When I was young (sort of) and innocent (up to a point), a member of parliament took me to a hostess bar in the west end of London. The scantily clad woman draped across the member (the politician that is) asked him what he did. He told her he was a member of the House of Commons, and she empathized, or rather recoiled momentarily. ‘Bloody hell! My job’s dirty enough, but it’s got nothing on yours.’ Quite. Politics is a dirty business, and as I have discovered, nowhere more so than in Washington.
Foreigners often wonder at the partisan rancor of American politics, not least because it’s so difficult to tell the two parties apart. For example, under Richard Nixon, spending on welfare, the national endowment for the arts, and court-ordered desegregation measures all reached a peak. He stopped the war in Vietnam, recognized China, fostered détente with Russia, and ended the US chemical and biological warfare programs.
Modern day Republicans would probably have had him impeached since, in any comparison with John F Kennedy or Bill Clinton on actual ‘liberal’ achievements, Tricky Dicky comes out as an outright pinko. Of course, for many liberals, Nixon’s close association with Senator Joseph McCarthy unpolishably tarnished him. But Kennedy was an inveterate anti-communist who was quite close to the senator himself.
Clearly, ‘it’s the way you tell ’em,’ since there is a world of difference between Nixon and Clinton. Nixon’s Quaker conscience afflicted him with a facial lie detector. Whenever he told a whopper, which he did quite frequently, his eyes spasmed and his bristly jowls quivered.
In contrast, the current president looks the camera straight in the aqueous eye and invites love and compassion. Meanwhile, he is evading issues as though he had a college-full of Jesuits and a yeshiva full of Talmud scholars on his team to advise him on the finer points of logic to dissect. Compassion is indeed called for. Clinton has taken the first steps to dismantle welfare, engaged in privatizing social security, reduced taxes, encouraged executions, signed Nafta in the face of labor union opposition, and held office during the roaringest bull market since the South Sea Bubble. But he is damned and that has led to him being impeached as a ‘liberal’.
For many years, the only way to make sense of US politics was as a tribal hangover from the Civil War, a continuous action replay of Gettysburg fought out in Congress between the descendants of those who supported Lincoln and those who had gone with Jefferson Davies. In many states the counties’ political color can still be accurately divined by checking which side they were on in that war.
In the last two decades, the results of Gettysburg were reversed on appeal, as it were. The south won. The Republican Party was taken over by defecting southern Democrats and the Democratic Party nationally was taken over by those southern Democrats who did not defect. Even the military is overwhelmingly a confederate institution, with a heavy concentration of recruits and bases in the south. I have been unable to check on a claim I heard that there were more bases named after confederate than union commanders, but I suspect it’s true.
And now we move to the current civil war which is inside the confederacy. Just think of the protagonists. In the ‘left’ corner, William Jefferson Clinton of Arkansas and Al Gore of Tennessee. Everyone thinks that Bill’s middle name was in honor of the second president of the US, even though he was a slave-owning southerner. But I rather suspect Bill got his name second-hand via the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davies. In the ‘right’ corner, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, followed by Robert Livingston of Louisiana as house speakers, and the leader of the senate, Trent Lott of Mississippi.
Their states were once generally known as the ‘pellagra belt’, and even now they are not famous for their income levels, so their national office is scarcely based on their local socio-economic triumphs. However, the Civil War permeates the whole battle. The Republican push on impeachment is like Pickett’s charge, with an army of republicans marching on to a disciplined disaster. In their unavailing efforts to dislodge Clinton, they’ve already lost two speakers, suffered severe set-backs in one election, and provided tons of casualties for divorce lawyers as the crack regiment of first stone-casters stumbles in sin.
But to many voters they look less like ‘wrong but wromantic’ confederate infantry, and more like a white hood-clad lynch mob. So the November elections witnessed a much higher than average turnout by black and majority voters and an unprecedented degree of support for the president who, incidentally, had not distinguished himself in their defense, as Jocelyn Elders can testify. The first black surgeon general was canned for suggesting that masturbation did not bring the risk of HIV infection. (The latter was a bit rich for a president who has ensured that a cigar will never be just a cigar ever again).
Between them all, Congress is indeed locked in a dubious battle on a field that will be mired and muddy. But whatever colors they all wave, no matter what stones they cast, there is one thing which remains for sure. The winners will use ‘y’all as the second person plural when addressing their constituents.
The Speculator
