and smile and a network camera catches you smiling and a CNN producer puts it on the air because he thinks you’re responding to what the speaker at the podium just said. You see your face on the monitor. You stand there surrounded by inauthenticity so pervasive, so inescapable that it feels like a balloon drop.

[Header] Truth in C-SPAN

The authentic sound of the Republicans in August was the authen-tic sound of the Democrats in July: “Richmond, Virginia, you’re up next.” The man and woman to whom all eyes turned in trust and for inspiration were C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb and Susan Swain. You could walk the halls of the big hotels, the Stouffer El Presidente and the Doubletree, and from room after room would come the gentle buzz of their voices. C-SPAN broadcast both conventions “gavel-to-gavel,” considered a seriously outmoded approach by the networks.

Lamb’s livelihood does not depend on advancing the story, so he can be humane and curious in his approach. His guests are not frightened and so reveal themselves, which advances the story. Swain is intelligent and calm. Her body language says, “I’m so interested, please tell me more.”

Tuesday afternoon, Lamb interviewed three delegates, all women, none of them famous, all of them delighted to be there. He asked how much it cost them to have this week in Houston. One said it cost $1,000 air fare and hotel, but “we’re sharin’ rooms and havin’ a great time!” They were. He asked who inspired them to be there, and one, a young woman with brown hair, said, “I’ll start to cry if I talk about it, but it was my dad, who’s a Democrat, who told me to always stand up for what I believe.” Her eyes welled.

It said more about who goes to conventions than any number of bright, gently spoofing network pieces. And unlike your basic anchor booth bluh bluh about whether Dan Quayle timed his floor appearnace to undercut Pat Buchanan’s speech, it was actually interesting.

[Header] The Presence of Lee

I met a friend of Lee Atwater at a hoedown Monday night. We stood in red bandannas, ate barbecue from plastic plates and drank from long-neck beer bottles. Later we shared a car home and talked about the Republican National Committee chairman who died of a brain tumor at the age of 40. Tell me something Lee taught you about being an operative, I say. He smiles, looks at his hands. “Play dumb, keep moving, take credit, stir the waters.” He laughs. “It’s hard to explain Lee. No one’s ever really got it.”

[Header] Strangers in the Night

Two men standing together at a reception.

They laugh, and look for other people to talk to.

[Header] Notes in the Night

Words jotted in a notebook after the first dozen speakers: “Do not mistake volume for passion, lectern-slapping for conviction. Fist-making does not convey strength but strength’s opposite.”

[Header] James & Mary

Walking, the Saturday before the convention, along the empty rows of the Astrodome, I saw Mary Matalin doing an interview. She stood so straight and looked so serious. I thought perhaps something had happened. Later, on TV, a reporter spoke of the interview. Matalin had been asked about whether her relationship with Clinton campaign manager James Carville has hurt her professionally. She said, “Yes, it hurts me because reporters always ask if it hurts me. They never ask the man, which in my view is sexist and unfair.” It’s nice when people say things that are both blunt and true.

[Header] In the Oratorical Zone

These are some of the people America watched last week:

Mary Fisher: An angel in pearl earrings and a black velvet dress who said, We must not judge each other, we must be kind to each other. She communicated this first through her presence, which said, I am a beautiful, wealthy, white, heterosexual mother, and when you think of AIDS, think of me. She used words not so much to assert as to underscore, and she manipulated the audience toward compassion by starkly stating her plight: “If it is true that my HIV will inevitably turn to AIDS, then it is true that my children will inevitably turn to orphans.”

Decoded: It is good that you care about traditional values. Moral generosity is such a value. Human beings sometimes see clearly only through tears, so I will make you cry.

Pat Buchanan: That wasn’t red meat, it was gristle and marrow. He defined: “Wrong, Albert. The central organizing principle of this country is freedom.” And merrily insulted: “Well, speak for yourself, Hillary!” His approach was bracing but hard, and he has forgotten Reagan Lesson No. 1: Conservatives who go national must be happy warriors who envelop, not pierce.

Problem to work on: The angry, unsmiling Pat looks slit-eyed and thuggish.

Marilyn Quayle: Flinty, unbroken and tough, she reminds me of the pioneer woman who, when the wagons were circled and the Sioux were coming over the ridge, kicked the cowering cowboys and told them to shoot, dammit. All this while sifting flour and breast-feeding a foundling.

It was a direct, substantive speech about societal arrangements and their meaning: Having a profession is not incompatable with being a good mother and wife; there are real trade-offs.

Problem to work on: When she tries to show her good humor, when her eyes take on a glint and her mouth a smile . . . well, to me she looks a like a Stepford wife who has a few wires just a little too tight.

