Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (27 page)

This other has been pure heat. Sister Souljah got her fifteen minutes of fame. Jesse Jackson got to play his habitual game of Super Mario Brothers with the Democratic powers-that-be. And Mr. Clinton got to shout across from the white side of the racial divide that black folks can be racist, too. There are those who say he was pandering. If he prospers with the support of voters who believe that the key to racial problems in this country is blacks killing whites, or talking about killing whites, he will be little better than the current occupant of the job.

Our problem is not the venomous words of a rap singer—it is silences so huge we are drowning in them. Senator Bradley quoted Stephen Vincent Benét on the conundrum of America:

Alas, it doesn’t make for sound bites.

THE TWO FACES OF EVE
July 15, 1992

It is no longer the fashion to lie about the everyday lives of women. Gone are the days when we pretended that caring for children and cooking meals were an always rewarding enterprise. Gone are the days when we insisted that a real woman found it more satisfying to provide comfort for those who did great things in the world than to do great things in the world herself.

Now we only insist on lying about the lives of women whose husbands are running for president.

It’s particularly noticeable this year, at this convention, as the Democrats parade their female congressional candidates, smart and outspoken and nobody’s fools. It’s particularly noticeable as Ann Richards runs the proceedings, a gavel, a grandmother, a governor. It’s particularly noticeable as Barbara Jordan talks about the role of women in the party, and the party faithful, half of them female, roar back the joy of inclusion.

It’s particularly noticeable that Hillary Clinton, who has already changed her name, her hair, her clothes, and her comments,
is reduced to hawking her chocolate-chip-cookie entry in the First Lady bake-off.

What next? Eleanor Roosevelt fudge?

The irony is that if Ms. Clinton were up on that podium as a candidate, she would be golden, with her Yale Law degree, her board positions, her smarts, and her looks. But Hillary Rodham Clinton is running for First Lady, an anachronistic title for an amorphous position. The job description is a stereotype that no real woman has ever fit except perhaps June Cleaver on her good days.

The remarkable thing about how long the fantasy of the adoring and apolitical First Lady has endured is how few occupants of the job have conformed to it. In the last twenty-five years, only Pat Nixon has truly seemed separate from the work her husband made his life.

Margaret Truman Daniel, whose mother, Bess, was the prototype of First Lady as average American housewife, says she does not recall her parents talking politics much. But her husband, Clifton Daniel, demurs. “I heard her do it often,” he said. “She was actively interested in politics and she did not hesitate to give her opinions.”

Barbara Bush, she of the ubiquitous adjective “grandmotherly,” has stoked the fiction afresh. In a fine profile in
Vanity Fair
, we learn how: she tends it relentlessly. “I could get in so much trouble if I said something she didn’t agree with,” her own stepmother worries. “Because you know how she is: she knows how she wants to appear to the world.” And she knows how the world wants her to appear, canny Bar—not as the Machiavellian woman who can whip Bush subordinates into shape with a word, but as the happy shadow.

Mrs. Bush came of age when the best hope for advancement many women had was to hitch their wagon to their husband’s star, although, like both Nancy Reagan and Rosalynn Carter, her lack of interest in influence is pure pulp fiction. Ms. Clinton is part of a different age, an age when we girls were taught we could
be anything we chose—and were foolish enough to believe it. She is a lightning rod for the mixed emotions we have about work and motherhood, dreams and accommodation, smart women and men’s worlds.

She was the kind of girl they said might wind up in the Oval Office. Now if she’s lucky she’ll get the East Wing, a not uncommon kind of pact in two-career marriages. Well, we say, she made her choices. She blonded and blended and sometimes she was outspoken and looked ambitious and that will never, ever do.

Here in New York and for the rest of this campaign we have the two faces of Eve. We have the women candidates, who are permitted—and I chose that word deliberately—to be ambitious, outspoken, strong, and sure.

And then we have Hillary Clinton, who must hawk those cookies and show off her daughter to prove her bona fide. Bill Clinton married someone smart and opinionated, who could challenge him and apparently frequently does. That’s not an easy thing for a man, but apparently it’s even tougher for this nation. Talk to people who don’t like her and they often say they have never heard her speak or seen her interviewed. It is the idea of her they dislike.

Abigail Adams, a pistol if there ever was one, wrote in the famous “Remember the ladies” letter to her husband, John, the second president, “While you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives.” It was a young country then. In some ways it still hasn’t grown up.

