SALON

Republican Party

Friday, Apr 9, 1999 11:42 AM UTC

Prodigal son

How will George W. Bush -- and the GOP -- confront the whispers about his past?

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Here in the host city of the 2000 Republican National Convention, it’s official: Texas Gov. George W. Bush is the Republican to beat. Not only has Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge endorsed him, but on March 31, 10 Pennsylvania party activists and major donors flew to Austin to sup with the man who would be president. Alongside 20 other power brokers and fat cats from California, the Keystone State Republicans sat down for lunch at the upscale Shoreline Grill, next to the Austin Four Seasons, and Bush began his serenade.

“He started with the salad and went right on through,” says candy magnate Bob Asher, one of Pennsylvania’s two Republican National Committee members. “He spoke and answered questions — and there were some very pointed questions. I went down there to see what he was all about, and I was impressed. I liked the fire; I liked the honesty. I’ve been involved in politics since Dewey-Truman, and I’m used to getting a lot of manure. But you didn’t get that with him.” That afternoon, Asher, his RNC counterpart and the state chairman all endorsed Bush’s exploratory committee. Now, Pennsylvania Republicans like Asher are charged with raising major cash for the Bush campaign — $1 million in the next two months, by one estimate.

But even at the lovefest at the Shoreline Grill, Asher admits, there was an awkward moment when Bush had to answer the “pointed questions” about his allegedly hard-partying past.

“I’m paraphrasing here,” Asher says, “but he said something like, ‘We’re baby boomers, and I’ve made mistakes in my life that I’m not always happy about, but I’m going to move forward.’” The group didn’t press the questions any further. “With 30 people you don’t bring it up. You’d probably pull him aside and say something like, ‘Wait — how the hell you going to address this thing?’ But it’s out there and all of us know it’s out there. We’re not going into the thing blind.”

What rumors are out there? About what you’d expect from a Texas Good Ol’ Boy who went to Yale in the 1960s and made some money in Texas in the ’80s — drinking and drugs and diddling around. Texas columnist Molly Ivins, a liberal who normally skewers George W. (in fact, she nicknamed him “Shrub” in 1992) confessed this week she feels a little sorry for her frequent adversary, now that there are so many reporters skulking around Texas, looking into Bush’s past. “I offer to explain how Bush flubbed the tax reform proposals last session — couldn’t even get his own party to go along — and the visiting journalists want to know if he ever used drugs,” Ivins complained. Already, Bush’s advisors and top Republican strategists are brainstorming about how to handle the character questions that are likely to dog the GOP front-runner.

And front-runner he certainly is. The Bush money machine is chugging along strong: With less than a year to go until the New Hampshire primary, the Bush campaign has already snagged $6 million, three times as much cash as his closest financial rival for the GOP nomination — his dad’s former No. 2, ex-Vice President Dan Quayle. On Wednesday, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire announced he was endorsing Bush, giving him an incredible organizational boost in that key primary state. Now, with the unprecedented official outpouring of support for Bush — at last count, 13 governors (including Ridge), six senators and 87 members of the House — the pending primaries and caucuses almost seem a trifle.

In 1979, by contrast, then-Reps. Gerry Solomon and Trent Lott tried to muster congressional endorsements for Ronald Reagan, but they were only able to garner 15 supporters. Solomon, now CEO of a lobbying and consulting firm, is conducting a similar task for Bush, and he’s finding it a snap. In just his first meeting to drum up support at the Capitol Hill Club in late February, Solomon was able to get 55 members of Congress to sign up. He anticipates reaching 100 by the end of next week.

“Look at the list of endorsements,” says a thoroughly juiced Solomon, proudly pointing out that Bush’s support ranges from liberal Republican Reps. Connie Morella of Maryland and Jim Leach of Iowa to |berconservative Reps. David Dreier of California and Phil Crane of Illinois. Bush “has proven that conservatism can be compassionate. That’s why he has such breadth of support among women and minorities. It’s uncanny, his support.”

But don’t order tickets for the Bush coronation just yet. Conservative activists are already wary of the self-described “compassionate conservative.” Says Focus on the Family’s James Dobson: “We don’t know what he believes.” Political insiders wonder aloud if revelations about a personal life more befitting a Democrat than a GOP standard-bearer could derail the Bush train.

Gov. Bush himself has acknowledged some trouble in his past. In statements recalling then-Gov. Clinton’s admission to have “caused pain” in his marriage, Bush has said that he did “some irresponsible things when I was young and irresponsible,” but that’s been about as specific as he’s gotten lately. He wasn’t always so circumspect about his reputation for womanizing. Ten years ago, at the 1988 Republican Convention, Hartford Courant associate editor David Fink struck up a conversation with George W. “When you’re not talking politics,” Fink asked the vice president’s son, “what do you and [your father] talk about?”