Bad joke: After being introduced by the actor Gerald McRaney, Marilyn Quayle said, “If only Murphy Brown could meet Major Dad!” As some pre-school friends of mine say when they hear an adult say something dumb, DOYee.

Decoded: I don’t care if the media don’t like us, we’re not backing down. You don’t scare us.

Barbara Bush: Everybody in politics could learn from her canny knocking-down of expectations—“Oh, it’s just a silly little speech from silly old me, please don’t pay any mind!” She knows intuitively what some of the president’s men learned slowly: Don’t promise a great speech, a defining moment, an oration that will make your spine tingle and your teeth dance. Play it down, do your best, act modest. Don’t point to the bleachers unless you’re Babe Ruth.

George P. Bush: Touching testimonial from a poised teenager. “Viva Boosh!” was great.

Mrs. Bush and George P. decoded: On traditional values we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk. We have Hispanics in our family.

Ronald Reagan: Four-score years and one and hauling into the Astrodome to do it again: concentrating, speaking, acting, timing the jokes, trying to control the audience when he can’t quite differentiate the sound of cheers and chants anymore and has to go by what he sees, by the clapping and the faces moving, knowing exactly what he has to do, coming through, and, at the end, blithely kicking back a balloon and exiting, with a wink, stage right.

“I knew Thomas Jefferson . . .an empire of ideas . . . . The sky would not fall if an American president told the truth . . . . Of course, at my age, every night’s a special night.”

Those kids who crowded the platform, they wanted to chair him through the hall, hold him high and rock the house with “Thank you Ron, thank you Ron . . . . “

It’s nice when you see someone get the three little words they deserve.

Disclaimer: I adore Ronald Reagan.

Phil Gramm: A keynote speech is a hard old speech. This one won no converts at home.

Problem to work on: When Gramm juts out his chin to make a point, he looks like a startled turtle whose head popped out of the shell after someone touched his belly.

Dan Quayle: I was among those who weeks ago advised the president to remove Quayle and start over. I said he had been a good vice president, but he’d never, ever, win the confidence of the people, and in a close race this would count. But after his speech, I think maybe I was wrong.

History is funny. This man who never should have been chosen may turn out to be the grittiest guy in the fight. The speech started out goood, got better as it built, was delivered with force and had a nice joke about the Democrats: “If they’re moderates then I’m a world champion speller.”

Quayle’s eyes usually aren’t expressive, they don’t seem to widen or narrow much as he speaks, and it makes him seem—preoccupied, absent somehow. Maybe he’s just a little too careful. Whatever, he was plenty expressive in his speech.

The Quayle Film: Not as polished or as long as the Clinton film, but good. Great old family movies, great Indiana faces, made the name J. Danforth touching instead of a joke. But oh, Marilyn, “We met over the death penalty.” Like a satire of young conservatives in love.

Bob Dole: We see him so much in Washington we forget to notice. He has style, conviction and a wit that is an expression of a different, interesting sensibility. “If the polls were always right, I’d be speaking next.” How old will he be in ‘96?

President Bush: The night after the Gipper, a friend told me, “The problem with Reagan’s speech is it’s going to get better as the week goes on.” Meaning, it will make it tougher for Bush,

But it didn’t. All Bush needed was a good solid speech in which he proved he was up for the battle, showed he could admit a mistake and demonstrated that he understands history, his own and the world’s. He had it. He did it. If it didn’t always sing—can capital gains, bless them, sing?—it still hit the right notes, and the president appeared relaxed and eager for fun.

Most important words: “When it comes to taxes, I learned the hard way . . . . It was a mistake.”

Most important argument: You’re better off with a man who raised taxes once and learned not to than with another who isn’t at least philosophically opposed to raising them.

Unanswered question: Was the president suggesting he intends to liberate Cuba? Is something up?

Verdict: The other night on CBS, Terrence Smith found beneath the bleachers the Astro’s third base. He kneeled down, pointed and said, “This is where George Bush has to hit the ball.”

That is where George Bush hit it.

