Mind of an Outlaw (70 page)

For the speech itself little registers in the text unless we bring
the emoluments of her presence to it. Speaking of her husband, she moved him safely out of harm’s way with queenly dispatch:

and gave the enumeration:

The Republicans in the Astrodome were delirious. They could believe in victory for the first time. Clinton’s lead was vanishing
even as the First Lady spoke. For there was depth to this gambit. It would appeal not only to all who were happy and fierce about their family, but one could probably add in a host of those loners bereft of family, plus the unhappy families that wished to be happy so much that their hearts tugged at the thought that it might still be possible. Family values was bound to exert a force on 75 percent of the vote—all the people who were in favor of Barbara.

Who would ever have believed there was any other side to her tonight? When the scandal about George had hit the fan just a week before the convention, and the media had been teeming with tales, not quite nailed down, of George and Jennifer Fitzgerald, Barbara Bush had called the reports “deceitful,” “harmful,” “mean,” “ugly.” That was to the media at large. To one interviewer, for whom she may have had a fond spot, she had laughed and said, “It’s funny. Nobody ever asks if I’ve fooled around.”

Who knew? With all the Republican candidates for ’96, could she be wholly out of her mind if occasionally she had an errant thought or two about who might be added to the list? History, we know, has its own mordant sense of humor. Tonight, with seventeen children and grandchildren surrounding Barbara and George, the story about Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, and Soon-Yi was circulating happily among the Republicans. William Kristol, an able servant in the development of the Republican mind—he was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff—was heard to remark at a press briefing, “I’m tempted to say Woody Allen is a good Democrat and leave it at that.” Newt Gingrich looked to rake in the pot. “Woody Allen having nonincest with a nondaughter to whom he
was a nonfather because they were a nonfamily fits the Democratic platform perfectly.”

William J. Bennett, the former secretary of education and the drug czar for the Bush administration, was chosen to nominate Dan Quayle, a well-thought-out selection since Bennett was reminiscent of Pat O’Brien in the movies of the thirties and forties where he would play a tough priest. Bennett gave a quiet, principled, conservative speech and concluded with a dignified series of encomiums for Dan Quayle. He has succeeded, said Bennett,

On the following night, Thursday, last session of the convention, it was up to Dan Quayle to fit such specifications. No routine task. One would have needed the light forged by inner contests with one’s rage and anguish, and Quayle, from the day he had been chosen by Bush in 1988, had been unable to take in one breath that was not predeterminedly partisan. Embattled, ridiculed, in liege to a wife who seemed twice as strong as he was and eight times more opinionated, he had had a full term of skirmishing with the media, and now, four years later, his petulance still leaked through. After a bow to the greatness of George Bush, he said:

To this he added extempore: “I’ll never surrender, never quit, never retreat,” which was reminiscent of Churchill’s speech after Dunkirk, but then Churchill, quite as easily as Quayle, could have been seriously influenced in adolescence by Thomas Henley’s “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.”

Quayle might speak with defiance, but he still seemed not so much unfinished as uncommenced. “It is not just a difference between conservative and liberal,” said Quayle, speaking with the sanctimoniousness that no politician in America seemed to have in greater supply, “it is a difference between fighting for what is right and refusing to see what is wrong.” That is probably why he inspired such hostility in the media. A young, rich, good-looking man does well not to be pious—piety, we sense, is not convincing unless it is based on tragedy and dread. Even as he threw down the gauntlet, he lacked dimension, a mediocre actor reciting a line more powerful than the true register of his experience.

Besides, he lacked taste. He mashed tuna salad and blueberry muffins into the same picnic baggie:

Let us give him credit, however, for the interesting point he did make. He was all for reforming the legal system. If he did not say how he would bring this about without government interference, he did, at least, point to one of the first of our economic ills:

Yes, indeed, and would he lead the war against the nonproductive costs put into our economic system by all the law firms that did corporate work?

