Hooked on Horoscopes

-- Good Housekeeping:

 

I have a vice that is actually more in the nature of an embarrassment, or maybe I should say a compulsion. When I mentioned it to some friends recently, my shame deepened because they didn’t see it as a vice, and thought I was just being prissy. The vice? Astrology. I read my horoscope every day. In, um, three newspapers. And, um, in whatever magazine happens to fall into my hands. Plus those I subscribe to.

“So what?” said my friends. “Other people do vodka therapy or shoplift. You read horoscopes—some vice.”

But it is a vice. And I know it. And I do it anyway.

To make matters worse, I think astrology is stupid. (Someone once said we should have our doubts about a science in which Shirley Temple and Adolf Hitler have the same sign.) I don’t even believe it, mostly. And yet I always want to know if my moon is in the seventh house and if Jupiter’s aligned with Mars. I always want to know if this is a good time for financial speculation, and if I had better invest now in those gold pearl-drop earrings. And if Capricorns are feeling grouchy, then it’s not my fault he lost his temper.

I read it even though when my horoscope says Saturn is in my third house and family troubles will follow, I know it means the other people who share my sign, not me.

Here’s why I feel it’s a vice and not just a weakness: I think astrology is at least slightly demonic, a doorway through which the devil’s imps can dance. (And yes, of course I believe in the existence of the evil one. You have to be as stupid as an intellectual to live in this world and not know there is evil, and that the evil has a source.) I strongly suspect demonic forces use astrology to affect our expectations and decision making. And this detaches us from reliance on God.

One of my friends said, “Well, God made the planets—maybe astrology reflects part of His plans.” I used to like to think that. But there is a problem: The Bible—every word of which I believe to be literally or metaphorically true—tells us to keep away from such things. In Isaiah, astrology is false; in Leviticus, it’s dangerous. In Acts, sorcerers who find God burn their scrolls. In Deuteronomy, the warning is clear: Put not your trust in those who practice divination, interpret omens, who are mediums and spiritists.

I believe this is all true and wise. So it’s funny that I once asked the late psychic Jeane Dixon to, um, do my chart. (She did, in a jolly three-page printout that asserted with striking confidence that I was “a writer” and would make my living as “a writer.” And I was so impressed by this that I forgot to notice I’d already written a book, which she’d read.)

Here’s the part that most ashames me: It’s not just that I don’t believe in astrology and yet constantly consult it, which is an intellectual embarrassment, it’s the inner voice that nags when we know we are hurting somebody, and not just ourselves. Trust in me, says the Lord, trust in me. There is a plan and it is mine, fear not.

When you turn to horoscopes and not to Him, you show you don’t trust. You betray an inappropriate anxiety. You distance yourself.

I do have trust and faith. And it makes me happy. It makes me see the humor in things, in myself and others. It gives me a feeling of deep satisfaction.

So it’s odd that I feel good because Joyce Jillson in the Daily News just told me Venus is conjunct with Mercury and love is in the air.

Actually, I can claim genetics, a family tendency.

My grandmother was a big, broad Irish peasant, a poor girl who came from a family where they sheared the lambs in the house. She was a plain and modest woman who loved her church and her faith. But she had this funny little habit of, um, reading tea leaves. And when the priests would come to call, she and her friends would run around hiding the teacups from which she was divining the future.

But she was from mystical, spirit-filled Ireland, where as a child she actually saw fairies frolic in the glen. If you saw fairies, you’d read tea leaves too.

I have no excuse. I am a rational American with a cell phone and a fax machine. And now I see my son, a bright, strong American boy with bright white teeth and thick sandy hair curling over the collar of his bright white button-down Gap shirt . . . and he has picked up an astrology magazine that somehow made its way into my house . . . and I overhear him saying to his friend John, “I’m a Gemini. Do you know your sign?”

Aaaarrgghhhh. I must stop. For the next step, I know, is, “Why shouldn’t I marry her? She’s a Libra.”

I will stop. I know I can. I am strong and have faith. All Virgos do. Aaaarrgghhhh.

Why Opposites Distract

-- Good Housekeeping:

 

Here’s a story of the times: In New York City recently, a small group of idealists decided they wanted to help disadvantaged teenage girls get a start in the world. So they created and helped fund a new public high school just for girls.

Now, the first thing you think is, what a great idea. In a time when so many girls seem so lost, when unwed teen pregnancy is up, when studies suggest girls have a harder time getting attention and help in school than boys . . . how could giving them something special and aimed particularly at their needs be anything but good?

But another part of your brain—the part that is experienced in the world and knows that any good idea can be thwarted by ideologues and interest groups—knows what’s coming: The school is facing a legal challenge on the grounds that it unconstitutionally discriminates against boys.

In a way it is a twist on the 1993 suit brought against The Citadel, the then all-male military college in South Carolina on the grounds that it discriminated against girls. The Citadel was forced to admit a girl; then the boys apparently rudely hounded her out. It isn’t nice to be rude. But the boys had a case, and I think it’s a case that should be made and heard more often.