[Header] One of Them

Reporters work hard. They are up at 6 for the prayer breakfast, then to the Southern Belles for Safe Sex news conference, then to the Democrats’ news conference at Papadeux’s Restaurant where reporters tried to get the quotes and facts right as 400 placard-waving Bush/Quayle kids pounded on the windows and screamed. (Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times said, “I feel like I’m in `The Birds.’ “)

Then they rush to the workspace, work the phones, wait for calls for a quote from the president’s cousin for the Bush profile that you have to file by 6, and he’s not calling. (Maybe it was that column where you sort of suggested another family member was a squash-playing, Repp-tie-wearing Greenwich weenies. Can’t these people take a joke?) And you wait, and worry, your stomach lining twitching with acid . . . and then the president’s cousin finally calls and you have to get told off for five minutes before he gives you, after long negotiations, the quote: “As a boy, George was always—polite!” You finish the piece, argue with the editor, then on to the Reagan Reunion cocktail party and then B/Q ‘88 Alumni Dinner, file again, cover the floor, go home at 2 and get up three hours later if you’re a woman to do your hair and makeup so your competitors won’t say, “That’s why she’s not on TV.”

I do not mean that hard work is an exonerating virtue; Mafia guys work hard. I do mean most of the politicians I know have only a passing sense of what a reporter’s life is. For instance: Journalists resent the relentlessness of spin—of political hacks shading facts and omitting truths to get the reporters to see things the way you want them to see them. This is the political journalist’s lot: to be patronized by dart-eyed campaign aides just out of business school, to be spun like fine silk by your intellectual inferiors.

Reporters resent being called an elite, but they are at least a hard-working one. I would offer them only one view they have not entertained lately: Referees are good, but the nation does not need a pack of schoolmarms. It’s a fight; let it unfold.

[Header] Waiting for ’96

Every serious Republican challenger for 1996 spoke at this convention. It was Jack Kemp, speaking to the big heart of conservatism, who most sounded like a president.

Behind Enemy Lines

-- Newsweek Magazine: July 27, 1992

The veteran political reporter R. W. Apple had the blues. He was sitting in the makeshift New York Times bureau off the convention floor, hunched over his laptop computer, looking the way Tom Wolfe once described Jimmy Breslin—like a bowling ball radiating steam. “These Democrats,” Apple groused. “Aren’t they acting like . . . Republicans?”

It was a serious allegation, but true. It seemed to me, a former Republican speechwriter asked by NEWSWEEK to observe the Democrats, that they were acting just like us—now brawls, no epithets. Even Jesse Jackson was showing up time.

The delegates, like their nominees, were proper boomers, businesslike and tailored. There was much talk of unity, but what I saw was the pretty homogenized gathering of one of the great parties of an increasingly homogenized country—a country that has been ironed out, no lumps and wrinkles and grass stains, a country in which we are becoming all alike, sophisticated, Gapped, linened and Lancomed.

This is one of the things that leave reporters depressed, this is why Johnny Apple had the blues: they want life to be authentic, they want people to be vivid, they want conventions that are a punch in the nose, they want to play a role. But it’s hard to play the part of city-slicker reporter now, because no one will play the part of rube.

You look to the podium, and you want to hear thoughts as big as the room, words bright as balloons. You yearn for something spontaneous and real, for a moment when reality breaks through the screen—a chant begun in the back of the hall that spreads and rings the rafters, a demonstration nobody planned, a speech full of things that are true.

You get lonely for the big heart of politics. You root for the rhetoric.

But—life is life and not bad but sometimes thin—and what you get is this:

Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo. Both hit it out of the park in ‘84, both this time hit a double.

Note to those who would be great speakers: Jesse Jackson doesn’t use a TelePrompTer. He memorizes set pieces that he has debuted elsewhere and weaves them together into a new whole. And he knows how to use fear. When he first comes out he stands back and sucks in the tension and high stakes in a great nostril-flaring inhalation; somewhere in his chest they turn into energy and the actor’s art. This is a trick particular to born politicians and schizophrenics.

Mario Cuomo also is a great actor. You have to act a speech. It’s a paradox of modern politics: to “act” is to be phony, but because of the demands and limitations of bigroom oratory, if you don’t act the text you’ll look wooden and—phony. Natural politicians understand and master this intuitively, without thinking.

When Cuomo puts out his hand to maintain his command—that movement that says, “Don’t clap yet, the applause line is coming”—it is the short, blunt hand of a masseur. He’s not only controlling the crowd, he’s massaging them. He’s touching the audience’s shoulder and saying, “Lie that? Wait’ll I get to your back.”

Cuomo talks about justice, Jackson talks about love, and something else. The constant subtext of his speeches is how hard it is to be alive, how tiring it is to go every day to a job that hurts your soul, your back. “She works haaaaaard for the money!”

Delegates and reporters want to be moved; Jackson moves them. Which is why they forgive him anything.

