First, a confession: Sen. John McCain almost seduced me (professionally). I was thisclose to becoming one of those reporters who swoon whenever the Republican senator from Arizona flashes his winning smile and demonstrates his passion and boyish enthusiasm. Just another journalist infatuated with the prisoner of war turned politician.
And then he showed me that he was a mere mortal.
In Tuesday, in response to a question about what he would do if he were president in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, McCain told me, “It’s obvious that at a gun show people should be subject to background checks. I don’t get it why in stores you get a background check, but you go three blocks down, there’s no background checks.”
There’s a loophole in the existing gun control laws, I noted, because the gun lobby argued successfully to exempt gun shows.
“Well, it should be closed,” McCain responded.
But a day later, on Wednesday, McCain voted to kill an amendment from Sen. Frank Lautenberg that would have closed that very loophole. The largely party-line vote was 51-47. Six Republicans voted for the measure. McCain was not among them. This after reports that the four guns used in the Columbine killings had been purchased at gun shows. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained, “It’s like the NRA lives in here.”
And then, a day after that, McCain changed his mind again, and signaled he’d support legislation to close the loophole; in fact, he might even draft it. Stay tuned, because the battle won’t be over until the last vote is counted.
McCain’s 48-hour flip-flop ain’t no big thing for most politicians. But it must be said that McCain is supposed to be more than just a politician. John Sidney McCain III has been wooing congregants into the church of his courage and charisma from the moment he burst onto the American landscape as an unfathomably brave returning POW in 1973.
He first ran for Congress in 1982, and won a Senate seat just four years later, all the while garnering supporters and detractors with outspoken, often counterintuitive views on high-profile subjects. He’s gone after government waste, fought to reform campaign finance laws, pursued big tobacco and lately, as his friend, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., says, he’s been “the only one who was acting presidential in the middle of Kosovo.”
Add it all up, throw in a presidential candidacy and you have grown men falling at his feet as if he were Gwyneth Paltrow in a sundress.
“He wants to clean up campaign financing, and restore honor to the heart of politics,” the normally acerbic Michael Lewis gushed for the New York Times Magazine. “A Maverick Takes on the Senate and Looks to 2000,” headlined the regularly just-the-facts-ma’am National Journal. “John McCain Walks on Water,” intoned Esquire. (Really.) This from the so-called liberal media, despite the fact that, on all but a handful of issues, McCain is politically about as conservative as they come — pro-life, pro-impeachment, pro-gun, pro-GOP.
It’s difficult to write about McCain without dealing with the gushing from the fourth estate. Media is as important to John McCain as is he to us. He loves the limelight, for one, but more importantly, it’s an important element of his battle plan as he tries to emerge as a serious contender for the GOP nomination. As he explains it to me, his easy access to media will help him make up for the bigger bankroll of the front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. And then, once it becomes a two-man race, his credibility, experience and straight talk will do the rest. Especially if Bush stumbles, as many Republicans think he can’t help but do.
But beyond his need for media, or journalists’ need to see him as a hero — or, conversely, a sham to demythologize — McCain is a compelling figure. In the end, he’s a flawed, complex man — as he’ll be the first one to tell you — and that makes him almost irresistible, at least to reporters.
“I’m a very imperfect person,” McCain says in an interview with Salon News. “I don’t live up to my own expectations in my life in many ways,” he adds. “There’s an impatience that sometimes is harmful to me in my relationships. Sometimes I move from one issue to another too quickly. Sometimes I’m not as considerate of my staff and my family as I should be. I could catalog many failings that I have as a human being. But I do try to recognize them and I try to improve. But I will not always be as good a person as some of the people I’ve had the opportunity to have met.”
This combination of humility and candor has served him well with a press corps fed on a steady diet of braggadocio and evasion. “There’s something about John McCain that comes through that’s hard to measure,” says one of his campaign co-chairmen, former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman. “There’s a quality to him that’s interesting. It’s an earnestness. A directness. An intensity. I can’t really explain what it is, but people like him. And I think that will carry him to victory if nothing else.”
But McCain’s a Rorshach test; you see in him what you want to see. To his Republican opponents in the House and Senate, he’s a hot-headed, grandstanding opportunist, while his Democratic foes see him as an ultra right-wing wolf hiding beneath the pelt of a charismatic sheep. To his first wife, he was a philanderer; to veterans he is the exemplar of the American fighting man.
“The media has had a difficult time conveying the essence of the whole man,” says Jeff Barker, Washington correspondent for the Arizona Republic. “The Arizona media focuses on how scrappy he is, and the national media focuses on how he seems to be above the fray. But I think it’s a combination of genuine courage and good political instincts — and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.”
But it’s the members of his staff — some of whom have worked for him for almost a generation — who have it about right. They roll their eyes at his quirks, nudging each other knowingly, complaining about him like you might do about a parent. All the while they put in 14-hour days because at the bottom of it all they love not issues or a cause or an image, not any false concept of St. John McCain the Divine, but the man, just the man.
“I don’t think he thinks of himself as a saint,” says Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisc., his partner on campaign finance reform. “I don’t think he likes that kind of label. He’s just out there trying to do the right thing.”
First of all, for a saint he’s got a flaming temper and, occasionally, a foul mouth.
One senator, a friend, tells the story of an acrimonious meeting toward the end of 1992, when the 12 members of the Senate Special Committee on POW/MIA Affairs were finishing up their report. It featured a hot debate over how to deal with former U.S. Marine Bobby Garwood, a former POW who’d been an accused defector.
The question was whether Garwood should be included in the report along with all the other POWs and MIAs, or if he had diminished his status and therefore only merited inclusion in the report’s attachments. Half the room thought he was a traitor, a deserter who knew about POWs held after the war but didn’t do anything about it, and McCain fell into that camp. The other half — which included Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — thought that Garwood had been unfairly blamed.
“Bobby Garwood is a traitor, and I and a whole bunch of other POWs got beat because of him,” the hot-headed McCain argued, according to a senator present during the debate.
Then Grassley started screaming. “Chuck has a temper, too,” the senator relates. “So McCain started shouting back.”
Grassley got in McCain’s face, and the two pit bulls started barking at each other while the other senators in the room sat back and watched. The pair got so close to one another that the senator who tells me the story — aware that because of war injuries, McCain’s arms don’t fully extend — was convinced McCain “was going to drive the top of his head into Grassley’s nose. I was convinced that bone fragments were going to go into Chuck’s brain, and I was sitting there and was about to witness a murder.”
McCain suddenly stood up. But instead of a head-butting homicide, he delivered a crushing blow of words.
“You know, senator,” McCain said, seething, “I thought your problem was that you don’t listen. But that’s not it at all. Your problem is that you’re a fucking jerk.”
“He is a combatant,” allows Sen. Smith of Oregon, who has yet to endorse any GOP presidential hopeful. “But I think people appreciate that he’s a man of principle; he fights for what he believes in. John is not lukewarm. He makes friends and enemies with his mode of operations. His style is both a strength and a weakness.”