The case is this: Boys really ought to be able to go to schools without girls, and girls to schools without boys. If you say, “That’s already legal as long as no public funds are involved,” well, public funds are almost always involved one way or another.

In the younger grades, boys and girls are very different and often have different needs. As my 9-year-old niece, Michelle, who goes to a coed school, recently reminded me, the difference between boys and girls is that “when boys argue they fight, and when girls argue they use words.” Boys have to be taught that a punch can break a nose, and girls that a word can break a heart.

Little boys are small and delightful animals who love to be petted and who require encouragement. (I know, for I have one.) Up until at least sixth grade, they are often not as mature, not as well coordinated or verbally capable. (My own theory on why, if it is true, teachers give more attention to boys than girls: They know the boys need it.)

Boys are genetically programmed to impress girls by acting tough. A boy in a choir in an all-boys school will try to hit the high notes because that is his job. But if girls are around, some of the boys will never hit the high notes because they’re afraid it looks sissy. A secret: Boys really like to hit the high notes because they like music and plays. They are more inclined to do it joyfully and well without the self-consciousness girls bring.

Girls, minus boys, will do the kinds of things little girls do: think, ponder, conspire, organize, and decide no one should speak to Jennifer today. When boys are around they often act as if this isn’t what they do—and phoniness is corrupting to the character. And they will ask hard questions and give hard answers without being afraid that brainy girls don’t get boyfriends.

Beyond that, boys are often more aggressive in class, especially when they have nothing to say. That’s when they’re most inclined to raise their hands. Little girls often sigh and let the boy screaming, “I know, I know!” get the attention. Which may be nice for the boy, but not’ for the girl.

When they’re teenagers, the problem isn’t that they’re unalike, but that they’re becoming similar. By eighth grade a lot of boys and girls would rather be staring across the room at each other, slack-jawed with fantasy, than doing their work. Opposites distract. Also, keeping boys and girls apart at this age contributes to an air of mystery, which makes boys and girls ultimately more powerful. (The most idiotic thing about coed college dorms is that they demystify the opposite sex.)

I for one believe boys and girls should be kept apart at gunpoint until age 21, when they meet to shake hands minutes before the arranged marriage. But of course I’m kidding: Guns are dangerous. I do, however, think that the closer you look at our culture—its highly sexualized nature, its celebration of sophistication and denigration of innocence—the more inclined you should be to consider whether boys and girls would do well to be apart. As a matter of fact, after 30 years of challenging men’s clubs, of challenging boys’ schools—of insisting even that the ladies and gentlemen should not part after the formal dinner party to take their brandy in separate rooms—it seems to me that it would be a good idea to knock it off and give it a rest. .

Equality of all sorts is always desirable, but it can be secured in a lot of ways, and forced integration of the sexes seems to me these days the least helpful and the least promising because it involves coercion. And that’s no way to learn.

Looking Forward

-- Good Housekeeping:

 

At a school concert recently, a pensive mother turned to me. The gathering was festive and the gym was packed, for ours is the kind of school where entire families show up to cheer the kids on. She gazed at the crowd and said, “I wanted my father to be here, but he said the traffic was too much.” She sighed. “I told him all the other grandparents would show.”

Her father lives 40 miles away, and with rush-hour traffic it could have taken hours to get into town. Then again, if he had lived nearby, it would have been a short walk and a nice time.

It got me thinking about generations. They used to be closer—like right in your face. They often lived together in the same house or apartment—Grandma and Grandpa and their kids, and their kids. It was crowded. Families were bigger 30 and 40 years ago, and sometimes eight or ten people shared a bathroom, standing on line with their toothbrushes like soldiers in an army barracks.

It certainly wasn’t all good. But I‘m thinking it wasn’t all bad, either.

While there are still many poor people, America, in general, is a more affluent place today, and more of us than ever have been able to buy privacy. More of us have our own individual bathrooms, our own individual homes. We make visits to grandparents who live in apartments and condos in other cities.

Forty years ago the aged often lived in what we would call reduced circumstances, sleeping in little rooms and depending on the generosity of their children, along with some small savings or a small monthly check. Now many older Americans have Social Security with cost-of-living increases, pensions, investments, savings, senior discounts. As a group, the old in America have the highest net worth of any demographic in our population.

And who, would begrudge them? They worked hard, survived the Depression, fought in World War II, and paid the taxes that defeated Soviet Communism. They deserve to be comfortable.

And yet.

I once had a conversation with Ronald Reagan in which he said he thought the TV show The Waltons was popular because it showed all the generations of a family living together and supporting one another, and that people are naturally drawn to this.

Mere nostalgia for another era? Maybe, but a wise nostalgia, I think. There were compensations for yesterday’s overcrowding. When I was a girl, I had a great-aunt who used to come live with us for months at a time, and her presence enriched my life in many ways. One is that she was deeply, authentically eccentric, and her eccentricities were lively and interesting. Sometimes when she couldn’t sleep at night, she’d roam the house reciting poetry in a soulful and dramatic voice. These days they’d give her a sedative and recommend outpatient treatment, but back then people were less sophisticated and more open-minded: They allowed each other to be weird.