Al Gore. Earnest, modern, blandly debonair, he was the surprise of the convention, with the best speech. He had context: the war is over, the world has changed, our next great battle is not on the land but for it. Great Elvis joke—focus groups must be showing the Elvis stuff is a plus—“It is time for them to go” a good chant. Gore seems half suburban high-school principal and half preacher man; he’ll be good on the stump and tough in debate. Kids, Tipper and mom are great, dad made me think of the John Huston character in “Winter Kills.” I believe he may be running the secret government Perot found out about before he quit.

Ann Richards. The only person in America of whom one can say: she reminds me of Lana Turner and Stu Spencer. Actually she’s like the matriarch of a big family of deeply attractive sons and daughters on a Ponderosa-like spread in a TV show with a name like “El Paso!” Cursed like Mario and Jesse with high expectations, her speech wasn’t the dazzler of yesteryear, but it was solid and did the job. In a quiet moment outside the convention hall, Richards ruminated on human nature and said, “People are what they appear to be. That’s been true in my experience. People aren’t good at hiding what they are.” This struck me as the smartest thing I heard anybody say in four days.

Bill Clinton. Oh Bill. For days I’d been picking up great speech ions, I could feel it coming. I was wrong. The big speech was good, not great, and not quite the equal of Dukakis’s—“The Reagan erruh is ovuh”—in ’88.

It may have been a focus-group speech—“We gotta say something about Bush’s lack of vision,. that gets a very strong response in groups”—or a committee speech—“That pretty part from Ted, that can be one of the endings!” Whatever, the result was a weak cup of coffee, somewhat stimulating but essentially insubstantial.

“We can do better” was JFK.” Now that we have changed the world it’s time to change America” is almost word for word George Bush. This is known in the speechwriting dodge (William Safire) as being fiercely derivative (Oscar Wilde).

You think Republicans won the past 12 years with lines, not ideas, so the Clinton speech was a series of applause lines largely unconnected to thought, ideas, philosophy. And a chicken in every pot– or, as you put it,” “An America where health care is a right, not a privilege” is a promise—not, as you said, a vision.

“I don’t have all the answers . . .” was refreshing. “ More empowerment, less entitlement” has potential and should be developed. Ditto “A government that is leaner, not meaner.”

Big tonal mistake: Bush is down, but Americans are fair; they’re mad at the president, but you don’t convince them you’re better by treating him with scorn. Put-downs are most effective when you’ve established a spirit of generosity. (And if you’re going to be a pugilist you better be a poet.)

Second total mistake: references to “my fighting spirit” and “the passionate commitment that I have.” Never talk this way about yourself in a speech. Or in a conversation, either. (You don’t have to put a hat on your virtues and make faces. Your hero JFK’s references to himself were self-mocking.)

The new covenant sounds both Biblical and, well, new. If it catches on it will be because people understand it, which so far they don’t. Repetition alone won’t do it; context and clarity are all. (Note to speechwriter: context, as you know, is often lengthy and rarely snappy. Your communications director will resist what he calls “long globs of no sound bite.” Write it the way you know it should be and smuggle it to Bill on the plane. If the communications chief threatens to fire your, offer to return home to write a snappy campaign memoir. After he takes you to dinner and asks you to stay, keep smuggling.)

The Film. The most compelling rhetoric of the last convention night was in the Bill Clinton bio. It was wonderful—stirring, soft focused and emotional—and alarming. Clinton’s focus groups show people think he was born rich; in the film, Hillary just happens to mention that when she talks to people they tell her the most amazing thing, they think Bill was born rich!

And can we get this one straight? Reporters and the Clinton organization keep saying he was “born in poverty,” but from all the pictures and the facts that have been revealed, Clinton appears to have been born middle or lower-middle class—the meaning of these phrases keeps changing—like just about everybody else in those days. Grandma and grandpa, with whom he lived as a child, had a cook/housekeeper. Grandpa had a store. Billy had a cowboy hat. This is poverty only by the standards of—forgive me—Northern boomer media snots who see Southerners as . . . naturally impoverished. (It was probably the outhouse that began the hagiography.)

I bet half the parents in America suspect that the real nature of Clinton’s deprivation wasn’t financial but emotional. Grandma and grandpa worked, mom was at school, his father was dead. But politicians can’t say, “I was born in loneliness . . .” to show they know something about pain.

Speaking of which: it is good that those who seek to lead us tell us of their lives, and the events that shaped them. But—there was a lot of my dad died, my son almost died, dad was a drinker, my sister died.

Why do modern Democrats have to declare to each other that they have suffered, that they are victims? In group therapy this is known as saying hello, but—this is government. The real pain in a person’s life is interior; the anguish unveiled in these speeches seems a surrogate for genuine pain, and the device seems not revelatory but deceptive.