He has a temper, and he can hold a grudge. “No question,” Rudman says, “John isn’t too popular up in the Senate. But all that means come the New Hampshire primary is that he may lose two votes.”
McCain is fully capable of freezing out someone who has disappointed him. After the Arizona Republic, for instance, published a harsh editorial cartoon making light of a scandal involving painkillers his wife stole from a charity she founded, McCain refused to talk to the newspaper for more than a year. He regularly yells at or ignores fellow senators when he thinks they’ve done him wrong. One Arizona reporter reports that numerous subjects he’s contacted have refused to speak about McCain with him since they’re terrified of the repercussions.
The storm usually subsides almost immediately. The day after the one fight he and Feingold ever had in their four years of partnership on various government reform issues, McCain apologized, Feingold says. “He said, ‘I didn’t sleep all night, thinking about our fight.’”
It’s a common refrain. And, to hear his allies tell it, they wouldn’t want it any other way. “He’s unafraid of getting into the ring and getting into battle,” says Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb. “That’s a characteristic I admire in anybody. And no matter how much he gets bloodied, he’ll stay till the very end. You may lose the battle, but you’ll have fun doing it.”
McCain loses his high-profile battles quite often. His bills on tobacco and campaign finance reform keeled over by the side of the road, coughing up blood. Critics say his support for these issues is political opportunism, but that makes little sense. “I think anyone who would say that campaign finance reform is a way for John McCain to ride to the White House has a unique perspective on the popularity of the issue in Washington and in the Republican Party,” says Meredith McGehee, vice president and legislative director for Common Cause. “It’s been a very tough issue for him.”
Indeed, GOP strategists wrinkle their noses at the mere mention of McCain, arguing he’s not a team player, he’s an in-your-face screamer, he’s got demons. He and Senate leader Trent Lott enjoy a tumultuous relationship, one symbolic of the love/hate he has with both the Senate and the GOP — they’re enemies, then they’re best buds. The trends last not days or weeks, but hours.
The idea that McCain embraces issues that put him at odds with his leader for his own political ends flies in the face of logic. Campaign finance reform is not a big vote-getter. Though it may enable McCain to wear an attractive chapeau that says “maverick,” the issue is too complex to truly resonate with voters, and it wins him far more enemies among his Senate colleagues and the big-money PAC culture then it garners him brownie points. Same with tobacco.
And same with Kosovo. By pressing President Clinton to do whatever is necessary to win the NATO mission — an order that he says includes ground troops — McCain is hardly embracing a stance popular with either the public or his colleagues. The Senate voted on May 4 to table his resolution authorizing the president whatever he needed to win the war. “We have allowed American pilots … to risk their lives for a cause that we will not risk our careers for,” McCain said on May 3 in a speech that hardly endeared him to his colleagues.
But he admits there’s no McCain doctrine that will determine when future intervention is required. “We always search for this magic formula,” he says. “I’d love to have a McCain doctrine. But this is such a complex world we live in, with such varying situations, with varying threats, that I’m not sure you could ever develop an overall doctrine into one size fits all.”
For the U.S. to use force, he says, “Our interests and our values have to be threatened. But the corollary to that is that you have to be able to beneficially be able to affect the situation.” That’s why, he says, he opposed sending the Marines into Lebanon in 1983 as a freshman congressman, and why he wouldn’t have sent troops to Rwanda or the Sudan.
According to his supporters, McCain’s courage on Kosovo will resonate with a public starving for leadership. “It tells people, here’s a guy who doesn’t need consultants to tell him what he believes in,” says Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., another McCain 2000 co-chairman. “Contrast that with who’s been leading this country for the last seven years.”
“He’s surged in New Hampshire,” brags Rudman. “He went from 3 percent to 15 percent in just a month.”
As Smith puts it, “He’s won the Kosovo primary.”
McCain has been brash ever since he was a kid. From high school through the Naval Academy, McCain was in an extended rebel-without-a-clue phase, always more interested in the three B’s — booze, brawls and broads — than the three R’s. (He graduated fifth from the bottom of the Naval Academy class of ’58.)
Born into Navy royalty — both his father and grandfather achieved the rank of admiral — McCain was just another risk-taking fly boy until he was captured by the North Vietnamese. Shot down over Hanoi on Oct. 26, 1967, as John Hubbell wrote in “P.O.W.,” “No American reached [the prison camp] Hoa Lo in worse physical condition than McCain.”
He suffered unimaginable torture, particularly once the North Vietnamese realized that he was the son of the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Recognizing the propaganda value of letting McCain free, so as to demoralize less-connected soldiers and POWs, his Vietnamese captors offered McCain an immediate ticket home.
“I wouldn’t even consider any kind of release,” McCain said, according to the moving account of his POW experience in Robert Timberg’s “The Nightingale’s Song.” “They’ll have to drag me out of here.” Leaving would be dishonorable, he thought. It would be detrimental to morale, and would violate the “first in, first out” rule of prisoner release.
They beat him senseless, over and over, until he signed a piece of paper confessing his “war crimes” — a perfectly understandable, even relatively innocuous, action that he still has yet to forgive himself for. “The cockiness was gone,” Timberg wrote, “replaced by a suffocating despair.” The despair, the beatings and the brutality lasted five and a half years.
He returned to a hero’s welcome, as well as months of grueling physical therapy and a collapsing marriage. He remains humble about it all, which is one of the reasons why reporters fall in love with him so quickly, as well as why he may make a compelling candidate.
“What I would like to tell you is that it turned me into a perfect individual motivated only by the most noble of principles and ambitions,” McCain says of his experience. “But … the fact is, that’s not true. I was privileged to serve in the company of heroes; I failed in prison as well … But I continue to strive to do the right thing, although I fail very frequently.”
One failure — though it wasn’t the big deal opponents made it seem — was his role as one of the fabled Keating Five — the five senators accused of muscling regulators on behalf of savings and loan shyster Charles Keating. McCain was eventually cleared of all but poor judgment, but he refuses to cut himself any slack. By all rights, McCain could be bitter: The Democrat-controlled Senate Ethics Committee, which normally strives to be nonpartisan, refused the advice of its counsel and insisted on lumping him and then-Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, in with the far-more-sullied Keating Three, all Democrats, because they wanted at least one Republican to share the heat.
But McCain only criticized himself about the matter. “I can’t tell you the hoops we have to go through in this office before a letter goes out with my name on it. The stuff we go through because … appearance is reality and … you can get into trouble.”
Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., who’s endorsed McCain’s presidential run, says that stance shows McCain’s political growth. “When he first came to Congress [in 1983], he was still trying to make up for his six lost years in the POW prison camp,” Kolbe says. “He didn’t tolerate delays, he didn’t tolerate views that didn’t seem to match his. He has changed.” While Kolbe says that McCain’s one major flaw remains his fickle short fuse, he allow that “he really has learned to reign that in.”