Packed around the floor under the podium, cheering every phrase, placards pumping, voices chanting, and with a high tropism for the nearest television lens, the Republican Youth Delegate Program, also known as the Youth Group, had been powering it up so masterfully for Dan Quayle that if one had not seen them do as much for Pat Buchanan, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Phil Gramm, and Lynn Martin, the impression could have developed that Quayle’s address to the convention had gotten him off to a good start for ’96. The essence of successful prostitution, however, even when it is merely spiritual, is an exaggerated if temporary enthusiasm for the client, and the Youth Group had certainly done as much for each of the other speakers. Two hundred strong, picked for Republican balance in gender and ethnicity—a judicious spotting of black, Hispanic, and Asian faces—they were Republican high school and college students
who would be future politicians, and so were up each day by five in the morning and did not pack their convention gear until after midnight, a special corps bused from rally to rally and event after event, there to give life to the TV crews outside and inside the Astrodome.

They certainly did their best for Quayle, and if one did not discern the drop in intensity as one moved farther away from the podium, there would have been no way to explain the little economic fact that over in the Astroarena, down in the shopping center, Buchanan buttons were selling briskly, Kemp buttons modestly, and Quayle buttons were not moving at all. How severe are the findings of the competitive free market! By its stern laws and principles, the unsuccessful are equal to the undeserving. Quayle’s buttons would be cast out on Friday.

Enter George Bush. Once again, as in 1988, he would have to give the speech of his life. Or so it was generally agreed. The feeling among Republicans was that family values had taken a full bite out of the Democrats’ lead in the polls, and if George could deliver on this occasion, parity might be near.

Bush had fretted over the need to prove himself one more time. It was as if he could not overcome his resentment that he, the conqueror of the Persian Gulf, was still obliged to seek victory through oratorical splendor. Whatever his desires, he had ended as the focus of narrative interest for this four-day convention. Would he or would he not startle and encourage the nation with new ideas and new policies? Or would he fail to?

Thursday morning at an ecumenical prayer breakfast, he had said, “Tonight, I give my acceptance speech—and if it catches fire, it may give a whole new meaning to the burning Bush.” A humorous remark, but a vain hope. He was too angry within: the delegates were treated instead to the smoldering Bush. If Clinton had failed to deliver a great speech and took fifty-four minutes to prove it, the same sentence could now be employed for George Bush except that he ate up fifty-eight minutes.

On reflection, there was a difference in the nature of their journeyman gifts at the podium. Clinton had elucidated a number of points and programs, even if he had felt obliged to do it
three times over; the president, having no new themes, provided a hundred applause lines. In the beginning, response came quickly and frenetically, his audience steamed up to hysteria not only by the Youth Group, packed in whole compressions of young humanity under his nose at the podium, but from the delegates on the floor, superheated in the first minutes of this hour of climax, ergo George Bush had difficulties handling the din. His first estimated ten minutes must have consumed twenty. Nor was he simple and modestly appealing as he had been in ’88 with Peggy Noonan’s speech. Tonight, the text read like a committee production, and by the end, a quiet pall was on the Astrodome, not unreminiscent of Bill Clinton’s last ten minutes at the Garden.

So it is pointless to do more than give a most restricted sampling of what he offered. He had, after all, said it before, and would say it again. His contribution to the problem of the economy was to tell again his tale of woe. Blame must fall on the head of Congress. The speech, like his ideas, was scattered in bits and pieces, a Broadway comedy which cashed laugh after laugh and left its audience muttering, “What an empty show!” The longer it went, the more one became aware that the center of narrative interest, the philosophical content, was the one protagonist that never appeared.

Here, then, is Bush’s climactic speech presented in selected snippets that will prove less injurious to him than the complete text:

Listening carefully in one of the VIP boxes above the floor was Jim Baker. Studying his expression, one could only decide that he was not the fellow to play poker with—by his expression you could not tell whether Baker was enthralled, appalled, or bored. As Bush went on, Baker proceeded to study the text of the speech with the concentration others might give to a musical score. Was he noting which lines produced more genuine response or less than he had anticipated?