But then, this is a party half in love with death. It is almost three decades since his passing, but JFK was the most popular man at the convention, RFK the most beloved; the first great moment of applause came when their pictures came up on the squares of a screen. All conventions are obsessed with something, but Democratic obsession with the Kennedys speaks of their continuing confusion about the facts of their predicament. They didn’t lose the presidency because when the Kennedys died they lost their charisma; they lost the presidency because they lost their voting base.

The Suit. This is a departure. Most people running for president wear your basic Brooks Brothers suit, but the one Clinton wore through most of the convention has bigger, sloped shoulders, and a sharper break. Kind of a Montclair, N.J., real-estate salesman’s suit. I wonder how many days or weeks his staff debated it. “Look, I don’t wanna get in your way but we’ve already got a Slick Willie problem, OK? You look at it and see chic breakout outfit, but other people are gonna think of the guy who screwed ’em at the closing.”

By the way, Clinton goes home to Little Rock to get his hair cut at a local place. This is so he’ll have an average-guy haircut so the voters will think he’s a regular guy. And the voters do notice it. They think to themselves: he goes to the local Clip ’n’ Snip so he’ll have an average-guy haircut so the voters will think he’s an average guy.

Clinton’s charm and warmth and intelligence are obviously real. His friends whisper the famous flaw: he wants too much to be liked. So do most politicians, of course. They love the roar of approval, the hands outstretched to touch their faces. Clinton’s flaw, I think, starts with a fleshy calculation, an instinct to blunt disagreement and split the diff, to shade and swallow. All presidents manipulate. FDR did, and so did Ronald Reagan. But with them, people perceived that beneath the overlay was a core of hardness and toughness. Clinton has survived a great deal this year. But one wonders: at the core, where it counts, what is there?

What’s Wrong With the Right?

-- New York Times: May 24, 1992

One day in 1980, New York’s history-minded Democratic Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, sat in his wood-paneled study reading the Op-Ed page of a major newspaper. Suddenly he smacked the floor with his cane like Lionel Barrymore, shook his head and growled, “Of a sudden, the Republican Party is the party of ideas.”

At least that’s how I imagine it. Anyway, it was 1980, he did say the Republican Party had become the party of ideas. and he was right. He was also surprised, understandably. A party that had spent decades hanging on through low budget liberalism was finally changing. prompted by forces its establishment had not ignited and could not control.

From the West came the broad, grass-roots antitax movement signaled by passage of California’s Proposition 13. From the East came new writers with new assumptions, who argued for change in the journals of New York and Washington. The two forces converged to produce something fresh: a modern conservatism that could govern.

At the center was Ronald Reagan, who kept in one piece a naturally divided movement—social conservatives who would ban abortion, libertarians who would legalize cocaine—first by giving its members a winner when they hadn’t expected to have a winner in their lifetimes. Mr. Reagan’s interests were widely and openly conservative. He had come to his beliefs at a time when the right’s tenets were clear: budgets should be balanced; put a Federal agency in charge or the Sahara and it would run out of sand. But he was receptive to new thinking and generous toward all strains of conservatism because in a way he believed In them all. His respect for other conservatives spread as if by contagion. For a decade the people he brought to Washington functioned pretty well as one big fractious family.

And then … the crash. Not of the economy but Dr Communism, which brought down more than the Berlin wall. For if Mr. Reagan held modem conservatism together, two pillars kept it aloft. The first was unambiguous and effective opposition to the evil of Communism. The second was a promise that Republicans would make government smaller, less expensive, less intrusive. The first pillar fell last summer, on roughly the day The New York Times ran the headline “Gorbachev Quits as Party Head; Ends Communism’s 744Year Reign.” The second pillar began to wobble when the Bush Administration, in 1990, rescinded “Read my lips.”

The end of imperial Communism made the movement start to float apart; the end of “Read my lips” made it mean. And thus the current impasse, in which conservatives hut”1 thunderbolts at one another. William F. Buckley Jr., an architect of the movement and one of its authentic heroes, is castigated as a narrow-minded excluder; he, in turn, eases into a pair of tuxedo slippers to tap out editorials damaging the Presidential campaign or the most rightward of the serious candidates in the 1992 race. Pat Buchanan.

It is not an easy time to be a conservative.

A decade ago, while Pat Moynihan was turning into Lionel Barrymore, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., a columnist and the editor of the conservative journal The American Spectator, was writing a book called “The Liberal Crack-Up,” which traced with originality and verve the decline of liberal thinking through liberal behavior. Now he has written a book abut the right. “The Conservative Crack-Up” is part memoir, part essay, and it has some useful; things to say about Conservatives and their current predicament.