It was in the common dailiness of life that the benefits of my aunt’s presence were revealed. She’d talk about World War I, and the Titanic, and what it was like to have been a lady’s maid. And I realize now that she was a kind of buffer between my parents and their children, a human hiding place whose very presence added context to our lives.

A friend of mine shared a bedroom throughout her childhood with her grandmother. Grandma did a lot of the cooking, wonderful Hungarian stews. She helped my friend understand her own mother; just by existing, Grandma took some of the heat off the often intense relationship that exists between mothers and teen daughters. And Grandma was the family’s oral historian; without those stories my friend says she might have a less strong sense of where she came from and who she is.

I asked this friend whether her own mother would ever come live with her. No, she said, with what I think was regret. Her mother has already told her, “I never want to be a burden on you.” And she meant it.

She must be a terrific woman. But burden? I don’t know. We won’t as a nation be going back en masse to the old ways and crowded houses anytime soon. But I can’t help thinking that you’d be lucky to have three’ or even four generations living in one house if you could, because you could keep the essence of life, and the richness of it—birth and death and history and love—close.

Generations living together was messy. We in the modern era are more tidy, even more antiseptic, and a lot of us are doing a pretty good job of keeping discomfort at bay. But I wonder if in this we aren’t also keeping some big parts of life at bay.

“The people have spoken, the bastards”

-- Forbes Magazine:

 

Forbes has asked me to expand upon my article of two years ago (Apr 25, 2004) saying Bill Clinton was sure to be a one-term President. This led me to experiment with different leads, such as, “After I saved a child from a raging fire some time back, I was forced to use painkillers to deal wit the burns. Unfortunately, I became dependent on them. It was about that time that I wrote a piece about for Forbes . . . ”

Or: “You probably don’t know how much Forbes changes a writer’s copy, but let me tell you . . . “

But of course I was, simply, wrong. And I can’t claim that I didn’t think it through, for I didn’t think it through, for I did; nor can I say I foolishly bowed to the common wisdom, for I didn’t. I was simply way ahead of everyone else.

This is how I saw it: Early on, Bill Clinton was so confused about what he wanted to do as President, so unsure as to his Administration’s reason for being, that he flailed about wildly, jumping from gays in the military to nationalized medicine to budgets so big and greasy they could have been served with hot sauce at a Texas barbecue.

He was like that—a walking, talking Human Blunder—for two years. And everywhere I went in America—for I often leave the island of Manhattan and journey to the continent to find out how they’re thinking over there—people, when I mentioned Clinton, would roll their eyes. They had hired him, and now they would fire him. But he had two years to play out his contract, and they’d have to suffer through it. Here’s something they also did that I wish I’d paid more attention to: Every time people damned Clinton, they’d smile. They’d smile when I brought up his name. They’d smile as if he were an erring younger brother. There was a kind of softness to their disapproval.

Any, I never thought he’d recover from his first years, in part because you only get one chance to make a first impression, but more seriously because it involved imagining liberalism would change its stripes. And that just wasn’t likely.

Then Clinton was blasted almost out of his chair by the 1994 Republican sweep, and as is often the case with those who are tough and hungry competitors—and that, for all his much bitten lower lip, is what he is—defeat contained the seeds of victory.

He looked down into the abyss and saw his death. He called into the Oval Office a thing that had not been there since Nixon—a sinister force: Dick Morris. Clinton listened, declared the era of big government over—liberalism, at least rhetorically, was changing its stripes!—and changed the subject matter of his presidency. Now he was a new traditionalist, a protector of schoolchildren and single mothers. He eliminated some potentially dangerous issues, such as welfare, by bowing o the conservatives, and stole other issues by obscuring them. Thus family values became parental leave.

Clinton read, and read well, the emotional terrain. And he was smart enough to step back from the limelight, letting Newt Gingrich dominate the news, Clinton smiled as the fierce and dramatic Georgian turned too hot. And ever so slowly, ever so steadily, Clinton recovered.

People told me: “Watch out, Bill Clinton is a great campaigner.” And I’d say, “No, he’s not, great campaigners say great things never said anything interesting in his life and never will.”

Little did I know, she said defensively, that the Republicans would nominate to go against him a man with even less to say, and who said it even worse.

I didn’t think Bob Dole would get the nomination. I thought it wasn’t his year, that he’d retire one day as one of the great legislators of U.S. Senate history, go down in the books as a man who lived by shrewdness and shorthand and who expressed himself in code. He would not win the nomination because Republicans know the presidency is in large part a speaking job, and that isn’t what Bob Dole does.

But in a crowded field Dole emerged as the winner, and that was the final good news for Clinton.