And Kolbe has personal experience with McCain’s willingness to take stands that won’t endear him to the average GOP primary voter. “He was very supportive of me when I was ‘outed’ by the Advocate,” Kolbe says. Kolbe went to McCain’s office to tell him what was about to happen, but before the congressman could get a word out, McCain put up his hands in protest.
“You don’t have to say anything more,” McCain said. “It doesn’t make a goddamn bit of difference to me if you’re gay. You’re a good congressman and a good friend.” When Tempe, Ariz., Mayor Neil Giuliano went through a similar ordeal, McCain was just as supportive.
“One of the reasons I have this confidence about not changing is because I’m not afraid of losing,” McCain says. “In 10 months, this nominating process will be over. And if I lose, I have to live in Arizona, have four wonderful kids, be in the Senate and be chairman of the Commerce Committee. I’m not afraid of losing.”
In fact, he doesn’t seem afraid of anything. Sometimes this is disastrous — witness his awful joke about Chelsea Clinton. Other times he can make you want to give him a big sloppy kiss — as CBS’s Mike Wallace recently did when he said he would campaign for him if he got the nomination.
Which is why, when he looked at me matter-of-factly and told me that it was just common sense that the NRA-backed loophole exempting gun show firearms buyers from background checks was wrong, and should be closed, I believed him. It made sense. Though he’s a longtime friend of the NRA, I knew he’d bucked big-time money lobbies of all shapes and sizes, and I believed he’d buck this one.
And then he caved. I felt disappointed, and exasperated, but having spent a
month studying and reading up on the man, I didn’t write him off. On
Thursday morning, McCain awoke and, bolstered by a number of other GOP
senators who were alarmed at what had happened the day before, or else by
how it was playing in the media (or a potent combination of both), McCain
brokered a compromise. McCain thought Lautenberg’s bill had been too
extreme — mandating a three-day waiting period, even though some gun shows
don’t last that long. But the GOP alternative, calling for “voluntary”
checks (read none), sat on the other extreme.
McCain was looking for
something in the middle, instant — but mandatory — background checks. “I’m
doing what it takes to close this loophole,” McCain told his staff. The NRA
is said to be
“grudgingly” supporting the new moves, but ultimately the battle could get
nasty. McCain doesn’t seem to care: “This is not an overly burdensome
requirement in the face of the tragic shootings at Columbine High School,”
he said in a statement issued Thursday evening. “Rather, it is a responsible
means of lessening the likelihood of unlawful gun purchases.”
So in the end, he’s not the superhero his supporters depict, nor is he the opportunistic bully described by detractors. In the end, he’s just a man, as he told me — many times — himself. And he’s betting that if voters get to know him, they’ll appreciate him in all his complexity.
“I don’t think the Republicans are smart enough to nominate him,” says Feingold.
I like George Bush. He has a strong set of core convictions, including a significant religious faith, but he is also genuinely tolerant, open and warm-hearted toward people with whom he disagrees.
He has made, for example, the strongest statements of any Republican candidate about including homosexuals in the American family, and treating them with Christian charity and civic respect. “I was taught,” he said in response to Trent Lott’s infamous remarks, “that we should look after the beam in our own eye before searching for the mote in someone else’s.”
Bush has the charisma of a national leader, but a personal style that is both down-home and down-to-earth. He is relaxed and disciplined at the same time, a Republican who seems comfortable in his own skin.
Over the past year, Bush’s speaking style has become noticeably more passionate. His war chest is larger than those of his opponents, and his poll numbers are strong, so he appears to be a formidable front-runner for the Republican nomination for president.
I conducted this interview in the governor’s Capitol office in Austin, Texas. It went on for about 45 minutes, until it was interrupted by the entrance of his next visitor, former Sen. John Glenn.
I’ve got two sets of questions — one that the editors of Salon gave me and another that is my own.
What’s Salon?
It’s the Internet magazine that ran the wretched article about Henry Hyde and recently had a feature asking whether you used drugs in the ’60s.
Should I dignify them by answering their questions?
Despite such lapses, Salon is an interesting and unorthodox magazine, and its audience reflects the libertarian and forward-looking ethos of the Internet. You, in particular, should speak to this audience. It is said you have the potential to reshape the political landscape.
That’s what I want to do. In the course of the campaign, it’s the first thing I want to do. The second is to elevate the discourse. I’m not going to participate in the old Washington, D.C., game of gossip and slander. The game many people want to play is: “Let’s force George W. to answer questions about gossip. Let’s force him off his message by making him talk about a rumor, or rumors.” I’m not going to participate in that game. I’m not going to try to disprove a negative. I’m going to talk about what I want to do for America.
I have told people that 20 to 30 years ago I made some mistakes. But I have learned from those mistakes. What Americans want to hear is: Will the next president be someone who has matured to the point where he has learned from mistakes and will bring dignity to the office to which he is elected? That was my solemn pledge in Texas when I first took office. I have fulfilled that to the satisfaction of Texas voters. And that is my solemn pledge to America.
Let’s start with my list of questions. In a year when Republicans lost ground or had trouble holding on to it, you won reelection with 69 percent of the total, 49 percent of the Hispanic vote, and the endorsement of every major Democratic politician in the state. How did you do it?
First, I did in office what I said I would do. I campaigned on school reform, accountability, charters and choice. And I signed bills to that effect. I campaigned on tort reform, juvenile justice reform and welfare reform, and on all I signed bills. And shared credit. I didn’t try to take all the credit, I shared credit with the people, both Republicans and Democrats, who helped achieve these reforms.
Second, I showed the people of Texas that I’m a uniter, not a divider. I refuse to play the politics of putting people into groups and pitting one group against another.
Third, during the course of the campaign, I didn’t talk about the past; I talked about the future. I laid out additional plans for tax cuts, for school reforms like ending social promotion, by initiatives that would say to kids that if you carry a gun illegally there will be a consequence, and I think the people of Texas listened, because I had credibility, and had done what I said I would do.
And how did you approach minorities?
First of all my message during the campaign was to make sure that people from all walks of life knew that the Texas dream was available for them — that when I talked about education, I wasn’t just talking about suburban education, I was talking about high standards for kids from all walks of life. I said that leaving children behind as a result of simply shuffling kids through the school system was not the Bush way, nor was it the Texas way. I talked about entrepreneurship.
In terms of Hispanics, I talked a long, long time about making sure that we had what I call a system of “English-plus,” not “English-only.” English is the gateway to freedom — plus we respect your heritage. I worked closely with the Mexican government to solve common problems Texas shared with them.
But the main thing is, David, I started my campaign in the minority communities the day I got elected the first time, when I said, “Many of you did not vote for me — I’m still your governor and will be your governor.”
Ronald Reagan had the only successful two-term presidency since Dwight Eisenhower. Part of the secret seems to be that he focused his attention on two important goals — lowering taxes and winning the Cold War. What are your priorities?