“The politics of the left and right are bereft,” Mr. Tyrrell says. “The liberals have not had new ideas since the last ice age . . . Conservatives have coherent ideas, but they have very few gifted pols. The conservatives relish for politics is only sporadic and almost wholly dependent on their perception that some zany reformer has become a threat to their home sweet home.”

Mr. Tyrrell notes that one of the reasons conservatives didn’t make some of the gains that they could have was that by the time they won power in 1980 many of their leaders, from their new President to the editor of their most important journal (Mr. Buckley of National Review) to the godfather of the freshest troops (Irving Krystal of the neoconservatives) were near or at retirement age. For them the victory of 1980 was less a hungry beginning than a satisfying end.

But this book is best when Mr. Tyrrell speaks of the distance, the utter disconnection, between the nation’s establishment—the press, academia, the arts—and its people. He accurately observes that “conservatives have become accustomed to being underdogs in the cultural wars,” that in the 1970’s the conservative movement was the least celebrated of movements, receiving “nothing comparable to the publicity attending the antiwar movement, the youth movement or the gruesome feminist movement. And yet only the conservative movement was to attract enough support from the country to capture the White House.”

The elites did more than ignore a movement. The “smokestack industries of American culture”—universities, policy institutes and the news media—have polluted the intellectual environment with their “incessant politicizing.” The result, in Mr. Tyrrell’s view, is a national blandness, a new conformity: “America’s Kultursmog has eliminated most forms of intellectual individualism with alarming thoroughness. There was a time when American culture was teeming with diversity and even with heresy. But over the last few decades the atmosphere of American culture has grown stale as the arts, ethics and every product of intellect has been tainted with the political vaporings of the New Age.”

* * *

Mr. Tyrrell is amusing and pointed when he rails about what is wrong with the left. When he writes about the right, however, things get uncomfortable. Much of the history he tells is old and has been told, often better, elsewhere. Some of Mr. Tyrrell’s complains seem tired. When he laments his and other conservatives’ exclusion from the tables of the news media titans, one simple wonders why he resents the absence of a dying establishment. Young writers in their 20’s and 30’s, hazed, shaved and barked at in the politically correct boot camps of the Ivy League, continue to rise, rebel and turn right. And they are the future.

There is less Menckenish irreverence in this book than mere rudeness towards safe targets. The score-settling ratio is high. Mr. Tyrrell calls Gary Mills a backstabber and Hilton Kramer bilious; he suggests that George Will is an explosive figure motivated by malice. Often the book seems less an examination of a crack-up than an example of it.

Sometimes it is hard to read, hampered by an odd tone, a kind of dispirited puckishness. And sometimes it’s just heavy going. Some conservative writers like Mr. Tyrrell affect a kind of big word style (predisposed to rodomontades, Mr. Tyrrell tends to compose feuilietons about the day’s perturbations). In part I think because they all grew up in a time when liberals had intellectual hegemony, one of the first things you had to prove as a conservative was that you weren’t stupid. But I’m not sure conservatives have to prove that any more.

Ultimately, this book is frustrating because it does not maintain a level of seriousness about what is behind the name-calling on the right—an inability so far to reach agreement on what conservatives should stand for and fight for in the new world. Should the right try, heroically, to return to the fight for smaller, less expensive government, or should it aim at increasing revenues that would allow us to get the books aright and fund what Pat Buchanan has called Jack Kemp’s big rock candy mountain? Mr. Tyreell does not address this and other questions with depth.

There are, in 1992, many kinds of conservatives. Concorde conservatives crisscrossing the Atlantic to check on this election and that caucus, cultural conservatives, bristling supply-siders, spiky libertarians and others, all rent by 12 years of intramural fighting, conflicting ambitions and snubs. A dozen years of leadership will leave you tired; a dozen years away from the grass roots, when you used to be the grass roots, might leave you disoriented. It would be amazing if they weren’t fighting, and weren’t mean.

One wishes Mr. Tyrrell’s magazine and other journals of the right would be not an army but a battlefield, not a combatant but a site on which combat occurs, each of the many sides contending, gaining and losing terrain, until the best side wins. We might all sit down, breathe deep, take heart and busy ourselves with pillar building. As for those fractious, angry Washington conservatives who would rather, this year, hurl thunderbolts, perhaps they need a rest. If they don’t come together soon, they will get it.