Clinton is a lucky man, and that is not a put-down. A Broadway musical from my youth, Pippin, had a character sing of “the rule that every general knows by heart/That it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.” History gave Bill Clinton peace. And prosperity. And a national mood of anxious well-being, a sense out there that change can, should, be incremental and inch by inch, and that the most interesting politician in America—our Newt—should stay on as a force and be happily moderated by a newly practical and even chastened second-termer named Clinton.

Who was it who said, “The people have spoken, the bastards”? I mean, apart from Steve Forbes. Anyway, whoever said it knew something about losing, about the proper attitude to defeat: Look ’em in the eye and tell ’em they were wrong. In this case I was wrong. Though I’d have been spared this humiliating admission if I’d been more prudently edited by Forbes’ editors, the bastards.

Dole’s Long Road

-- Time Magazine:

 

In a more or less conservative country, the more or less conservative candidate—Bob Dole—should have been a shoo-in for the presidency, especially against a feckless charmer whose Administration threw off scandal like spores. But until the end, Dole was barely competitive, and in the end he lost. There are three schools of thought on why. The first:

Everything went wrong. Dole was so bloodied and bankrupted by Steve Forbes in the primaries that he never fully recovered. The choice of Kemp for Vice President seemed bold, but Kemp as candidate was not: he was weak and embarrassing. The Republicans took an early pounding on Medicare and were late in understanding the impact of a year’s worth of anti-G.O.P. spots from what should once again be called Big Labor. The President’s luck on almost everything held—until the very end.

Clinton’s people were better. Clinton surrounded himself with tough and talented tigers who spoke with authority because they had been in the meeting. Dole surrounded himself with second-raters who had the easy arrogance of national-campaign veterans and no national-campaign experience. In the last month they got up every day with what a Washington insider called two and only two objectives: not to get fired and to blame everything on Dole. They succeeded. That was staff. The lobbyists around Dole seemed more interested in getting a piece of the media buy than helping him win.

Dole got no breaks. But then he made no breaks for himself. He didn’t do the obvious, didn’t take full advantage of the conventions of modern campaigning, like the free media of radio talk shows. And he didn’t do the daring—picking a Cabinet in advance, making it Our Team vs. Their Team.

That is one school. Here is another:

It all came down to two things. The year began with two reigning cliches. One was that the incumbent would win because the economy was good; the other was that Dole was too old. Normally in an election the early cliches are replaced by newer cliches, but not this time. The good economy denied the challenger the traction he needed to move forward. As for Dole’s age, the best political commentary I heard all year came one morning on C-SPAN during the Republican Convention in San Diego. An elderly woman called in to say why she couldn’t back Dole. I am his age, she said, and people our age—they shouldn’t let us drive! Have you seen us on the highway? They shouldn’t give us licenses!

Reagan was almost 70 when he was elected the first time, and he was not too old. But Dole at 73 was, because he had the crochets of old age—crabbiness, defensiveness. Reagan looked forward toward the horizon, saw the city on a hill and said, Let’s go there. Dole looked back and saw flat Kansas, the boarders living upstairs and the family in the basement. He was emotionally landlocked. Where Reagan had a vision, Dole had only a picture: of Bob Dole sitting at a desk in the Oval Office and doing a good job. But a picture is not a vision, and Dole’s picture wasn’t enough.

There is a third school on Dole’s loss. It has to do with limitations—and not all the limits were his:

True, he never said anything interesting. On the stump he seemed like a man caught in a 1983 applause-line factory. He never thought aloud in his speeches, never offered the sustained and layered argument that precedes the applause line. He just declared things—And there’ll be no more crime in a Dole Administration!—and waited for people to clap as he cleared his throat. Every time I saw him on C-SPAN, his sentences lay there like half-dead fish flopping on the dock.

An almost poignant note: His staff advised him as to the modern media convention that a politician has to repeat his message relentlessly. They perhaps didn’t notice he didn’t have a message. So he took to repeating phrases endlessly: It’s about your money…your money…your money. I thought the media were exaggerating the tic until I saw him on the stump and found they didn’t report half of what they came to call the trifectas.

Dole ran on the wrong issues. More than most candidates, he needed the right ones to justify running at his age. In a good economy he shouldn’t have banked everything on a 15% tax cut, should instead have pushed a tax cut within the larger context of going after the biggest corrupter in American life, the IRS. He should have echoed Forbes: tear it down and sow the field with salt.

He made no use of a big issue: a latent anxiety about Clinton’s competence if something bad happens. Everyone in the country knows Clinton has had four years of good luck, and they all know luck doesn’t come in eight-year doses. Much could have been made of Clinton’s lack of international sophistication.

Clinton successfully obscured every issue. All politicians know how to dance, but boy, can this boy foxtrot. Clinton ran as champion of the family, knowing he could obscure the issue if he turned it into something else. And so family values became parental leave. It was brilliant. Dole never called him on it.

Clinton got away with having one of the most scandal-plagued Administrations in U.S. history. Perot gave a good speech detailing the scandal in this Administration and outlining its implications. Dole never made the case, only used applause lines—”some barroom bouncer named Craig Livingstone!” Dole never nailed Clinton in a way that said to the people: This isn’t just a partisan matter; this is a level of corruption that actually endangers our country.

