After the Ball Is Over
January 20, 2001
From The New York Times
By FRANK RICH
More Americans voted for the candidate who lost the
election than the one who won. The Washington Post/ABC News poll
says that only 41 percent believe the winner "has a mandate to carry out
the agenda" of his campaign.
Presidents come and go, but a Washington cliché is forever. Today
we'll be lectured repeatedly on the poignancy of a president's exit
(not that he's actually going anywhere), the promise of a new president's arrival,
and on the glory of our Republic. We'll be reminded that there are no tanks
in the streets when America changes leaders — only cheesy floats
and aural assault weapons in the guise of high school bands.
All true, and yet at this inaugural more than any other in any American's
lifetime there is a cognitive dissonance between the patriotic sentiment
and the reality. More Americans voted for the candidate who lost the
election than the one who won. The Washington Post/ABC News poll
says that only 41 percent believe the winner "has a mandate to carry out
the agenda" of his campaign. Even before the Florida fracas, the
country's black population rejected the Republican candidate (who
assiduously tried to attract black voters) by a larger margin than any since
Barry Goldwater (who had voted against the Civil Rights Act).
And now come calamities ignored in a campaign that dithered about prescription drugs,
tax cuts and schools: an energy meltdown in the nation's biggest state, and a possible
economic downturn.
George W. Bush seems like an earnest man. When he says he has come
to Washington to "change the tone" and "unite, not divide," I don't doubt
his sincerity. But so far his actions are those of another entitled boomer
who is utterly blind to his own faults. He narcissistically believes things to
be so (and his intentions pure) because he says they are.
Change the tone? As Clinton-Gore raised $33 million largely from their
corporate masters for their first inaugural, so Bush-Cheney have solicited
$35 million from, among others, the securities firms that want to get their
hands on your privatized Social Security retirement accounts and the
pharmaceutical companies that want to protect the prices of prescription
drugs. And already foreign money is making its entrance — in the form of
a legal but unsavory $100,000 contribution from the deputy prime
minister of Lebanon, channeled through his son.
Now comes the news — reported by the columnist Robert Novak —
that John Huang, the convicted Clinton- Gore fund-raiser, repeatedly
took the Fifth Amendment in November when questioned in court about
his alleged fiscal ties to Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell,
the No. 1 opponent of the John McCain crusade for campaign finance
reform that Mr. Bush has yet to credibly embrace. (Mr. McConnell is
also the husband of Mr. Bush's latest labor secretary-designate, Elaine
Chao.)
Change the tone? Hard as it is to imagine that anyone could choose an
attorney general as polarizing as the last, Mr. Bush has outdone himself.
With a single cabinet pick he has reproduced the rancor that attended the
full Clinton legal troika of Reno, Hubbell & Foster.
There's been much debate about whether John ASHCROFT is a racist — a
hard case to make against a man whose history of playing the race card
to pander to voters is balanced by his record of black judicial
appointments. But there has not been nearly enough debate about
whether our incipient chief legal officer has lied under oath to the Senate.
Perhaps his seeming fudging and reversals of his previous stands on Roe
v. Wade and gun control can be rationalized as clever lawyerese.
Perhaps some of his evasions can be dismissed as a politician's typical
little white lies — and I do mean WHITE — such as when he denies he
knew that a magazine he favored with an interview, Southern Partisan,
espoused the slaveholding views of Southern partisans.
But it took a bolder kind of dissembling to contradict his own paper trail in public office.
After he swore that the state of Missouri "had been found guilty of no wrong" in a landmark
St. Louis desegregation case and that "both as
attorney general and as governor" of the state he had followed "all" court
orders in the matter, The Washington Post needed only a day to report
the truth: A federal district judge in fact ruled that the state was a
"primary constitutional wrongdoer" in the matter and threatened to hold
Mr. Ashcroft in contempt for his "continual delay and failure to comply"
with court orders.
Mr. Ashcroft may have left even more land mines in his testimony about
the businessman, philanthropist and former law school official James
Hormel, the Clinton ambassador to Luxembourg WHOSE NOMINATION HE HAD FOUGHT..
Asked by Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary chairman, if he had
opposed Mr. Hormel because Mr. Hormel is gay, Mr. Ashcroft
answered, "I did not." Then why did he oppose Mr. Hormel?
"Well, frankly, I had known Mr. Hormel for a long time. He had recruited me,
when I was a student in college, to go to the University of Chicago Law
School," Mr. Ashcroft testified, before adding a cryptic answer he would
repeat two times as Mr. Leahy pressed him: "I made a judgment that it
would be ill advised to make him ambassador based on the totality of the
record."
The implication of this creepy testimony is that Mr. Ashcroft, having
known the 68-year-old Mr. Hormel for decades, had some goods on
him. The use of the word "recruit" by Mr. Ashcroft also had a loaded
connotation in context, since it's common for those on
THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT who argue (as Mr. Ashcroft does) that sexual orientation is a choice to
accuse homosexuals of "recruiting" the young.
No senator followed up Mr. Ashcroft's testimony about Mr. Hormel,
who, unlike another subject of an Ashcroft character assassination, Judge
Ronnie White, was not invited to testify at the hearings. I located Mr.
Hormel by phone in Washington, where he had traveled for final meetings
at the State Department after concluding his service in Luxembourg. He
strongly disputed Mr. Ashcroft's version of events.
"I don't recall ever recruiting anybody for the University of Chicago," Mr.
Hormel said in our conversation Wednesday night. As an assistant dean
involved with admissions, he says, he might have met Mr. Ashcroft in
passing while touring campuses to give talks to prospective law school
applicants, or in later office visits about grades or curriculum. But, Mr.
Hormel quickly adds, he doesn't recall "a single conversation with John
Ashcroft."
Nor has Mr. Hormel seen him in the three decades since; Mr.
ASHCROFT didn't have the courtesy to respond to repeated requests for a
meeting during Mr. Hormel's own confirmation process and didn't bother
to attend Mr. Hormel's hearing before opposing him.
"I think he made insinuations which would lead people to have a
complete misunderstanding of my very limited relationship with him," Mr.
Hormel says. "I fear that there was an inference he created that he knew
me and based on that knowledge he came to the conclusion I wasn't fit to
become an ambassador. I find that very disturbing.
He kept repeating the phrase `the totality of the record.' I don't know what record he's talking about
I don't know of anything I've ever done that's been called unethical."
The record that Mr. ASHCROFT so casually smeared includes an appointment
to the U.N. in 1996 that was confirmed by the Foreign
Relations Committee on which Mr. Ashcroft then sat.
Since Mr. Bush could easily have avoided the divisiveness of the
Ashcroft choice by picking an equally conservative attorney general with
less baggage, some of his opponents will start calling him "stupid" again.
That seems unfair. Mr. Bush's real problem is arrogance — he thinks we
are stupid. He thinks that if he vouches incessantly for the "good heart" of
a John Ashcroft, that settles it.
It hasn't; polls showed an even split on the nomination well before the hearings.
He thinks that if he fills the stage with black faces at a white convention and poses incessantly with black schoolkids and talks about being the "inclusive" president "of everybody,"
he'll persuade minority voters he's compassionate. He hasn't.
George W. Bush likes to boast that he doesn't watch TV. He didn't even
tune in as the nation's highest court debated his fate, leaving his princely
retainers to bring him bulletins. Maybe it's time for him to start listening;
he might even learn why so many Americans aren't taking his word for
John Ashcroft's "heart."
I don't doubt that our new president will give a poetic Inaugural Address today,
but if he remains out of touch with the country, he will not be able to govern tomorrow.
From The New York Times.com |