One is prosperity: to make sure that we continue to be prosperous by lowering taxes and by fighting off isolationist and protectionist policies and politics. A second priority is to make sure that we educate children. A third priority is to promote the peace. America must be strong enough and willing to promote peace. One way to do so is to bring certainty into an uncertain world, and I support the development of anti-ballistic missile systems to do so. These are three priorities.
President Clinton has shown Americans that character counts and that moral values are important. But an important part of the electorate is wary of Republicans with strong moral convictions because they fear politicians who want to impose their values on them and on the rest of us. Abortion is a case in point. What is your answer to these fears, or how do you deal with them?
The answer to anybody’s anxiety about me is in my deeds and actions. I have a strong faith. I am a religious man. I believe in Christ, and therefore my actions hopefully reflect a heart that cares for others. I understand good people can disagree on issues. I am a pro-life candidate, but there are pro-choice governors who are my friends, and who support me, and for that I am grateful.
My goal is for every unborn child to be protected in law, and welcomed in the world. But I recognize that we don’t live in a perfect world, and I also recognize that good people can disagree on this issue. What America should focus on is banning partial-birth abortions and passing parental notification laws. That’s where we can find common ground. Americans can find common ground on adoption initiatives as well.
Let me ask it another way …
You don’t like the answer? (laughing)
There’s another dimension. There are roles that politicians can play, and roles that they shouldn’t get involved in. Pronouncements on what is and what is not a sin might be an example.
Here’s my view of government. Government is really about laws and justice. The frustration many people may have with government is that they look toward government to change people’s hearts. Hearts aren’t changed by law — hearts aren’t changed by man-made law — hearts are changed in churches, in synagogues, in mosques. Hearts are changed because people who have good hearts persuade others who don’t. You don’t have to go to church to have a good heart. But the agent of change for a heart is not in a government subcommittee, or in government legislation. It’s in civil society — it’s loving people, helping others in need. Only when you change hearts and attitudes will the laws also change.
So you’re not going to use the government to force a change in attitude …
Well, government can’t change attitude. Government can lead — a leader can lead and convince people, but there’s no law that makes people love each other.
OK. You’ve taken a forthright position of tolerance toward discriminated groups, including homosexuals. Would you like to elaborate?
I think that each person ought to be judged by their heart and by their soul and by their contribution to society. Group-thought will balkanize our society, and I have rejected the politics of pitting one group of persons against another.
You said that education is the most important thing that a state does, and you’ve made that your priority. Foreign policy is the most important thing that a president does. Will you make that a priority?
Absolutely. It is essential that the next president be someone who understands America has an important role to play in promoting peace and to encourage others to understand the value of freedom, of free speech, free religion and the importance of the rule of law.
Now here are the Salon editors’ questions. Dan Quayle implied that you did not have any foreign policy experience and therefore he would make a stronger president. Your response?
My response is that every candidate is going to bring a different level of experience to the job. My experiences have been in the private sector, as someone who has run a business, in governing the second-largest state in the United States. I know how to set clear goals and I know how to make decisions. Period.
Are you and your family going to put any of your own money into your campaign?
No. Oh, yes, investing my own money. My mother and dad contributed $1,000 a piece. I’m trying to get more … (laughter)
Would you appoint Jeb to a Cabinet position like RFK?
That’s against the law. These are their questions? They’re tough.
Will your parents play a role in your campaign and if so, what?
My parents have played a role in my life, and I’m going to name my mother the vice president. (laughter)
Do you think questions about your possible drug use are unfair?
I think that rumors and gossip about what may or may not have happened 20 to 30 years ago is part of the process. It is a sad part of the process, and I refuse to participate in the game of slander, rumors and gossip.
Should politicians not have to answer questions about whether or not they ever broke the law, and if there are limits, what are they? A statute of limitations of 20 years for anything short of a felony?
That’s up to each politician to answer. First off, if laws were broken, there are records, and I’m confident that any journalist worth his salt will find them. Secondly, I believe that it’s up to each candidate how they want to deal with their past. But most importantly, the question each candidate must answer is whether you are prepared to bring dignity and honor to the office to which you have been elected.
And as for yourself?
I have brought honor and dignity to my office and I will continue to do so.
How come you’ve been willing to answer questions about faithfulness to your wife but not whether you’ve ever used illegal drugs?
That’s an interesting question. I’d separate the difference between what I may or may have not done 20 to 30 years ago and when I took a vow with my wife, which I honor, and continue to honor.
I’m sure you’ve heard the scurrilous rumors that you were once a party animal — perhaps even the one who danced on a table naked. Can you put these to rest or do you wish to plead the Fifth Amendment? Yuck. I don’t even want to ask this question …
I’ll just say those questions are ridiculous, and I’m not going to participate in that kind of gossip. There’s no picture of me, but it’s trying to disprove a negative. It’s just ridiculous.
What can you tell us about your successful battles to overcome alcohol abuse and are you willing to use this personal experience to help fight America’s No. 1 drug addiction?
One time I was dancing on a table naked, and got drunk, and fell off — (laughter). Just kidding. Say that again, now?
What can you tell us about your battle over alcohol and are you willing to use this personal experience to help fight America’s No. 1 drug addiction?
The word “battle” is too strong a word. I decided to quit drinking because drinking was beginning to compete with my energy and beginning to deplete my energy levels, and it was becoming too important in my life relative to what really is important, and so I quit. I had my last drink one day, and the next day I was through forever, and I haven’t had a drink in 12 years. I think it’s important for people who drink too much to seek help.
Well, that’s the end of Salon’s questions. Here’s another one of mine: A lot of Republicans talk “care,” they talk the talk of compassion, but you seem to have been able to walk the walk …
I think what’s important is how much a person actually cares about other people. I got into politics because I do care about other people. I also understand the false promise of having government solve everybody’s problems. Government just can’t do that. Would that it could. I’m fully aware of the promises of the last 30 years that said, “Don’t worry, government will solve your problems. You don’t have to. You don’t have to work out your own problems.” I believe in self-reliance and independence, but I also believe we ought to help those in need, people who can’t help themselves. I also clearly see what many of the problems are in society. Many of those problems are because of people not being responsible for their behavior. And one example is the number of men who father children and walk away, saying, “They’re not my problem, they’re somebody else’s problem.” That’s a clear sign of an irresponsible culture, and that’s unacceptable to me.
The hardest job in America is to be a single woman trying to raise children, and the person responsible for that is the absent father. The fathers of those children need to be responsible to help those mothers and to help those children. So I believe in tough love, and I emphasize the tough side as well as the love side.
I also think people in America should listen carefully to politicians, to political figures, to determine if they have a heart. That’s a key sign. Do they care about people? I do.
I also reject the liberal orthodoxy that says big government and love go hand in hand.
One interesting common thread in the Bush family is baseball. Your grandfather and father were first basemen and you ran the Texas Rangers. Baseball is the American game. It’s not an aristocratic sport. Was it your Midland upbringing that gave you your common touch?