“Pussy,” George W. replied.

Bush has also acknowledged that he used to drink to excess, though he’s insisted that he hasn’t touched a drop since his 40th birthday celebration 12 years ago. (He won’t admit to alcoholism, however.) But he abjectly refuses to comment on his rumored use of other, less legal, self-medicatons — like the use of marijuana or (cue the thunderclap) cocaine. When interviewed by WMUR-TV in New Hampshire, and asked if “drugs, marijuana, cocaine” had ever found their way into his bloodstream, Bush replied: “I’m not going to talk about what I did as a child. What I am going to talk about — and I am going to say this consistently — [is that] it is irrelevant what I did 20 to 30 years ago. What’s relevant is that I have learned from any mistakes I made. I do not want to send signals to anybody that what Gov. Bush did 30 years ago is cool to try.”

Bush’s Clintonian statements aren’t helping to put the issue to bed. “If I had done anything in the past that would have disqualified me for being in public office, you’d have found it,” Bush said to reporters when asked about the whispers about his past. “When I put my hand on the Bible and was sworn to uphold the laws of the land, of the state, I also implicitly said I’d uphold the dignity of the office I was elected to, and I have done so.” If there exists anyone out there who couldn’t teach Parsing 101 after watching our president’s weaselly ways this past year, let’s be clear what Bush is denying in the above statement: absolutely nothing.

“There are rumors that he might have danced on a bar in the nude when he was in college, that’s one thing,” ardent supporter Gerry Solomon admits. “But you’re not breaking any laws there. And whatever he did in his 30s, he was not an alcoholic. In the environment he was working in — which was the high rollers in Texas in the ’80s — there might have been situations that were not exemplary. But since that time I don’t think there was anything, and he hasn’t broken the law. He’s said that he drank too much, but since he straightened himself out, he’s led an exemplary life.”

Democratic and Republican campaign operatives say that the persistent rumors are something that Bush will have to deal with more candidly if he wants to hold the most powerful job in the world. But so far, the Bush campaign disagrees.

“The rumors are ridiculous and we’re not going to dignify them with responses,” says Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes.

But the campaign’s refusal to “dignify” rumors is inconsistent. Hughes will address the gossip about Bush’s alleged womanizing, for example, insisting that her boss has been faithful to his wife. (And lest we forget, it was George W. who in 1987 was handed the unseemly task of telling the world that his father had never strayed from his mother: “The answer to ‘the Big A’ is N-O,” he said.) So it seems that the younger Bush is only unwilling to dignify media intrusions into his personal life when the subject involves the use of illegal narcotics — arguably a personal tidbit far more relevant than infidelity for someone aspiring to be what Republicans during impeachment termed the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States.

Ironically, Bush is counting on impeachment fatigue — fed up voters tired of tales of soiled dresses, spelunking cigars and the like — to make opponents’ efforts to bring up his past backfire. The questions are “an unpleasant fact of political life, and one of the reasons people are so disgusted with politics,” says Hughes. “He has admitted that as a younger man he has made mistakes, but he is not going to itemize them. Everyone has to decide on their own how they’re going to answer these kinds of irrelevant questions. Gov. Bush has decided how he’s going to handle it.”

That approach is flying with some politicos. One expert New Hampshire political observer says that Bush is riding high in the polls there right now and probably won’t have to address any tawdry allegations unless tangible proof of wrongdoing materializes. “If George W. just says, ‘Quite frankly, I’m not answering that; you’ll have to take me as I am,’ I think he’ll be fine,” says New Hampshire State Sen. Pat Krueger. “If this were four years ago, it might be different. But now, we’ve just been so inundated with this stuff the only ones asking the questions are reporters, not Joe Schmo.”

Dee Stewart, executive director of the Republican Party of Iowa, goes so far as to say that by refusing to delve into his past mistakes, Bush is setting a proud example. “So many things today celebrate all the wrong things about people’s lives and in a way, it’s irresponsible,” Stewart says. The culture war has never been about eradicating immoral behaviors, Stewart says, it’s been about not wanting to celebrate them. “When you look at an opinion leader like Bill Clinton who bragged that he used marijuana and laughed about it — and over the next six years there was a rise in the use of marijuana by 140 percent — it’s clear that the statements that leaders make do affect society. What Bush is saying by not getting into it is, ‘Hey, we don’t bring out the best in our children by celebrating the mistakes that we may have made in our past.’”