Those Moist Amphibian Lips

-- New York Times: May 19, 1991

Once upon a time in the land of children’s books there resided certain conventions: fairy tales would be relatively simple stories, and the lessons they provided would be both practical (cry wolf too often and no one will listen when the real wolf comes) and moral (virtue is, in the end, rewarded). There were some unfortunate stereotypes (the kind tend to be beautiful, women with sharp noses tend to be witches). and some heroes were dolts, which you know if you’ve ever had a 3-year-old look up and ask you, “Why does she think the wolf is her grandma?”

Now, possibly because children are more sophisticated—if that is the word to describe the condition produced when a toddler up late with an earache can pick up the channel switcher and wind up on Channel 35, where an adult male is masturbating to disco music there is something new: the ant-fairy tale, a mordant treatment of the form’s conventions in a manner that might be called not Grimm but somewhat grim.

“The Frog Prince, Continued” by Jon Scieszka begins where “The Frog Prince” left off. He’s already been kissed by the Princess and is now a nice yuppie-looking man in a suit and tie, but, alas, he is not happy. His wife, the Princess, who looks like Sydney Biddle Barrows, is always nagging him to stop sticking out his tongue as if he’s catching flies. He wants to know how come she never wants to go down to the pond anymore; she says she’d probably be in a better mood if he’d stop hopping around on the furniture.

You know what happens next: she finds a lily pad in his pant:> pocket and declares she wishes she’d never kissed his slimy frog lips, and the Frog Prince packs his bag and leaves. Then he goes on a great adventure where he tries to get a witch in the forest to turn him back into a frog so he can be happy again. But the witches he meets are apparently heavily influenced by Stephen Sondheim. The first one threatens to cast a wicked spell on him because she thinks he’s there to wake up Sleeping Beauty before the 100 years are up. (This witch zaps people into spells with a television channel switcher.) The next one, whom he finds at a beauty parlor having her hair done and reading Hague magazine, fears he’s come to rescue Snow White and offers him a poison apple.

The Prince is terrorized by more witches who don’t understand what story they’re in, and at the end, tired and bedraggled and ready to recount his old blessings, he returns home to a by now anxious and rueful Princess, who is eager to kiss his moist amphibian mouth. The moral being, in a harsh and confusing world it’s sometimes best to trust what you have and to fight boredom not by changing your outer world but your inner one.

Steve Johnson’s illustrations are artistically interesting—witty and spooky at the same time. But at bedtime most parents prefer benign and sunny, because children have nightmares and the day-to-day world yields more than enough fodder for an imaginative child’s bad dreams. So I’m not sure spooky is a good thing. But it is good if you wrote and illustrated the book in part to make your grown-up friends laugh. Mr. Scieszka’s first book, “The True Story of The Three Little Pigs,” for example, has been a huge hit with adults. My friends laughed at this book too, but they have three decades on the nursery school set.

To fully appreciate “The Frog Prince, Continued,” you have to have a highly developed sense of Irony and a sharp sense of the absurd, which most children don’t develop before they can read, despite exposure to random television programming. The jacket says “The Frog Prince, Continued” is for ages 5 and up, and it’s definitely up because those under 6 or maybe 7 will inevitably be confused by it. And that’s all right. There’s time ahead for ironic humor. People who sell things for children are always claiming too broad an age group. probably so they’ll have a bigger pool of potential buyers. This is not only unhelpful to the consumer, it’s counterproductive to the seller: hit a 3-year-old with, say, the “Peanuts” characters too soon and they’ll be bored, refuse to listen and turn against Charlie Brown and Lucy forever. Although appearances are sometimes deceiving, little children are not sophisticated and they don’t know it all. So it’s worth waiting a few years before introducing them to Jon Scieszka’s sense of humor. My guess is that the rest of the family will still be laughing at “The Frog Prince, Continued.”

The Eye of the Beholder

-- The Washington Post: September 9, 1990

The novelist and journalist John Gregory Dunne once described himself as “one of life’s neutrals, a human Switzerland,” but he sure got over it. This collection of his essays, magazine pieces and book reviews is full of sharp, tough prose-he is a wonderful writer, wry and educated-that is funny, mordant, acerbic and depressed. He’s on the side of the good guys, only he doesn’t find a lot of them, and he’s on the side of the truth, which is also pretty hard to find. Resisting intellectual currents to get at what at least seems to be true (a tough piece on Chappaquiddick becomes a tough piece on John Kennedy; he says of the work of a Camelot apologist, “This is not history; I would call it perjury”), he journeys to Israel before the Intifada, to Hollywood during the McCarthy era, to all the gin joints in Chinatown.