Well, I think I am what I am because I’ve got a lot of my mother in me. She is a very relaxed person around people. She cares. She is also a great communicator. I’m not suggesting I am, myself. But I’m suggesting that I’ve watched her very carefully.
Hopefully I have my dad’s values. He is a man of enormous inner strength and values. I am a product of my parents, and I also am a product of my growing up in a world out in Midland, Texas. It was a land of dreamers and entrepreneurs. It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, what mattered was if you struck oil, you realized your dream.
I was educated on the East Coast, but my heart never left Texas. I’m proud of my education. I learned to read and write. Actually, that’s not true. I learned to think on the East Coast. I learned to respect rigorous standards. Phillips Academy in Andover was a place that had rigorous academic standards, and I worked really hard to keep up, because many of the kids were brighter than I.
Why did you work hard?
I’m sure part of it had to do with expectations from people I loved and respected. I think that’s part of what a parent does, is to set high standards and work with their children to achieve those standards. That’s the role of a mother or father — to set standards for children and help children set goals, and Phillips Academy at Andover was hard, really hard, for me.
People might think of you as a patrician just because the family image is one of growing up in wealth.
That’s exactly right. There’s no question — it can be to my advantage or my disadvantage. There are some who will refuse to listen to me basically because they think I am of the manor raised, when in fact I was Midland, Texas-raised, where there were no manors when I was raised. My parents, I guess Mother and Dad could have stayed on the East Coast. My dad could have settled into a Wall Street career, but he was entrepreneurial. They packed me up when I was 2 years old, and moved out to Odessa, Texas. It was a modern-day frontier in a way. It certainly was a business frontier. The oil business was going through its second boom. It was a great place to grow up. The misperception has an unexpected plus side, too. People approach me thinking I have some kind of haughtiness as a result of a patrician upbringing. I hope they find my personality different and refreshing. I’m told it will break the mold.
I think you already have. You come from an aristocratic lineage, but there is a democratic element in the history of your family.
It is interesting you mention history. It is either meant to be or not meant to be, that’s how I view it. I feel pretty free. I’m a competitive person, but I feel free about it, because I’m a person who never grew up thinking, “Gosh, if only I’m my eighth-grade class president, I can parlay this into becoming the president of the United States.”
I never had the notion of trying to plot my course. I decided to get into the baseball business because I saw a business opportunity and seized it. Baseball was a great life, but I had a reason, a specific reason, to go into it. It was the same when I decided to run for governor. My decision was based upon specific issues and ideas. And it’s the same with the presidency. I see a problem; I want to seize the moment. Part of the problem is the spirit of America and part of the problem is making sure it really does combine with “Can we be prosperous and make sure people have got the tools necessary to access the dream?” I believe that if I am able to articulate the “why” — “Why change from governor? Why leave the state?” — people will hear it. I hope so. The key then is not to focus on the sideshows of Washington politics, not to focus on the rumors and gossip, not to focus on the negative attacks, but to elevate the discourse and the debate so people can realize there is a better tomorrow.
I think it’s important for me to stay focused on why I am running. What’s the vision? The vision is a prosperous America where everybody is prepared to access the dream. I don’t believe we can guarantee results, but I do believe that we can have equal access to the dream. I’d like to set a new standard as we enter the 21st century, and that is a campaign that is positive and based on an optimistic message, and then just let the voters choose who they want to lead.
If decision 2000 were left up to the shrieking 15-year-old girls sitting in the bleachers of Huntington North High School, there’s no doubt who they would pick: former Vice President Dan Quayle.
For better or worse, however, that weighty choice will not be put in the hands of the Midwestern adolescents who filled the packed gymnasium with cheerleader-led cries of “Gimme a Q! (Q!) Gimme a U! (U!) Gimme an A-Y-L-E! (A-Y-L-E!)”
Quayle, of course, seemed well aware of the relative unimportance of the ardent support of his hometown crowd, and for that reason he made sure that his announcement speech took a clear, if implied, shot at the GOP front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. “I intend to make foreign policy an issue in this campaign,” Quayle said. “We don’t need another president who needs on-the-job training. We can ill afford another president who has inexperience in foreign policy. You can only get so much from briefing books and crash courses — you need experience. Today I can look you in the eye and assure you that on Day One, I will be prepared to lead this great nation.”
Quayle also countered Gov. Bush’s front-runner fund-raising status as well, saying that “the presidency is not to be inherited,” and that “the presidency will not be bought. It must be earned.” Bush’s campaign war chest hovers around $6 million, roughly three times as much as Quayle’s.
But Quayle’s less subtle jabs were aimed at the Clinton administration, primarily Vice President Al Gore. Noting that Gore had appeared on television right after Clinton was impeached and referred to Clinton as the “greatest” president in recent history, Quayle expressed outrage.
“What arrogance,” Quayle said. “What disdain for the values parents are trying to teach children. What contempt for the rule of law.” Then, echoing his former boss’s rhetorical salvo against Saddam Hussein, Quayle promised: “This shall not stand. Starting in this town, in this place, at this hour, we fight back.”
In another slap at Gore, Quayle pointed out that “when President Bush and I left office six years ago, nobody questioned whether we would sacrifice national security for campaign cash.”
Quayle couldn’t have picked a better spot — or a more loving crowd — for his campaign kickoff than this sleepy farming town of roughly 17,300 residents, 80 miles northeast of Indianapolis and 30 miles southwest of Fort Wayne.
“Welcome home, Dan,” read signs posted throughout town, which boasts the only vice presidential museum in the country. The Dan Quayle Center and Museum set up numerous booths outside the high school, selling Dan Quayle golf balls, golf towels, pins, T-shirts, key chains and pencils. Also for sale were Quayle’s two books: “Standing Firm” (his memoir) and “The American Family.” Also available: a slender paperback called “Things the Media, Talk Show Hosts, and Liberals Never Tell You About Dan Quayle.”
“He was the good kid in school who played golf real well,” said Loveta Hartle, whose daughter was a classmate of the former vice president. Hartle said Quayle was such a favorite son that even the town’s Democratic mayor, Bob Kyle, had thrown him his support. Kyle, who himself is up for reelection this November, says that his support for Quayle has deep personal roots. Quayle was a customer of the bank where Kyle used to work, he golfed with him “on Wednesdays and Sundays” back in the 1970s and they have common friends. “Dan has the values that it takes to make a good president,” Kyle said. “Anything we got in the White House now can be beaten.”
Inside the school, the gym rapidly filled with students from Huntington North High School, from which Quayle graduated in 1965, and Huntington Community College, where he taught business law in 1975, as well as folks from the surrounding area, who first elected him to Congress in 1976. Supporters held signs on which they’d written “Q2K,” “Quayle Rocks!” and “Pro-Life Quayle.”
“Quayle 2000″ read one sign, held by a man holding another that said, “Pray for America.”