But a Gallup poll conducted in February for CNN/USA Today indicates that 72 percent of Republicans believe that the public has a right to know if a presidential candidate “had used drugs in the past.” And even some of Bush’s most ardent supporters think the sandbags can’t hold indefinitely. “I think he will [address the rumors] in due course,” says former Rep. Solomon. “I think he will answer all questions in due course. But I don’t think anything he’s done can compare to Bill Clinton.”

Republican National Committeeman Asher agrees. “At the appropriate time, the governor will have to address whatever rumors are out there.”

So how to do it? Let’s presume that George W. has done more than fail to inhale. The problem for Bush may be his knowledge that, like the first line of American soldiers storming Omaha Beach, the first political person to ‘fess to a particular sin usually becomes cannon fodder. If New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller was the first candidate disqualified for being a divorcee, if eminently qualified Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg saw his nomination hobbled because he was the first to own up to having smoked a doobie, if Gary Hart bit the bullet on skirt-chasing, what candidate in his right mind would want to take one for the team on recreational drug use, perhaps even cocaine?

But the media’s Mongol hordes smell blood. When word got out last week that Bush had once been engaged to a Rice University student named Cathy Wolfman (now Cathy Young), the media converged on her and her parents. As the Washington Post gossip column said on Friday: “Much of the speculation about Bush’s reluctance to run for the White House centers on his self-described ‘young and irresponsible’ years. Young, 52, is considered a prime source for juicy details.”

Young wouldn’t dish the goods, but that doesn’t mean that reporters have given up on scouring the land, looking for party girls and coke fiends with tales to tell out of school.

And there are limits as to how sordid a past Bush can have, which may also explain his reticence. Solomon says that he doubts the governor has ever used cocaine. When asked if he would continue to support Bush even if he had used coke, Solomon hesitates. “I’d have to think about it,” he finally says.

“If someone produced evidence of [cocaine use], it changes the equation,” Iowa GOP chieftain Stewart acknowledges. But Stewart is quick to point out the when did you stop beating your wife quality to the question. “Our society needs to get away from the whole notion that when someone runs for political office, their days from the cradle forward — who they danced with at their high school dance — [are] fair game for the press to get into. The mainstream media, tabloid media and pornography have in many ways merged.”

But even if the media swore off scandals altogether, there’s a full field of Republican contenders who probably wouldn’t. It’s hard to imagine that every Republican who wants control of the planet — a list including sanctimonious Christians Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes, brawler Pat Buchanan, gazillionaire Steve Forbes (who invested thousands in negative ads against front-runner Bob Dole in the last go-round), resentful could-have-beens Lamar Alexander and Dan Quayle and firebrands Sen. John McCain and Rep. John Kasich — will give the Texas governor a pass on his who-knows-how-sullied past. “There’s a lot of wishful thinking by a lot of people who want to be president that there’s a silver bullet that will just shoot Bush out of the sky,” says Stewart.

Indeed, Tim Goeglein, communications director for Bauer for President 2000, insists that Bauer’s “will be an issue-related campaign.” However, he hastens to add, “if it is proven that a president of the United States or a man running for president of the United States has used illegal drugs, that will be an issue. If any American has broken the law and that American is running for the highest office in the land, that would certainly be an issue.”

Bush may be especially vulnerable, since his campaign has decided to emphasize “personal responsibility.” That’s not an interpretation, that’s from his speech announcing the formation of his presidential exploratory committee. “I am committed to helping usher in the responsibility era, an era in which all individuals in this great land understand they are responsible for their actions, responsible for the decisions they make, responsible for the children they bring into this world,” Bush said on March 2. Does the theme make him open to charges of hypocrisy? Does taking responsibility for one’s misdeeds necessarily entail confessing them?

One top GOP strategist who says the race is “Bush’s to lose” suggests a creative if somewhat cynical way for the prodigal son to explain his past. Wait until there’s another Chris Farley-like tragedy, when a hard-partying celebrity dies of overindulgence, the strategist says. Then give a heartfelt speech “about the challenges of life and the ability of one to overcome those challenges.”

The Republican National Committee’s Asher says that Bush may be able to dispense with the issue, but only if he acknowledges it. “As long as the guy stands up there and says, ‘Yeah, I drank too much, I used drugs … but it was wrong,’ he’ll be fine,” Asher says. “I was always taught in my church, you forgive people if they come clean. I was taught that was what religion was all about. If you truly are a person who believes in Christianity, you don’t sit around and be judgmental. So some guy made a mistake three years ago. Or 20 years ago. If you really are a religious person, you forgive that.”

Especially when the sinner is so damned appealing … at least for right now.

Jake Tapper is national correspondent for Salon. More Jake Tapper.