The media played favorites by refusing to obsess on Clinton’s scandals. The other day at a Dole rally in New Orleans, a reporter was assailed by two Dole supporters who said the media are in the tank for Clinton and don’t report the scandals. The reporter answered, honestly, that the media had reported all the allegations against Clinton. But what the Dole supporters meant and didn’t say was this: the media failed to crusade against the scandals of the Clinton Administration as they’d obsessed on Watergate, on Iran-contra, on Ray Donovan and Ed Meese and all the smallest scandals of the Republican presidencies. They reported the Clinton scandals—and then let them go, released them like balloons into the air, where they disappeared.

Could any Republican have defeated the Great Conniver? I think so. A fighter aware of and engaged by the things that bedevil our country, a thinker able to speak with such clarity and simplicity that his words move people to action. That is not what the Republicans had this year in Bob Dole. But considering all he had against him, including himself, the percentage of the vote he won was a kind of triumph, even a kind of tribute to his gritty and stubborn endurance.

Looking Forward

-- Good Housekeeping:

 

Since the country is facing a national election, which is, among other things, a coast-to-coast argument, I have been thinking about the peaceful image of a joining of hands, a private coming together-a wedding. Which is, of course, not an entirely private act, as it takes place in public with witnesses, and is a cause for local celebration: A new family has been created. This is good.

To love weddings you have to view them with the same attitude you bring to a play or movie, which is a complete and willing suspension of disbelief. This is sometimes hard. But I like weddings because they’re a show: I like to see everyone get dressed up and pose for the cameras. I like to notice the way the mothers of the bride and groom circle each other. I like to see Grandma and Grandpa dance. I like the toasts: the funny ones, the affectionate ones, the drunken ones.

The big change I’ve noticed lately at weddings is someone will say, “She’s taking his name.” And the older people will murmur and say, “Oh,” and nod. They don’t express approval outright, for that would be impolite to women who do not take their husbands’ names. But you get a sense they approve.

It turns out this is happening on a broader scale. A recent Bride’s magazine reader survey revealed that in 1992; 71 percent of first-time brides in their 20s said they planned to take their husbands’ names. In 1996, the number was up to 87 percent. You can even see the new style in the decisions of some young celebrities. When Pamela Anderson of Baywatch married rock star Tommy Lee, she became Pamela Lee. Model Jill Goodacre married singer Harry Connick, Jr., and became Jill Connick.

This could reflect a return to traditionalism in the Age of Martha Stewart. It could suggest a return to simplicity: It’s cumbersome to be Ms. Smith married to Mr. Jones and call your children the Smith-Joneses. It also happens to have a counterpart in the business world. When Chase Manhattan and Chemical Bank merged recently, they picked one name: Chase Manhattan, because it was more well-known. And that was despite the fact that Chemical was the bigger bank. Lesson: In any merger, taking a name is just the first of many compromises.

Or maybe taking the husband’s name marks a return to clarity. The New York Times has what one of its reporters calls “the Ferraro rule.” When Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president in 1984, she used her professional name, which was her maiden name: Ferraro. But the Times didn’t want to call her Miss Ferraro because she was a Mrs., married to John Zaccaro. Except, she didn’t go by Zaccaro. So the Times invented a new formula: A married woman who uses her maiden name gets a Mrs. to go with it. Thereafter, Geraldine Ferraro was referred to as Mrs. Ferraro.

This rule was explained to me ten years ago when the Times referred to me as Mrs. Noonan. I was married; then, to Mr. Rahn but used my maiden name professionally, so at home I was Mrs. Rahn and at work, Ms. Noonan. So the Times, in the name of politeness and political correctness, had chosen to call me the one thing I wasn’t. It was odd, and amusing, and I got to tell my mother she was in the papers.

People have a right to go by what they want to go by. If you would rather retain the name your daddy gave you than assume the name your husband has, go for it.

But when I see young brides change their names and take their husbands’, I think it suggests a kind of bravery. And I suspect at least some of them are saying something through their courage.

A bride in her 20s grew up in the Age of Divorce.

As likely as not, her wedding party consists of her mom and her mom’s second husband, and her dad and his third wife. This bride and her husband know firsthand what the end of a marriage means. And they may have fewer misconceptions than their parents about how important freedom and self-actualization are. They may think other things are more important, like constancy and commitment and loyalty.

Maybe, for these brides, taking their husbands’ names is a declaration not only of intention, but of faith. Maybe they are suspending disbelief. Marriage itself is a marvelously faithful act. It shows that you have faith in yourself and your spouse, and also in life, in the ability of things to stay and grow and endure.

Which is why I suppose I find myself at weddings lately just as fascinated and entertained as ever, but also moved. And, when I hear someone say, “She’s taking his name,” I find myself nodding like the old people, and quietly thinking, Good.

