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REPUBLICAN ROUT, 1998
BY PETER KURTH (published 11.09.98)
If there's anything more satisfying
than the spectacle of Republicans on the run, I don't know what it is. It's
been a splendid week in that regard, far more rewarding than my imagination
would allow, from Doug Racine's rousing squeak past Barbara Snelling to
poor old Newt packing his bags and going back to whatever it was he did in
the first place -- teaching history in Atlanta, I believe, which come to
think of it is his just reward. Nobody takes history seriously anymore,
much less in the ''New'' South, where the mental and philosophical
gymnastics required to keep up with the century lave created a permanent
class of lunatics and sentimentalists. (lf you doubt this, you need only
reflect on the huge success of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,
written by a New York journalist
in homage to a Southern ''mystique'' that never existed outside Hollywood.)
We are also told in press
releases that Newt and his wife need to “get to know each other
again,'' an enterprise that doubtless spells horror to them both. What's
Gingrich without the ''Speaker?''
Where's the power without the broker? As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed,
there are no second acts in American life -- unless you're Bill Clinton,
apparently, in which case you get as many acts as you want. Clinton
is the real Teflon president, not Ronald Reagan, whose reign republicans
must now look back on as having been kissed by God.
Remember the Reagan years?
The greed! The riches! The
Contras! The gowns! Reagan proved
that you could defeat an Evil Empire just by sleeping through it -- also,
of course, that the office of the President is more important than the
president in it, a lesson seen again last week in spades. This was the
first billion-dollar election, according to news reports, but even the
Republicans’ vast stores of soft money and sanctimonious TV-spots
couldn't rouse the electorate against the Prez.
Now, at exactly two minutes
past the electoral hour, it's the going wisdom that the drive for Clinton's
impeachment is dead, and that the ''Bush boys,'' George and Jeb, who won
resounding victories in Texas
and Florida respectively,
will re-gild the republican lily by reaching out to ''Hispanics'' and the
poor. This I want to see. What do they have in mind -- 401K's for the help?
Me, I wouldn't vote for a
Republican for dog catcher, taking reverse inspiration from my
great-grandmother, who used to say that she’d vote for a monkey so
long as he was Republican. In 1940, however, when the G.O.P. nominated the
internationalist Wendell Willkie for president, she cast her vote for Roosevelt.
“We thought you said
you'd vote for a monkey if he was a Republican,” her children
remarked.
''A monkey, yes,”
said my great-grandmother.
“Wendell Willkie, no.”
As to Mrs. Snelling, I have
nothing against her in principle, if you ignore the fact that she’s a
Brahmin running on dynastic coat-tails and that she allies herself in the
first place with a party that hates and harms women -- unlike Chittenden
County Senator Helen Riehle, for example, who practically declared herself
a Communist this year in order to escape the drubbing any idiot could have
told her party was coming.
Any idiot but a Washington
pundit, that is, as that dried-up parasite, Sally Quinn, make plain in a
recent article for the Washington Post. Quinn is the wife of the Post's
former editor, Ben Bradlee, who was something of a populist hero until he
fell in with Sally's tip-nosed-and-cocktails set. Quinn's November 2 Op-Ed
-- in which she begged us to consider how fine, moral and civic-minded she
and her powerful friends ''inside the Beltway'' are, and how they simply can't
stand by and watch someone from Arkansas make a mockery of their values --
owes more to Martha Stewart than Martha Washington, and has been the object
of such ridicule on C-SPAN and the Internet that it's disappeared from the Post’s
web site, leaving nothing but a trail of incredulous letters in its wake.
''How good of Sally Quinn
to instruct us dimmer folk how morally superior the Washington
establishment are to that low-life, redneck, hillbilly nobody who doesn't
even own a house,'' says one, Beltway ''outsider'' Rose Pritchard. ''Her
piece not only sets forth precisely why Kenneth Starr has had collaborators
up the gump stump in the establishment press. It also is an invaluable
`Guide to the Establishment Umbrage-Assertion Society,' whose tireless
campaigning has brought us in this otherwise golden age of peace and
prosperity to the verge of a preposterously senseless constitutional crisis
that may trigger a world market panic.''
Wish I’d said
that. One by one the authors and
fulminators of Monicagate are scrambling for higher ground. In The New
York Times, having donned rainwear and rubbers several weeks ago as
protection against the rising anti-establishment tide, Maureen Dowd now
declares that there's nothing left of Ken Starr and his ''investigation''
but two shriveled feet sticking out from under a house that's fallen on him
from the sky, like the Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz.
“Who would lave
thought that the man Monica brought down would be Newt?” Ms. Dowd
enquires, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Let's hope she's right about
Starr, and that this particular republican distraction isn't still wearing
its ruby slippers. It's a new day in Washington,
anyhow, as Maureen and Sally can tell you. So let's hear it for the
Republic - without the “an.”
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