Tuesday, Mar 23, 1999 8:00 PM UTC

The skeleton in the GOP's China closet

The GOP's spy scandal: How the Los Alamos-China connection occurred on Bush/Reagan's watch.

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Despite all their professed outrage, many Republicans seem oddly delighted by the recent revelation that China may now be able to arm its missiles with smaller nuclear warheads on multiple re-entry vehicles. Perhaps conservatives feel they have finally discovered a suitably scary substitute for Soviet communism, the defunct threat that used to give unity and coherence to their own movement. Just the other day, the Washington Times — a daily compendium of right-wing propaganda subsidized by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, also known as the Messiah — published a drooling front-page story comparing the current “Chinese espionage scandal” with the capture and trial of the Rosenberg Soviet spy ring in the 1950s.

Bursting their bubble may be dirty work, but somebody has to do it, because playing with this fire could leave the right-wingers scorched worse than their liberal enemies. Not only did the alleged theft of nuclear secrets by China occur on their watch, during the Reagan and Bush administrations, but there is a likelihood that the security breaches at Los Alamos and the other national laboratories were made worse by one of the right’s favorite public policies: privatization.

First, however, let’s dispense with the righteous nonsense about freezing relations with China because their spies may have spied on us. If the United States used espionage as the chief criterion for judging allies and enemies, we would have few allies bigger than Burkina Faso and all too many enemies. And if other countries applied the same ludicrous test to their relations with the United States, we would have no allies and countless enemies.

As everyone who can read should know by now, we spy incessantly on friendly governments and hostile regimes alike, employing the largest, most technologically sophisticated and expensive espionage apparatus the world has ever seen. Our closest allies spy on us in return, and rather than cut off relations, we share intelligence data with them and send billions of dollars in annual aid. When Jonathan Pollard was caught selling U.S. military secrets to Israel, he was sent to prison for life — and relations with his spymasters went on undisturbed. It is safe to assume that our friends from Paris, Moscow, Berlin and even London gather intelligence about our statecraft and defense whenever their own national interests are implicated.

That doesn’t mean the Clinton administration’s policy of engagement with China is necessarily wise or moral. Having covered the Tienanmen Square massacre and its aftermath in Beijing almost 10 years ago, I regard the dictatorship there with revulsion and deep suspicion. Back when the president first announced his turnabout on trading with China in 1994, I complained that he had buckled to the business-dominated China lobby and given comfort to the aging oppressors of democratic Chinese youth. But the debate over how to cope with the world’s biggest nation, with its human rights abuses and military adventurism, has little to do with whether the Chinese spy on us. They do — and we spy on them, as we have done for a half century. Otherwise how would we know anything about their nuclear arsenal?

Such routine espionage and other unpleasant facts of international life were well-known to the policymakers of the Bush and Reagan administrations when they pursued their own engagement with Beijing. They may affect shock now, but that is merely politics. So is the insinuation that China-linked campaign contributions somehow affected national security decisionmaking in the Clinton White House. Although the conservative critics don’t come right out and say so, what they would like the public to believe is that Chinese spymasters paid off the Democrats to allow leakage of classified information. That would be treason, of course.

But if such ugly accusations are going to be smeared around for political gain, there are alternative scenarios that are equally nasty and just as plausible (or implausible). With a little imagination, the case can be made that it was the Republicans, not the Democrats, who sold out American security to China.

Dire warnings about inadequate security at Los Alamos and the other national laboratories date back to the Reagan era. In 1986, officials at the Department of Energy shut down a wide-ranging, nine-month probe of narcotics trafficking at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco because they feared bad publicity about the lab. Officials said they were still pursuing leads on 127 suspects among the lab’s 8,500 employees — many of them working on missile defense and other supersecret programs — when they were ordered to abandon the investigation.

Instead of placing stricter controls on access to the national laboratories, however, the Reagan administration issued an executive order in 1987 that loosened controls so that scientific advances could be more easily commercialized by the private sector. That order also gave freer entry to foreign citizens and corporations. Then in 1988 an alarm arose from within the government: The General Accounting Office reported to Congress that security procedures to protect sensitive data at the national labs were fearfully lax, and needed immediate improvement.

According to Rep. Floyd Spence, R-S.C., the chairman of the House National Security Committee, not much was done in response to that report over the past decade — a period that of course includes the entire Bush administration. So perhaps the most pertinent question is why didn’t the tough weenies in the Bush White House tighten security against spies seeking nuclear secrets?