THE FOURTH WALL
July 19, 1992

Late at night, bleached by the streetlights, the satellite dishes pale moons at its perimeter, Madison Square Garden looked like the starship
Enterprise
. The doors were barred to all but those with special passes by a phalanx of police officers, who stood between the arena and the uninvited—the protesters, the leafleteers, and the man who paced the corner repeating, “The answer is Jesus. Jesus is the answer.”

The third night of the Democratic convention a man walked by with his hands in his pockets and muttered bitterly, “Blah blah blah blah.” And though it is possible that he was not all there, this being New York City, the Democrats should keep in mind, during this anniversary celebration of the Michael Dukakis Memorial Euphoria, that he may have been an ordinary working Joe, giving vent to the still-considerable chasm between working Joes and politicos this country over.

Bill Clinton gave a speech Thursday night in which he introduced himself anew to the American people, making the personal
political. The most important thing about that speech was that he could not simply give it to the people in the Garden, the people with the open-sesame passes slung around their necks. Accepting the nomination of your party for the presidency is the most egregious sort of exercise in preaching to the converted if you talk to the folks in the hall.

Mr. Clinton needed to break the fourth wall, the barrier between the actor and the audience, the scrim between the glib circumlocutions of the stump speech and the yearning in ordinary Americans for recognition of the commonplace crises of their lives. That is what he is going to have to do in the next four months if he has a prayer of winning in November.

He is going to have to tell single parents about his plucky widowed mom, tell working people about his grandfather’s grocery store. Contrast the universality of his biography with the narrowness of George Bush’s. Transcend the distance between the governed and the governors, a distance grown so great that it seemed only a man who had never run for office could bridge it.

The lesson of Ross Perot’s stillborn campaign is simple: Mr. Perot was never a candidate, he was a wake-up call with ears. Mario Cuomo, when he was trying to convince reporters of why he need not run for president, used to say that it was not the messenger that was important, it was the message. In the case of the Perot phenomenon that shoe fits. He was limited, this talk-show wonder who got out when the going got tough. And he changed the whole tenor of the race this year. When George Bush, who seems to have been on a fishing trip for every major crisis of the last four years, interrupts his angling to say that he got the message, something is out there. In his speech Mr. Clinton quoted the civil rights activist Fanny Lou Hamer, who said when she was running for Congress in 1964, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Mr. Perot galvanized the sick-and-tired vote.

This last week there’s been so much talk of positioning, a word that is offensive to voters, suggesting that winning their allegiance requires no more than a Happy Meal with a McPrinciple
and a large middle ground. Mr. Clinton positioned himself as a moderate and friend of the middle class. He said it was time for a change in the party, to admit that the welfare system doesn’t work and that creating jobs is more important than creating entitiements.

The Perot groundswell had nothing to do with positioning—there were few positions, even to the bitter end—and everything to do with a vast number of voters who believe that government and its citizens live in parallel universes. Paying seemly attention to the meaning of the Perot candidacy, Mr. Cuomo said in his nominating speech, “Before he told anyone what he intended to do or how he would do it, he used one word and the applause broke out all over America. The word was ‘change’!”

That big broad vague message has preempted this election. The old Democratic stances have been muted and the theme of a new generation hammered home with everything from Elvis jokes to Fleetwood Mac anthems. The tone has been set: change. From here on in, Mr. Clinton must stand the dictum on its ear—the messenger has become critical, the messenger and his ability to look dirough the scrim of positioning and spin and electoral votes and simply say, “I see you. I know you. I am you.”

ONE VIEW EITS ALL
September 6, 1992

My oldest kid invited the jock home the other day. The jock’s name is, of course, Kyle. He is a nice kid with an awesome arm, the kind who can choose a tree halfway down the road, pick up a stone, and—bing!—nail it while my son stands openmouthed.

This is one of the great rituals of growing up, trying to puzzle out who you are by discovering who you are not. Our children bring home familiar strangers, archetypes who will, by contrast, teach them what they’re made of. There is something bittersweet about watching this, something that makes you want to give them simple answers instead of time and space. But figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience. So we let them be.

I couldn’t help thinking of this when Pat Buchanan gave his hateful speech at the Republican convendon. You figure when you go on vacation certain events will pass you by. But the Buchanan speech has stayed with me because it was so insulting to the American people and so contrary to everything we value.

The election, he said, “is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are.” Here’s the catch—who you are is who Pat Buchanan says you should be. Distrust differences. Revile people who are gay. Dismiss the aspirations of women. Reduce the answers to the problems of our cities to “force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.” Let your fears and hatreds be your guide. Invoke God to justify them.

“There is a religious war going on in this country for the soul of America,” Mr. Buchanan said. And if you agree with him you are blessed. And if you do not you are damned.