The Captain Of His Soul

-- Time Magazine:

 

On the stump those last days, Bob Dole’s campaign was more local than national—the taped Sousa marches, the town bigwig at the mike vamping in front of an audience in elephant hats. Then Dole would come out from behind the stage, parting the polyester-blue curtain, and enact the body language of victory—thumb up, quick-flash smile, the arm that doesn’t hold the pen punching the air in a go-get-’em arc. The crowd would always stand and applaud. “We love you, Bob!” someone would yell, and the unmuffled sound would echo too well, because the hall was always half empty.

He didn’t look bitter or lost that last week, didn’t look—concussed, as big losers of past history have. He just looked like a man who was enacting a campaign rather than waging it. And I stood in the back of the hall and thought, He’s losing with grace because losing is something he knows how to do. I thought of the old poem Invictus:

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

I think that’s how he saw himself at the end. Invictus, one of F.D.R.’s favorite poems, was popular in the storm-tossed 1940s and would have been known to a lieutenant named Dole. It is a poem about fierce human will, a poem you might call proud or braying, depending on your taste. And you could say the Dole campaign at the end was a similar kind of poem.

He drew the party faithful. A Dole campaign stop was not Reaganesque (20,000 adoring college students) or Bushian (mom and pop and the kids in the city square). Dole’s crowds were 400 and 600, often at small, third-tier colleges, and they were Republican believers. One night, on the Wednesday before the voting, at the Pontchartrain Center outside New Orleans, about 700 people showed up, a big crowd. It was dinnertime, after work, and they could have been home relaxing, watching TV, helping with homework, but instead they got in the van and drove on the highway to stand and cheer for a man who they knew would give a bad speech and who in a week would be an asterisk in a boring book.

The faithful lived up to their name. At Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, there was the young mother in jeans, hair frosted blonde, a baby in her arms and a toddler in a stroller. She came late to the speech, flustered, and she was excited to be there to see a man who was running for President. When Dole was moving along the side of the gym talking and shaking hands, she saw the top of his head, his tanned brow and his combed, sprayed hair, and she said to someone, “That’s him—oh, I’ll never get there with the kids …” I turned and motioned to the stroller. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll watch him.” She looked at me as her brain rolled out the possibilities—the young mother said she last saw her son at a Dole rally when a member of the press offered to stay with him—and she jerked the stroller softly and barreled toward Dole, who was turning now and disappearing in a small sea of suits. “Oh,” she said as he left, “oooooooh!”

Those twilight days Dole took to talking about Dwight Eisenhower. He would tell crowds, I want you to be proud of your vote, just as I was proud years ago when I voted for General Eisenhower. Hearing him refer to his fellow Kansan, I realized Eisenhower was to Dole what F.D.R. was to Reagan—the prototype, the vivid President of his youth, the one who set the standard and the style. Do you remember Ike’s philosophy from the ‘52 campaign? Neither does anyone else. He didn’t have a philosophy; he barely had a discernible point of view. What he had was himself: I’m Ike. I ran the war, and I can run the White House, because I am me. The buttons said it all: I LIKE IKE.

Dole ran the same kind of campaign: I’m Bob Dole, and you know me: I ran the Senate; I’ve been here for 30 years; I’m solid and competent, the Big Bobster. But that won’t do anymore. The candidate must be himself, and more than himself: he must be the carrier of a point of view, the expression of certain assumptions. He must have a philosophy. You may say, but Clinton didn’t have a philosophy! And the answer is, sure he did—he had plenty of them.

Dole ran like Ike but without Ike’s air of inevitability, and without his sunny good fortune. But then Dole never saw himself as a fortunate son, and if you know his history, you know why. The story of his devastating war wound and recovery is so moving because trauma was at the heart of Dole, not only of the physical kind but in so much of his life that would follow. For he would enter the Republican Party just as the great wave of modern liberalism was washing across the American continent. He would rise to head the Republican National Committee just in time to see victory washed away with Watergate. He rose to lead his party in the Senate—only to find his time going not to securing victory but to limiting loss. He would run for President twice and lose and keep running.

It was a political life of great triumph—he did, after all, go for the very top job—but his victories obscured its persistent theme. And now here, in the last days of his last campaign, at the end of another long losing haul, he stood alone, with the faithful, the master of his fate, as the old poem says, the captain of his soul.

Welcome to Hard Truths

-- Time Magazine:

 

Bob Dole’s acceptance speech was big—stern, daring, even at moments Churchillian—but it was marked most by a kind of interrupted eloquence. The speech betrayed the weight of a few too many hands. Even in its strongest, most poetic passages there seemed to be something missing. When Dole stirringly pointed to the exits in the convention hall and declared the Republicans the party of Lincoln, he invited any bigoted delegates to leave, “as I stand here and hold this ground.” But the way the section was constructed, it seemed as if he were telling the party it was bigoted and no longer welcome at his convention.

The speech didn’t quite hang together. Yet it was a brave speech and deserves credit for its ambitions. It was brave first in that it ignored many of the time-honored conventions of political oratory, and did so in a way that asked a lot of the audience—especially the people in the hall. Half the delegates had been to dinner, had had a few drinks and were ready to rock. But Dole gave them little to play with. He didn’t offer much humor, didn’t inspire a chant, didn’t ask them to hoot ‘n’ holler.