“Birds fly over the rainbow, why oh why, caaaaaaaaaaaaan’t IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII?” sang the school’s varsity singers — one of the five groups featured in the event — before they segued into “I Believe I Can Fly.” Only eight African-Americans were visible in the room of several thousand supporters — the members of Sons of Thunder, a brass band flown in from Harlem especially for the event.
The event was brutally emceed by Steve Shine, a highly enthusiastic Republican official from a neighboring county who led the crowd in pep-rally cheers and repeated admonitions that “IIIII Caaaaan’t Heeeaaaar Yoooouuu!”
“WHO’S Gonna be the next president of the United States??!” Shine bellowed. One grizzled reporter was heard grousing that Shine had asked the same question back in ’96 when he hosted the kickoff for Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar’s insipid presidential campaign.
The pep-rally feel was augmented not only by Shine’s bufoonery and the cheerleaders’ gyrations, but by fireworks, balloons, mascots from Fort Wayne’s minor league baseball and CBA basketball teams and that “Na! Na! Naa! Na-Na-Hey!” song from years past. Hot dogs, soda and pretzels were sold in the lobby. Local pro wrestler K.C. Thunder, 1998 Indianapolis 500 winner Eddie Cheever Jr. and 1986 Super Bowl-winning quarterback Jim McMahon helped prep the crowd by tossing out bombast, Frisbees and footballs, respectively.
Two immense televisions hanging in the corners of the gym alerted the crowd when Quayle and his wife, Marilyn, pulled up in a white Ford. Soon Shine was introducing the Quayle 2000 team as if they were in pre-game warm-up suits. Former Georgia Sen. Mack Mattingly, former New Hampshire Gov. (and deposed Bush White House chief of staff) John Sununu and a whole host of Indiana officials jogged onto the stage, one by one, followed by former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, who introduced the former vice president.
“I stand here today with Dan Quayle, who has overcome odds all his life,” Coats said of the son of one of Indiana’s richest families. “And he will overcome the odds to become the president of the United States.”
Quayle, looking fit and ruddy-faced, his oft-described graying temples lending gravitas to his boyish face, waved to the crowd. Marilyn Quayle, in a bright green suit, resembled a bronzed Laura Petrie.
(“They’re tan ever since they moved to Arizona,” noted a local TV reporter.)
Quayle then proceeded to thank the town and his supporters. Recalling the day after President Bush announced his nomination in 1988, when the town’s ardent support for him manifested itself in angry confrontations with reporters, Quayle said that journalists had told him that they hadn’t felt welcome in Huntington. “Today is a new day and a new campaign,” Quayle said, asking the crowd to turn to the back of the room, where the media had been corralled, and “give a rousing welcome to the national media.” (The press filing room, incidentally, was located in the high school trailer where students serving in-school suspensions are forced to sit.)
Though his speech included digs at Gore, by name, and Gov. Bush, by implication, the body of Quayle’s remarks addressed American values. “The time has come to reset the moral compass because prosperity without values is no prosperity at all,” he said. Interestingly, Quayle utilized many of his past gaffes and controversies to illustrate the need for values. Decrying newfangled education, he said, “No more fuzzy math where four plus three ‘feels like’ seven. It is seven. And no more creative spelling, either. I’ve tried that; it doesn’t work.”
He also mentioned his long-derided “Murphy Brown” speech of May 19, 1992, where he took the fictional sitcom character to task for serving as a poor role model since her baby did not have a father in an active role. “Murphy Brown is gone,” he said, “and I’m still here fighting for the American family.”
Additionally, Quayle said that his resilience in the face of continued mockery by the media and late night talk-show hosts was proof of his character: “The question in life is not whether you get knocked down. You will,” he said. “The question is, are you ready to get back up, are you willing to get back up, and fight for what you believe in.”
In addition to values and foreign policy, the third plank of the Quayle platform is a 30 percent tax cut, which his campaign chair, two-time losing Virginia congressional candidate Kyle McSlarrow, later explained could easily be paid for through the budget surplus.
After delivering a rousing finish, Quayle shed his jacket and shook hands with members of the crowd. He was soon whisked off to a back room, where he chilled with his supporters. To the background accompaniment of Bruce Springsteen songs, his coterie of Coats, Sununu, Mattingly and McSlarrow were dispatched to reporters, where they gave their man rave reviews.
“Americans are going to see a much different Dan Quayle,” Coats said. “What they’re going to see is the Dan Quayle we’ve all known, and who was mischaracterized. When Americans see the real Dan Quayle, they’ll take a second look.”
Sununu agreed. “I’ve been trying to talk Dan Quayle into running for president since 1993,” Sununu said. “I really think it’s important to the country, and important to the party, certainly, that the old Reagan coalition be rebuilt. And Dan Quayle is the man to do it. He’s the smartest and most experienced of the bunch.” Many of Sununu’s former colleagues in the Bush White House are supporting the son of their former boss, George W. Bush, but Sununu says that both the elder and senior Bush “understand that I’ve been supporting Dan Quayle since 1993. What’s hard in politics is that you always have to choose between good friends.”
As is fairly standard for presidential announcements, the candidate was not available for press inquiries. According to a Quayle spokesman, the former vice president spent the afternoon talking to conservative talk-radio hosts who are guaranteed to be friendly, including Ollie North, Sean Hannity and Michael Medved. Quayle was to be interviewed on NBC’s “Today” Thursday morning, live from Nick’s Kitchen, a Huntington diner where his wife used to hold daily breakfast meetings back when she was senior partner at Quayle & Quayle in the mid-1970s. “I think he’s the man for the United States of America,” says Jean Anne Drabenstot, owner of Nick’s Kitchen. “He’s honest, he’s truthful … he’s just great.”
War is hell, even on politicians. And the early political fallout from the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia and Kosovo is becoming a quagmire both for Congress and for the presidential contenders in both parties.
So far, there’s been a striking political role reversal: Republicans, who used to be reliable defenders of U.S. military initiatives, are doing most of the criticizing, while normally dovish Democrats defend President Clinton’s actions in Yugoslavia. Defense Secretary William Cohen was caught in a political pincer Thursday morning when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Republican members are normally pro-military. But Oklahoma Sen. James Imhofe scolded Cohen, insisting the United States had no business getting involved in an air or ground war in the Balkans. And for the first time Cohen acknowledged that American casualties are not a “possibility but a probability.”
On the House side, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright found herself in a similar fight in front of the Appropriations Committee, with many Republican members criticizing her for starting a war without adequate preparation. The Clinton administration will have to ask the committee for a $4 billion supplemental appropriations bill to pay for the war’s enormous expense, and the politics are already intense. Republicans can probably be counted on to support an increase in the military budget, but they may attach strings that won’t be to the administration’s liking. House Majority Leader Richard Armey sent an e-mail to Republicans early Thursday asking for support to tack on more funds to increase Pentagon funding across the board, but it’s likely Armey and his allies will also seek dollars for things Clinton opposes.