The logical answer is bureaucratic inertia and incompetence, the usual suspects. Former Bush administration officials have claimed in recent days that they didn’t even know about the GAO report when it was issued, a poor testament to their self-proclaimed brilliance in the field of national security. But if we adopted a more suspicious attitude, like the Republicans now direct toward the Clinton White House, we might have to consider the broader context of Republican and conservative dealings with the Chinese.
We might, for instance, recall that during those years of alleged Chinese spying and inept American security, the president’s brother Prescott Bush was earning a fortune in commercial ventures in China. The same could be said of Henry Kissinger, and later of President Bush’s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, who joined Kissinger’s firm when he left the White House. Scandalously soft in its initial response to the Tienanmen atrocity, the Bush administration harbored many Republican statesmen who cashed in on U.S. ties with Beijing.

Obviously, to draw any inferences connecting Republican boodling in China with that regime’s apparently easy access to American secrets would be terribly unfair. But no more so than Republican attempts to connect security breaches in the Clinton administration with alleged Chinese contributions to the Democrats. Before they start hurling accusations about China policy, the Republicans ought to examine their own culpability more closely. The first victim of hysterical overreaction to the latest headlines could be their own front-running presidential candidate, George W. Bush, heir to his father’s soft-on-China legacy.

The real problem at the national laboratories may lie in a Republican policy that the Democrats have too willingly endorsed. When Congress gets around to investigating security issues at Los Alamos and the other labs, its findings could be quite disturbing to conservative ideologues — because responsibility for maintaining secrecy at those institutions began to be privatized during the Reagan era.

At Los Alamos, says spokesman John Gustafson, the armed guards who work
directly for the Atomic Energy Commission and then the Department of Energy
have been provided by a private firm since the early years of the Reagan
administration. In 1996, a similar policy pursued by the Clinton
administration contracted out routine daily security
tasks within the lab facilities to another company.

If Rep. Spence is to be believed, privatized security at the national labs has failed badly. The efficiencies of the private sector may have saved a few dollars, but at what greater price? How ironic it would be to learn that Washington’s free-marketeers — those most ardent anti-communists — have unwittingly aided Chinese Communist spies by allowing their ideology to compromise the national interest.

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Joe Conason blogs in Salon several times a week and writes a weekly column for the New York Observer. His latest book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush." More Joe Conason.

Tuesday, Mar 9, 1999 8:00 PM UTC

Honor thy geezers

They know something we don't: Big government works.

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–>The cultural imperative of the moment is to honor our elders, whose achievements during the past half-century are now being celebrated in bestselling books by network anchormen Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, as well as in essays and columns and television specials. When it comes to values like ethics, patriotism, and sacrifice for the common good the generation that overcame the Depression and won World War II looks pretty good — especially in contrast to the baby boomers now in power.

Implicit in this chorus of praise for Mom and Dad (or Grandma and Grandpa) is a conservative parable for America at the end of the American Century, a stark morality play about hard-working, self-denying citizens as opposed to their lazy, narcissistic offspring. Yet within this same fable lies another very different message that contradicts and subverts the conventional wisdom of our time. The venerable generation now passing into history knows something critical that we are being taught to deny.

In their dotage, older Americans understand that their generation’s best friend has been big government, which has saved so many of them from poverty, insecurity and medical bankruptcy. They know, from their own experience with Social Security and Medicare, that government can do big things and do them well.

To say this sounds almost shocking in the present political climate, when the corporatization of pensions, health care, schools and even prisons is so fashionable among Republicans and Democrats alike, that the suggestion of any new federal program encounters almost automatic derision. The old faith in public institutions has been discarded, and we are advised every day to bend our knees instead before the great Golden Bull of the Market, from which all blessings supposedly flow.

The sustained rise of the Dow Jones index has validated this new idolatry — and now, in an irony few seem to appreciate, we are told that the systems of social insurance devised by our venerated elders must be dismantled. If only we will place our faith in Wall Street and turn our faces from Washington, then we can all be rich in our old age. All we have to do is “privatize” Social Security through individual investment accounts (and turn Medicare over to the managed-care industry).

Heroic media images of the World War II generation subtly reinforce those arguments, urging us by example to emulate the rugged individualism of a more upright and self-sufficient era. But even a glance at the real history of postwar America demolishes that free-market myth. Our parents and grandparents did work hard and sacrifice, but they also relied heavily upon the state to help them earn a better life. Government provided the G.I. Bill that educated them, the home loans that sheltered them, the highways that transported them and the student loans that educated their children.

And, unlike their parents, they had little fear of old age because government had helped them provide for themselves and each other, collectively, through Social Security and Medicare.