What he asked them to do was stand there and think. And that is a lot to ask of a delegate surrounded by guys in elephant hats. But the most interesting part of the speech’s bravery was its high moral seriousness; it attempted to address what really ails America. And it did so while rejecting the florid optimism of political speeches and asserting instead that America is in trouble because of the way modern Americans have been living their lives. He scored the small corruptions of our lives, of ambition and unthinking selfishness that damage first individuals, then a whole society.

“Permissive and destructive behavior must be opposed,” Dole said, “honor and liberty must be restored.” How? Through personal “right conduct, every day at every level.” What stops us from rising above ourselves? The answer was beautifully put—if not utterly convincing: “It is because for too long we have had a leadership that has been unwilling to risk the truth…An Administration in its very existence communicates this day by day until it flows down like rain. And the rain becomes a river, and the river becomes a flood.”

But what worked on page didn’t always work onstage. Dole never seemed to “own” the speech, didn’t have it absorbed so deep it was bubbles in his blood. My guess is he never really liked it, but stuck with it because his previous collaboration with his speechwriter, the novelist Mark Helprin, was such a hit. Aaargh, eggheads all liked the resignation speech, do it again. There was a lovely spareness to certain small sections, and if it had been sustained, it would have resulted in elegance. Helprin had given Dole a first draft of the speech on April 22, then met with him roughly a dozen times to work on it. But in San Diego things unraveled when Dole asked for new writers. Soon sections of eloquence were followed by blocks of boilerplate. After more than a dozen drafts, Helprin turned in his beeper and went home to upstate New York. There he issued a statement. It said in part, “Early on I was happy to volunteer to Senator Dole a first draft of an acceptance speech, and he then made it his own…In the end the legitimate and understandable requirements of political speechwriting did not mesh with the principles of my profession, which I can in no circumstances abandon. So I stood down, without rancor.”

That is pretty strong rhetoric. Perhaps some of the best at the convention.

A Memo to Bob Dole

-- Time Magazine:

 

    FROM THE DESK OF PEGGY NOONAN
    TO: BOB DOLE
    DATE: JUNE 10, 1996

This week you leave the Senate, with a goodbye speech on the floor that is sure to be moving. Whatever happens in November, you’ve closed a great chapter of your life.

Now what? The standard thing to do is what all modern presidential candidates do: get on a plane and hop like a mighty flea from one end of the continent to the other. Your advance team will get the schedule late and throw events together haphazardly. They’ll put you in the wrong room with the wrong crowd, with the TelePrompTer shading part of your face and with a bunch of nine-year-olds standing behind you at the lectern with faces that say, “Mama, whatever I did to get put here, I won’t do it again!” That is, it’ll all be like your Macomb County event last week.

What should you do? Let’s start with your problems and work from there. You’re out of money and will be until roughly the time of the G.O.P. convention, when you get an infusion of federal funds. Your campaign is also, at the moment, without a kind of physical context. When people think of Bill Clinton they think of a big white house with pillars on Pennsylvania Avenue. When people think of Dole they used to think of the Senate floor, the wrong place but a place nonetheless. Now you are—where? On a tarmac without a tie.

You’re rootless, moneyless, groping toward a message. Is there a way to make a virtue of these disadvantages? Yes. It’s an idea that’s just begun bubbling up from the Republican ranks. (Ted Stevens and Slade Gorton are talking about it in the Senate.) It is simple, cheap, so old it’s new, so hokey that it has a startling cleanness about it.

It’s this: go home to Russell, Kansas. Go back to the house you and your brother and sisters grew up in, the house in which you waged your lonely battle to recover from the wounds of war. Wage the last great front-porch campaign of the 20th century. Now and until the convention, make that house and that porch the locus of your last great battle. Let the word go forth that you’ll meet with any American or group of Americans that has the wherewithal to get there and the patience to stand in line. Get them all in—farmers, fishermen, enviros, ranchers, housewives, fire fighters—and listen to them. Ask them what they most need from the next President, listen to them, learn from them.

This will be the first real front-porch campaign since 1920, when Warren Harding oozed to effortless victory. But before him the great front-porch campaign, the one that caused the phrase to be coined, was in 1896, by William McKinley, who sat on his porch in Canton, Ohio, and met with whoever came by. As William Safire once noted, McKinley “had good reason to stay at home . . . he was not the stem-winding orator his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, was.” He played to his strength, a strong personal presence. “I rang and walked in,” wrote an English journalist. “Mr. McKinley was sitting on a rocking chair not 10 feet from the door . . . he is gifted with a kindly courtesy that is plainly genuine and completely winning.”

Like you. You shrink in crowds and expand in private. Play to your strength. Sit on the porch with a glass of iced tea and have them come to you, as they should. Here are the reasons to do it:

It will give you place and context. Your campaign will reside in a place called Kansas, a square state in the middle of America. This is a good place to be.