But if the war may ultimately hurt Democrats, right now it’s giving the Republicans the biggest political problems. The GOP is sharply divided between old-line internationalists like former Sen. Bob Dole and isolationists like Pat Buchanan, who has a number of GOP allies in Congress. California Rep. Tom Campbell, a moderate Silicon Valley Republican, has introduced two bills intended to force the House to declare war on Yugoslavia or halt the bombing campaign by May 1. He introduced the legislation under the War Powers Act to compel Congress and the Clinton administration to obey the constitutional requirement that “Congress and only Congress [can] declare war.”
“We are presently at war,” Campbell declared. “It is an unconstitutional war, and the sooner we bring the matter to a vote in the House of Representatives, the sooner the Constitution is complied with.”
In this topsy-turvy political climate, liberal California Democrats who represent the anti-war wing of the party immediately criticized Campbell for not backing the military action. Still, the solid support for Clinton among Democrats started to develop some cracks.
On April 14, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, normally a staunch defender of the president, took to the Senate floor to issue a strong broadside. “Despite claims by NATO and Pentagon officials that they predicted everything, the United States and the rest of NATO were clearly unprepared for the debacle that unfolded,” he said. “I suspect historians may look unkindly on the administration officials who did not have the contingency plan if Milosevic refused to back down after a few days or weeks of NATO bombing.”
Leahy went on to praise Arizona Sen. John McCain for advocating the use of ground forces. Clouds over the rugged mountains of Kosovo have brought sunny days to McCain’s campaign to take the White House in 2000. The longer the war drags on, the more media, money and volunteers will flow into McCain’s camp.
“The phones are ringing off the hook,” says McCain’s campaign press secretary, Howard Opinsky. “Our poll numbers are up six points.” Campaign contributions are sure to follow.
In the crass calculus of presidential politics, the pained faces and bombed bridges that flash across American TV screens have given McCain the opportunity to display himself as a true American hero, the Vietnam War vet who spent years as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton. By comparison, Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s reticence to comment on the American and NATO air war in Yugoslavia has dropped him from golden boy to missing in action. And the Republican Party that used to line up in lockstep on military and foreign policy matters is divided and demoralized, according to a variety of GOP activists.
The war in Kosovo is the first defining moment in a campaign that is a year away from hitting high gear. In a crowded field of potential GOP nominees, McCain has quickly defined himself as a distinguished former Naval officer who knows something about foreign affairs and isn’t afraid of taking bold positions. As soon as Serbian troops captured three American servicemen, McCain was all over the news: “Nightline,” “Larry King Live,” the three morning shows. He looked like Ike Eisenhower in waiting.
“Avoiding casualties, theirs and ours, is not our primary objective,” he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Tuesday. “Winning is, the sooner the better. To that end, we should commence today to mobilize infantry and armored divisions for a possible ground war in Kosovo.”
“It’s a total plus for McCain,” says veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “All the other Republicans are scared to talk.”
The greatest fear is coming from Bush’s campaign headquarters in Austin, Texas. The son of the former president has said very little about Kosovo, and what he has said makes him look less than presidential. Bush apparently referred to Kosovar refugees as Kosovarians. “What’s that,” asks a gleeful Democratic operative, “a new group from a distant galaxy in the next ‘Star Wars’ movie?”
In his most candid remarks to date, Bush told New York Times columnist William Safire: “I believe we ought to be slow to engage our military, slow to commit our troops,” but he begged off on more details, saying he didn’t have full intelligence on the matter.
It’s not that Bush lacks good advisors. Two luminaries in the foreign policy firmament, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Haas, have put themselves at Bush’s disposal. But he’s either not happy with their advice or he’s chosen to take the politically expedient course of keeping his mouth shut.
Or perhaps he’s trying to avoid the fate of former Michigan Gov. George Romney, whose presidential bid collapsed when he said he’d changed his views on the Vietnam War because he’d had “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.”
Bush’s inability to take a clear position has opened him up to jabs from other Republicans and Democrats. On the one hand he’s said that the United States has a stake in Kosovo; on the other he’s tapped New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg as his standard bearer for that state’s key early primary, and Gregg is firmly against U.S. involvement.
“He’s getting buffeted by his right and by his right,” says one prominent Democratic official.
The governor’s vacillation is a metaphor for the divisions within the GOP. With the Democrats in command of bedrock GOP issues like the economy and crime, Republicans are desperate for an issue, but they are in disarray on defense, too.
“For 30 years, Republicans have maintained a unified foreign policy as military hawks against communism,” says Luntz. “This time, for some strange reason, Bill Clinton has unified the Democratic Party, and the Republicans are divided.” Indeed, isolationists may constitute a strong bloc of GOP primary voters, so that McCain’s strong support for the war could ultimately backfire come election time.
The day McCain advocated sending troops to Kosovo, Pat Buchanan, running once again for the GOP nomination, said the Kosovo campaign was “the greatest debacle I’ve ever seen almost in my lifetime.” Both Steve Forbes and Dan Quayle, two more in the pack of GOP hopefuls, have come out against U.S. involvement.
David Keene, longtime head of the American Conservative Union, is calling for a withdrawal from Kosovo. “Who appointed us God?” he asks.
Looking like Republicans, the Democrats are unified behind Clinton and the bombing campaign. Even liberals like Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone is in step. But there are pitfalls, especially for Vice President Al Gore. The Democratic front-runner has been a proponent of American involvement, but a prolonged war that starts costing American lives could put Gore in the position of campaigning while soldiers in body bags are flown home.
“Gore’s got to be very nervous,” says Keene. “He doesn’t know what’s going to happen.”
But even GOP candidates who favor action in Kosovo have found ways to criticize Clinton, and by extension Gore. Both McCain and Republican presidential contender Elizabeth Dole assailed his “credibility.” Taking a page from McCain’s speeches, Dole used a speech Wednesday before the Naval Academy to call on Clinton to “build up and deploy the forces necessary to win the war” in Kosovo. But she also hit Clinton’s credibility and vacillation on foreign policy. “When we accept half promises,” she said, “we send the wrong messages about our values and our will.”
McCain has already admitted the potential risks of his strong position. “I know that should Americans die in a land war with Serbia, I will bear considerable share of the responsibility for their loss,” he says. “I and any member who shares my views must be as accountable to their families as the president must be.”
The bottom line is that McCain gets to look presidential as long as Americans are at war, and that’s a big advantage for a candidate who was not at the front of the large Republican pack.
“Americans are seeing someone who they could easily see sitting in the Oval Office,” says McCain spokesman Opinsky.
Meanwhile, Bush is still sitting in Austin, padding his campaign war chest.
You could almost hear the entire nation exhale when Paul Weyrich, godfather of the far right political movement, declared in his post-impeachment funk that “politics has failed.” It was time for the “moral majority” — a term that he had coined nearly two decades ago — to “drop out of this culture and find places … where we can live godly, religious and sober lives.”
Sounded as if he were calling for a truce in America’s 30-year cultural wars.