It may seem sentimental to say so, but the result is a powerful testament to democratic progress. Among the lasting achievements of the generation lauded by Jennings, Brokaw and the rest is the virtual elimination of poverty among the aged. They reached this milestone despite the dedicated opposition of corporate conservatives who tried for decades to kill Social Security, and who fought to prevent the passage of Medicare.

While only a few of their generation actually set out to create or expand the federal apparatus that guarantees their security now, they became nearly unanimous in defending it. Not so long ago, before the current nostalgia took hold, the World War II generation was regularly slandered as a gang of “greedy geezers.” All kinds of data were cranked out by budget-cutters and privatizers to demonstrate that the elderly were bankrupting the country for their own comfort, at the expense of future generations. But that wave of nasty propaganda didn’t last long, in part because the political muscle of the geezers thumped any politician who uttered such slurs. (By the way, that’s another bit of wisdom handed down from the aged: “Vote!”)

Sometime in the next century, after the last of this generation has departed, Social Security may reach the point of fiscal deficit. Nobody really knows, because nobody can predict how fast the economy will grow decades from now. Medicare’s future financing seems more uncertain because of rising health-care costs. The contentious debate over reforms and revisions has scarcely begun to engage the consciousness of those who will be most affected by its outcome.

Seductive chatter about individual retirement accounts will undoubtedly grow louder — as will demands to increase the retirement age, cut benefits to the disabled and leave Medicare patients to the mercies of the managed-care executives. Experts will materialize on television to warn that government cannot be trusted to protect our economic security.

By then we may no longer be quite so preoccupied with the generation we now glorify in books and movies; amnesia, not memory, is more our normal state of mind. But if we mean to show respect, then we should honor them as they really were: a people who used government to improve their lives and their nation.

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Joe Conason blogs in Salon several times a week and writes a weekly column for the New York Observer. His latest book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush." More Joe Conason.

Tuesday, Mar 2, 1999 8:00 PM UTC

California Republicans: “Circular firing squad”

'Circular firing squad' for California Republicans: Abortion foes win big as state GOP tries -- and fails -- to regroup after impeachment.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The largest crop yet of presumptive Republican presidential candidates gathered here last weekend at the California Republican Party convention. But the contenders’ visit was overshadowed by an internecine battle over the election of party officers, which became a proxy for how Republicans will address the divisive issue of abortion. If California is any kind of a bellwether — and it usually is — there’s more bad news ahead for the GOP.

The convention’s marquee names included former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Family Research Council head Gary Bauer, former Vice President Dan Quayle, millionaire Steve Forbes, New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith and ultraconservative Alan Keyes (front-runners Elizabeth Dole and George W. Bush were no-shows). But those stars were upstaged by the previously little-known candidates for state party chairman and vice chairman. Moderates made a last-ditch effort to block the conservative heirs-apparent, but when the votes were counted, businessman Nicholas Bavaro lost his bid for chairman to conservative John McGraw, who’d made national news for telling a religious publication that “killing our babies [is the] issue of the century. Compared to that, cutting taxes or any other issue pales.”

Thus abortion headlines and tales of division, not reconciliation, dominated the stories coming out of Sacramento throughout the weekend. Many party moderates fear that obsession with divisive social issues will only add to the Republicans’ 1996 and 1998 electoral disappointments, and convince swing voters, especially in the growing Latino community, that the party is irrelevant to their future.

California Republicans are trying to rebound from their worst defeat in 40 years. In November, led by the religious conservatives who controlled the internal party hierarchy and both legislative houses, Republicans cringed as right-wing Attorney General Dan Lungren received a 20-point thumping from Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, who became the first Democrat in 20 years to capture the California statehouse. The party also lost ground in both the state Assembly and Senate, and watched liberal U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, believed an easy electoral target, march to victory against Matt Fong.

If the state party was looking for a convention that would begin the process of rehabilitation in the eyes of voters, this was probably not what its leaders would have scripted. One prominent state party leader referred to this weekend’s gathering as the Democrats’ “wet dream,” and GOP consultant Dan Schnur quipped the party was lined up in a “circular firing squad.”

“The key question is whether we want to be a governing party, or we want to continue to lose elections the way we did last November by highlighting how out of step we are on social issues,” said Bob Larkin, a Southern California activist and a leader among state GOP moderates. Voters in California differ sharply with the party’s views on key social issues like gun control and abortion. More than two-thirds of all voters consider themselves pro-choice and for some form of gun control. They opposed the Republicans’ impeachment crusade against the president in similar numbers.

But such poll data held little sway over the party faithful, or the hardcore candidates who came to lobby for their support. In his address to delegates, New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith said “killing children is the central issue facing our nation today, and it needs to be stopped. If we’re not going to stand up for the life of unborn children, maybe the Republican Party deserves to fall into the ash bin of history … and it will, if we don’t stand up for life.”