It will give you a symbol—the old American porch, the kind people rocked on before the days of drive-by shootings. The symbol underscores a message: I stand for the heartland.

It will make you a better candidate. You’ll learn things you didn’t know. No matter how sensitive or astute, no man spends 36 years in Washington and doesn’t lose a sense of the texture of his country.

It will force the media to tell your story for you. Every major news outlet in America will send a crew and reporters. They’ll be forced to get to know Kansas towns and Kansas people. They’ll be forced to do feature stories on your life—this is where he played football, this is where they passed the cigar box to pay his hospital bills.

Every comedian in America will spoof it. Dennis Miller will rant, Al Franken will say Kansans are big fat idiots, Letterman will have a Top 10 Reasons I’m Really Sitting on This Porch. Fine. The more famous they make it, the more famous it becomes, the more present in the minds of people.

You’ve just begun thinking about this, as has your wife, but you haven’t really focused on it. But do.

By the way, McKinley and Harding won handily.

Memo to Bob Dole

-- Time Magazine:

 

    MEMO FROM THE DESK OF PEGGY NOONAN
    TO: BOB DOLE
    DATE: MAY 27, 1996

Your Senate leave taking provided that most satisfying of political moments, when the words are as big as the event. Forget the June departure date, leave now and for good. You made a dramatic exit. To go back in the next three weeks and haggle is to blur the picture and confuse the public. Don’t step on your own applause line: it’s over, the tie is off, go West ol’ man.

Now you go to the people. What they need from you is a clear new picture. Like Bush in 1988, you’re famous but unknown; people know your face and name but aren’t sure what you believe in. This is not a disadvantage but an opportunity. Now you get to reintroduce yourself, and on your terms.

Start with what people know. They know you’re experienced, they know you’re an adult, they can see the flintiness. But they don’t know if you have the presidential temperament, that you’re a big, good-natured, stable, tough-minded optimist. You also need to show that you’re genuinely thoughtful, that you have been watching and thinking about America for a half-century and have come to conclusions that are now convictions about how to preserve and protect her.

All year your aides and friends have been telling you to show your passion. But after three years of sentiments and feelings from the White House, the whole country hungers for logic. (And in any case, every time your staff tried to make you show passion, you wound up pounding the lectern—”Have you no shame, Hollywood?” “Liberal judges!”—and looking not serious but fierce, dark, censorious.) You can demonstrate the quality of your thinking and temperament by spending the next six months speaking clearly to the American people—by trusting them with your thoughts. Which is not something you’re used to.

Talk about the things that have happened in America since 1961, when you entered Congress, and what your thoughts are about what worked, what didn’t and what you’ve learned in a party split on issues and a country going to extremes. In the past 27 years you’ve straddled, which may have been the only way for a Republican Senate leader to survive. You’ve had your paleoconservative moments—”Democrat wars!”—and an old-style, Midwestern aversion to deficits. You’ve also pushed through tax increases, and if you think you were wrong about some of your votes and views from 10 and 20 years ago, then explain where you were and where you are. If you think you were right then, say that too, and amplify. People respect it when politicians try hard to speak truth.

To do all this, you will have to overcome a lifetime habit of thinking words are the enemy. Up until now they have seemed that way. Words muck up deals, create divisions, draw battle lines, are misunderstood. When you are a legislator, silence is your friend. The unspoken word never has to be taken back. (And dust-bowl Kansas wasn’t exactly a place for airy chat; you grew up in the last age of yup and nope. “Lost the farm.” “Bad.” “Still tryin’.” “Good.”) Now it’s all different. When you run for President, words are your friend, your only friend. You must “martial them to fight for you,’’ in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase. This will be a psychic shift, and it won’t happen overnight. But it’s your job now; if you win the presidency, it will be your job then.

Don’t let your advisers tell you that the right loves cheap, nasty issues, and you have to be cheap and nasty to please them. This is a common misconception of moderate conservatives. Reagan spoke to the right as if they were equals; he never had to throw them raw meat because he never thought they were animals. And don’t let the liberals in the party fuzz up the message. The conservatives are still small town and small pocket; the liberals are the moneybags of Team 100 who used to be entrepreneurs and lately are lobbyists. They’re proabortion and disdain the icky Christians. (This kind of snobbery is as old as America itself.) Take their money and thank them, but do not let them dictate policy.

You have a gender-gap problem. The way to ease it is to bring up the real women’s issue of this campaign: the fact that more and more women are entrepreneurs—dry-cleaner’s owners, real estate-agency owners—and taxes and regulation are killing them. Show women who are breaking their backs pursuing economic freedom that you’re on their side.

Your wit is natural to you, almost compulsive, deeply mordant. They’re telling you to squelch the one-liners. Don’t. It’s you, and it’s a relief. The pious conniver in the White House lacks the cool tragic sense that produces irony. So go with it, knowing wit is not a substitute for thought but an adornment of it.

So go out there, speak, be famous and known.