Does he have something to say? Yes, that life is hard, and full of shadows and deceit. He writes of a friend as having “the eyes of someone who has seen too much, too many violations of the human contract,” but those are also his eyes, and the fun in this collection is seeing them at work. He is drawn to morgues, courthouses and the scene of the crime “the way some people are drawn to church” (lots of Catholic imagery here; a friend has the look of “a Graham Greene priest; he had heard too much in confession”) and finds there the usual assortment of transgressors. “Whenever I meet a cop, I am struck by a certain element of performance in his persona.” He is a reporter who knows whom to listen to. A defense attorney tells Dunne about his favorite kind of defendant: “I like the guy who says, `Sure, I was in the store . . . but there was no way that bastard could’ve recognized me with my mask on. It was a Batman mask. Who’d she think I was, Bruce Wayne? And I didn’t have no shotgun. It was a twenty-two. If she says she can recognize me, she’s blowing smoke up your {obscenity}.’“ The attorney smiles. “That is an easy client to defend.” Another lawyer says of the case backlog in Santa Monica, “The only cases that go to trial are the unimportant crimes of important people and the important crimes of unimportant people.” That’s the most succinct definition of modern urban criminal justice I’ve ever heard.

There is an intellectual wildness to some of Dunne’s observations. “My Lai was the last major American victory, body-count-wise,” he says in an essay on the Mideast. Newt Gingrich is “of course, the moral equivalent of a bowel movement.” The columnist Robert Novak is “that fat and flatulant little bully” (I myself prefer Mark Shields’ explanation that Novak is simply living proof that Calvin Coolidge and Ma Barker were more than just good friends).

Dunne has a soulful edge-his Catholicism has not left him, or he has not left it-but he’s no romantic, he’s not sentimental, his heart doesn’t soar. One senses he faced a tough decision when leaving college: Join the priesthood, or run the Westies? He became, as some gifted ambivalents do, a writer, armed with Eyes of a Killer Nun. In a review of William F. Buckley Jr.’s memoir, Overdrive, he is admiring and impatient: “And yet at stage center, he is really not very giving of himself, except for that sly self-deprecation that comes so easily to the self-infatuated.” The writer Alexander Cockburn is “the salon Stalinist fancy man.” Does Tommy Lasorda swear a lot? “To say Lasorda has a mouth like a sewer is to pin a bad rap on the department of sanitation.”

But writers who search for what is true, and who try not to be guided by politics in what they see, deserve admiration. It occurs to Dunne, a former screenwriter himself, and author of a sympathetic piece on a writer who had been a figure in the “witch hunts,” that “had there not been a blacklist, all the Hollywood Communist screenwriters, penitent and unpenitent, would have languished in the well-paid obscurity they essentially deserved.” The most memorable and moving part of the book is his trip to Israel in the days before the Intifada. He is drawn to spies, hoping to get a clear read on things from those who have no investment in illusion. No one satisfactorily answers his questions, not even “V,” a young American Jew, an editor distrusted by all and reliably used as a conduit by all sides. Dunne asks him “if it was not corrupting for the whole state of Israel to have this raj in an area where the Jews were outnumbered nearly fourteen to one by the Palestinians.” V shrugs: That’s the Peace Now line. His question neither answered nor addressed, Dunne spends a sleepless night reading the Jewish quarterly Tikkun and thinking that being in Jerusalem, with its constant assault of ideas, is like “being an eyewitness to a bad marriage and the poisonous bickering therein.”

When he writes about writing, world weary becomes, perhaps by accident, invigorating. He is still excited by his trade, about which he is not in the least romantic, and has good simple advice: blocked? gone dry? confused by our own plot, confused by why we wanted to be a novelist in the first place? Tough it out. “What civilians do not understand-and to a writer anyone not a writer is a civilian-is that writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.” Go to the office every day, break the block by showing up. “The professional guts a book through this period, in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve, and a failure of nerve is the best definition I know for writer’s block.”

It has been asked of collections such as this: Why should anyone want to buy old opinions on old topics, and isn’t this taking literary recycling too far? And these are valid questions, but it seems to me that it is always interesting to see a review that shows you how a writer like Tom Wolfe was viewed by his contemporaries in the pre-Bonfire days; it’s interesting to see a meditation on Renata Adler’s impressive work flicking the lid off the New Grub Street revealed in the Ariel Sharon-Time case and the Westmoreland CBS case. Years later such pieces can tell you things about the age, the way reading a William Manchester essay on his short war with the Kennedys over Death of a President tells you about the hothouse angst of the mid-’60s. It’s old news but its still news. The real question is what do you want to spend for old news, and the answer is maybe you want to buy the paperback version and keep it in a small pine bookcase from college, picking it up every few years and getting reminded.