Others, like McCain and Alexander, avoided the abortion issue altogether. “Instead of laying down litmus tests and rigid pronouncements, reach out to others with whom we agree,” Alexander advised.

Delegates did not appear to take his advice when selecting party leaders. Incoming chairman McGraw has been a lightning rod for criticism from many moderates within the party who want to redirect the party’s focus back to economics. In the January issue of San Francisco Faith, he not only urged the party to stick with the abortion issue, but opposed gay rights. McGraw said he was “appalled that Catholic institutions like the Jesuit University of San Francisco openly champion the homosexual agenda.”

But California Republican Party officers have rarely been known for their moderate politics. In 1991, conservative activists who have long controlled the state party burned an effigy of Gov. Pete Wilson, a pro-choice centrist, after he signed off on the largest tax increase in state history. One of the organizers of the 1991 anti-Wilson demonstration was John Fleishman, who will serve as the party’s executive director under McGraw.

GOP strategist Tony Quinn said the party missed out on a key opportunity to do some housekeeping in the wake of last fall’s election debacle. McGraw, along with new party Vice Chairman Shawn Steel, “represents the fiasco of 1998,” Quinn said. “This is the leadership team that brought its party to its worst defeat in 40 years. Dan Lungren is the favorite whipping boy of most Republicans [in California], but some of the blame has to go to the party leadership.”

Though conservatives remain in control of the state party, California’s dynamic political landscape may still alter the message and soften the ideological stand of Republicans in California. One of the most significant changes in recent years is the state’s growing Latino population. The party’s continuing efforts at damage control among the state’s fastest-growing ethnic group could pull the GOP to the center.

Latinos now make up 14 percent of the general electorate in California, up from only 7 percent at the beginning of the decade. Many attribute that bump in participation to Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1994 racially charged reelection bid, in which he made illegal immigration the centerpiece of his campaign.

In the wake of Wilson’s support for ballot measures to abolish affirmative action and curtail social services to undocumented residents, the party has lost significant support from the burgeoning Latino middle class. Many moderate Latinos left the party during the 1994 campaign, and have been slow in coming back. “The simplest thing in the world to do is count the numbers,” said GOP strategist Quinn. “Latinos now make up 14 percent of the electorate, and we can’t continue to spot Democrats 10 points out of the gate in every general election. That means a Republican simply cannot win in California without one-third of the state’s Latino vote.”

Getting that one-third could be an uphill battle. In spite of significant efforts at Latino outreach, Lungren received just 20 percent of the Latino vote in 1998. “Wilson was not able to differentiate between the legals and illegals in the minds of Latinos,” Quinn said. “That’s something this party needs to recover from.”

Among new California voters, more than half of whom are Latino, only one Republican is registered for every three Democrats. Statewide, Republican registration has fallen to a mere 34 percent overall, down from 39 percent in 1992.

The party made one important stride toward changing its anti-Latino image after the election with the elevation of moderate Republican Rod Pacheco to leader of the traditionally very conservative Assembly Republican caucus. Pacheco, now one of four Latino Assembly Republicans and the highest ranking Republican Latino in California, has surfaced as the primary spokesman for legislative Republicans. The necessity for Latino outreach among Republicans, and the climb of Latinos like Pacheco through the party ranks, may do more to moderate the party and its message than any other single trend in California politics.

Pacheco said even Latinos who register Republican “are, I think, more willing to accept that government can be part of the solution rather than simply a problem.” This fact has not been lost on many prospective presidential nominees, including a guy in Texas named Bush who received more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in his state, and who has repeatedly summoned Pacheco to Austin to plot California strategy.

Will Latino leaders help the party moderate its more extreme stands?

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a matter of moderation as much as it is tolerance,” said Pacheco spokesman Mike Madrid, a former political director for the state party and now a state party delegate. “We have to end the mentality of ‘you’re either for us or against us.’”

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Anthony York is Salon's Washington correspondent. More Anthony York.

Tuesday, Feb 23, 1999 8:00 PM UTC

A silent wind blows

Conservatives seem to have nothing to say when it comes to racism, hate crimes and white supremacists.

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–>It doesn’t have the Nielsen numbers of the JonBenet Ramsey case, but one of the grimmest spectacles in recent memory is unfolding in Jasper, Texas, at the trial of John William King, one of three men indicted for the torture murder of James Byrd Jr. Prosecutors have presented evidence that King and two accomplices chained Byrd to the back of a pickup last June and then dragged him along the back roads until his body ripped apart. This atrocity was allegedly meant to inspire the creation of a new racist organization in East Texas, to be known as the Texas Rebel Soldiers Division of the Confederate Knights of America — for which King already had written a “code of ethics.” His fashion statement is a tattoo of a black man hanging from a tree.

