Harris's Harassment
Chivalry compels me to defend Florida's secretary of state.
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Monday, November 20, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST
After this infernal business in Florida is over, I propose to set up a small, private dining society. We shall gather formally once every year--possibly at one of the university clubs in Manhattan--dress in black tie, and toast a lady who stands today reviled and dishonored. I shall call the society the "Katherine Harris Circle." And although I have never met Ms. Harris, the secretary of state for Florida, I hope she will consent to be guest of honor at the Circle's first dinner.
I am drawn to Ms. Harris not so much by reason of politics, as by the pull of chivalry. This is the woman who has been slandered by Democrat apparatchiks, derided in the liberal media, and called a "crook" by Alan Dershowitz (the man who, as the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard, heaps daily disgrace on the memory of Frankfurter).
There can be valid disagreement over the question of whether Ms. Harris, in excluding selective hand recounts, abused her statutory discretion. I believe that she did not, as did the Leon Country circuit judge on Friday. Those who think that she did exceed her statutory authority are free to say as much--provided, always, that they explain why.
The opponents of Ms. Harris's decision have, however, disdained a course of reasoned disagreement. Instead, they have chosen to make a series of personal assaults on the secretary of state. The oafish Paul Begala, for example, has called her "a dilettante debutante Republican hack," and Chris Lehane, a Gore sidekick, has described her as "a Soviet commissar."
Their nostrils atwitch at the scent of Republican blood, the hyenas of the liberal media wasted no time in circling the wounded Ms. Harris. On hearing Mr. Lehane's remarks, CNN's Bill Press--a man with all the charm of a pregnant chad--gargled up the view that "calling Katherine Harris a Soviet commissar was an insult to a Soviet commissar."
These ad hominem attacks have also taken a predictably tasteless turn. Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like the liberal "establishment" scorned--by a woman. Ms. Harris's appearance has been mocked and reviled. A columnist in the Boston Globe described her as "Florida's ghoulishly made-up secretary of state." The column continues: "Her mask of mascara and eye shadow cannot hide the obvious. Ambition empowers her to hide behind the letter of the law and thwart the spirit of the Constitution." If anyone can discern a connection between Ms. Harris's mascara and the Constitution, I'd love to hear about it.
Another writer, in the Style section of the Washington Post, gave us this portrait of Ms. Harris. It takes second prize for vulgarity: "Her lips were overdrawn with berry-red lipstick--the creamy sort that smears all over a coffee cup and leaves smudges on shirt collars. Her skin has been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogenous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid, with every downward glance to double-check--before reading--her most recent 'determination.' " Why the quote marks around the word determination? Is it because the official making the determination wears makeup? Do I detect the stench of sexism here? Or the outbreak of that unmistakable brand of contempt--at once ardent and cold-blooded--that liberals reserve for women who come from the wrong side of the political tracks?
My first prize for gratuitous, ugly effrontery would go to this piece from the Washington Post were it not for an effort in The New Republic, a magazine whose intellectual preening is increasingly at odds with its editorial shrillness.
In its "Notebook" section, on page 8 of the issue dated Nov. 27, TNR posted two pictures under the heading "Separated at Birth?" The top picture is of Ms. Harris, wearing--yes--makeup, eye shadow and lipstick. The picture below, which hers is supposed to resemble, is of Ozzy Osbourne, a heavy-metal singer who wears long hair and eyeliner. Caught in midsong, he has his mouth open in a way that suggests a state of dementia. The juxtaposition of Ms. Harris and Mr. Osbourne is crude, coarse, and unsporting. And TNR's message is positively boorish: Ugly, ugly, ugly, the editors of the magazine hiss. Boo! Nyaah! Yechh! Katherine, you suck, and your face sucks too! And to think they still review books about Hannah Arendt in the back section of this once-proud magazine--now separated, as if by a chasm, from the front of the book. Separated at rigor mortis?
I end, with apologies to Edmund Burke, on a doleful note: The age of chivalry has gone. That of Paul Begala, Alan Dershowitz and The New Republic has succeeded, and the glory of Florida is extinguished forever.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays. |