Over the next few weeks, hard-core conservative columnist Cal Thomas came out with “Blinded By Might,” a book suggesting that Christians had been seduced by power and politics. Then Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, blessed George W. Bush’s squishy position on abortion, which wasn’t pro-life enough for the true believers. It seemed as if Robertson were willing to hold his nose and support the Texas governor who Republicans see as their best chance for retaking the White House in 2000.
In the space of a few weeks, three pillars of the church of Christian politics had started to crumble. “Some members of the Christian right have awakened to the fact that they’re nowhere near a moral majority,” says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Governmental Studies at the University of Virginia. “They’re one wing of one party.”
Even Janet Parshall, conservative radio commentator and spokeswoman for the Family Research Council, detects a “kind of cultural fatigue.”
But beyond the Beltway, Christian fundamentalists are mounting offensives in state and local political contests. If anything, the 2000 political season will be the setting for cultural conflicts from school board races in Texas to the battle for the White House. There will be no cease-fire in the combat over abortion, gay rights and control of public schools.
“The movement is out of gas at the top in some ways, but it’s never been more vital and energetic at the bottom,” says Craig Shirley, a political consultant who represents the NRA, the Christian Action Network and presidential hopeful Steve Forbes, among others. “It’s more threatening to the left this way. There’s no easy bogeyman to motivate their base. It’s more effective below the
radar screen.”
Raw numbers gauging the numerical strength of the religious right are hard to come by. Polls show that social conservatives could range from 15 to 30 percent of the total electorate, but they are closer to the high end among committed Republican voters.
The movement is like a pyramid, with a broad base at the local level that becomes more narrow and less significant in national races. “Their power increases in inverse proportion to the turnout,” says Elliot Mincberg, vice president at People For the American Way, a liberal group that monitors the right wing. “When you expand it to the general election sphere, it’s much harder for their voices to outweigh others.”
In Maine and Washington state, the Christian right helped kill efforts to pass laws protecting gays and lesbians. In dozens of states, social conservatives have teamed up with the NRA to pass laws permitting residents to carry concealed weapons. In school board elections nationwide, Christian soldiers are still fighting to keep gay teachers out of the classroom and cleanse libraries of books they see as offensive, such as Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.”
“Our troops will be coming out,” says Craig Shirley. They’ll be coming out this November in Maine to push an anti-choice initiative that would ban partial-birth abortions. They’ll be out in California next year advocating a “defense of marriage” initiative that would restrict homosexual unions. “Next is a ban on gay adoption,” promises Galen Nelson, executive director of the Ballot
Initiative Strategy Center in Boston.
But they won’t win just by showing up. Even when the right-wing troops take the field, they aren’t always victorious. Last Tuesday, a right-wing candidate for mayor of Colorado Springs lost to a liberal incumbent. And voters in Missouri rejected a concealed weapons initiative heavily backed by the NRA and social conservatives. Last year Republican moderates in Lee County, Fla., voted out a school board dominated by religious right members who had advocated teaching the Bible in public schools. Even in Jerry Falwell’s home base of Lynchburg, Va., a small conservative town by nature, voters have reacted against Falwell’s slates in local elections so strongly that they’ve been electing Democratic majorities.
Moving up the political pyramid to Congress, the Christian right continues to exercise influence far beyond its numbers, thanks to Majority Whip Tom DeLay and his Texas sidekick, Majority Leader Dick Armey.
Technically, DeLay is third in command — behind House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Armey — but DeLay trained and installed the mild-mannered Hastert, and it’s DeLay who’s becoming
the public face of the hard-core House conservatives. Hastert talks peace between the parties; DeLay plots the next tactical strike against the Democratic infidels.
DeLay, who once compared the Environmental Protection Agency to “the Gestapo,” still wants to dismantle major hunks of the federal government. Armey is the legislator who called Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank “Barney Fag”; of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Armey said: “All her friends are Marxists.”
DeLay and Armey are also among the few congressmen who sit on the Council for National Policy, the secretive organization of right-wing political and religious leaders, which gives them a direct connection to the Christian right.
While the right’s raw power might be diluted in presidential politics, Republican candidates are racing right to win the nomination.
Gary Bauer, former president of American Renewal, is the presumptive favorite son of the Christian right, but he has serious competition. Dan Quayle, Pat Buchanan, Alan Keyes, Sen. Bob Smith, Lamar Alexander, Steve Forbes and Rep. John Kasich are all honing in on abortion and family values in hopes of capturing the religious vote. As a result, they may only end up dividing it.
“The social conservatives could get splintered in so many ways as to be less effective,” says National Journal political columnist Charlie Cook. “So splintered that they don’t get one of their favorites into the top three in the Iowa primary.”
In the general election, if one of the early front-runners — George W. Bush or Elizabeth Dole — becomes the GOP nominee, the Republican Party’s internecine warfare will become impossible to camouflage. Moderates and party regulars will argue for pragmatism while true believers in the Christian right will press for ideological purity. The result could be civil war, pitting purists like Gary Bauer and James Dobson, head of the megabucks media ministry Focus on the Family, against Bush and Robertson, who become the relative pragmatists.
Right-wing and “family” issues in the 2000 campaign will incorporate fundamental Republican favorites like cutting taxes in general, especially repealing the “marriage penalty” tax and increasing defense spending. But the true religious litmus test will be abortion, just as it was in 1996, and the early skirmishes seem to spell a level of hostilities as nasty as those that split the party four years ago.
Bush says he’s a “pro-life” candidate, but a statement from his campaign adds that the Roe vs. Wade decision “will not be overturned until the hearts (of the people) are changed. Until then we should focus on ways to reduce abortion.” In another slap at the religious purists, Bush has yet to commit to the higher ground of requiring that all judicial appointees explicitly oppose abortion. Robertson says he “totally” agrees with Bush’s approach, but Dobson has been sniping at Bush for being soft on abortion.
“Bush claims to be pro-life, but so have other people who’ve gone before him and wound up showing no commitment to defend unborn children,” Dobson said. “Don’t give us double-talk. Tell us if you’ll support pro-life judges … We don’t know what he believes.”
While disheveled and fractured at the top, religious right groups are getting back to the fundamentals of politics: raising money and getting organized. The Christian Coalition is raising a war chest of $21 million to promote its candidates and causes in 2000. And while $21 million may be a drop in the pot of presidential campaign bucks, it will print and distribute 70 million voter guides in churches from coast to coast.
The leadership is coalescing, too. The Christian Coalition’s Randy Tate, Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum and Virginia right-wing politician Mike Farris have formed the Committee to Restore American Values. Its goal is to focus the religious right’s vote on a successful right-wing candidate in 2000.
Even Weyrich, who disavowed politics just months ago, has re-emerged from his post-impeachment hangover to take a leadership role in the new group. “His remarks back in February were just a feint,” says Mincberg, of People for the American Way.
Just one more flanking maneuver in the country’s continuing cultural wars.