If all this sounds like a nightmare from America’s distant past, it isn’t. There are literally hundreds of white supremacist groups operating at various levels across the country, many of them as insignificant as King’s little band of goons, but no less lethal. Many of them have carried out random killings like the Byrd murder during the past decade, and there will no doubt be more such horrific rituals in years to come.

In other words, there really are “hate crimes,” and the question that lingers after hearing about James Byrd’s terrible death is what to do about them. Conservatives haven’t had much to say about the Byrd case — if the silence of right-wing pundits means anything — except to deplore legislation that would increase the penalties for hate crimes. (Somehow they get particularly upset when proposed hate crime laws include protections for gays and lesbians.)

Passing laws against hate does seem both futile and censorious, and prosecutors certainly could misuse such a statute for demagogic purposes. Drafting a hate-crimes law that doesn’t do violence to the First Amendment might indeed be difficult — but isn’t it worth the effort to try? By insisting that no such laws should even be considered, our normally law-and-order-loving right-wingers risk appearing a bit squishy on criminals who happen to be racial, religious or sexual bigots.

After all, many crimes carry heavier penalties under what are known as “aggravating circumstances.” It’s universally considered far worse to rape or kill a child than an adult, and nobody on the right complains when legislators decree harsher punishment for those offenses.

Still, opponents of hate crimes legislation aren’t necessarily soft on hate. They may quite sincerely believe that there is no constitutional or practical means of distinguishing between murder motivated by prejudice and any other kind of homicide. But the burden they seem to shrug off rather easily is to explain how society ought to deal with the hate that leads to hate crimes.
Excluded from this query, of course, are those who enjoy and profit from promotion of bigotry: radio shock jocks, anti-gay crusaders, culture warriors and eugenic theorists who populate the uglier precincts of the right. Characters like Joseph Sobran, Patrick Buchanan, Charles Murray and Jesse Helms spring instantly to mind.

While those troglodytes account for a substantial fraction of conservatism as a whole, let’s be generous and assume they don’t represent the dominant trend on the right. What do the decent right-wingers propose to do about the Confederate Knights of America and the spiritual disease that spawned it and all its kindred?

The honest answer, unfortunately, is “nothing.” The right-wing response to coping with racism almost invariably is negative — as in simply negating any active anti-racist measure, for reasons sincere or spurious. Conservatives oppose affirmative action, often for perfectly principled reasons, but propose no real means to ameliorate the past inequities that affirmative action is designed to remedy. Conservatives mock the president for convening a panel on race relations, which admittedly accomplished little, but have almost nothing useful themselves to say about improving racial harmony. The unmistakable impression is that the worst elements of the right promote prejudice, while the better elements remain indifferent and even callous.

Then, laughably, conservatives profess to wonder why African-Americans and Latinos overwhelmingly support President Clinton, despite his moral and political failings. Clinton’s secret ought to be obvious to all but the most obtuse right-wingers: He speaks out against racism and always has. He uses the symbolism of his office to fight racism. Black people know that about him, and they don’t know that about any of his opponents.

In fact, what they know about some of Clinton’s enemies is just the opposite — from his most dedicated adversaries in Arkansas, led by Justice Jim Johnson, who just happened to be veterans of the old White Citizens Council, to his harshest critics in Washington, such as Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, who just happen to be chummy with the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Of course you remember the CCC, those charmingly sophisticated white supremacists whose links to top Republicans like Lott and Barr caused a flurry of tut-tutting on editorial pages across the country not long ago. The CCC leaders enjoyed their brief moment in the national spotlight, and now they present a wonderful opportunity for conservatives and Republicans to kick some racist butt. Having complained for the past several paragraphs about right-wingers who don’t do anything to oppose bigotry, I think it’s only sporting to make a positive suggestion.

A few weeks ago, Democratic Reps. Robert Wexler of Florida and James Clyburn of South Carolina, a Jew and a black respectively, introduced House Resolution 35, which condemns the CCC for, among other things, promoting “racism, divisiveness and intolerance” as well as “extremist neo-Nazi ideology and propaganda that incite hate crimes and violence.” Noting that the CCC sprang from the old White Citizens Councils, the resolution also “urges all Members of the House of Representatives not to support or endorse the Council of Conservative Citizens and its views.”

Now H.R. 35 has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Henry Hyde, told New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum that he would support such a resolution. It will be fascinating to see whether Hyde makes good on that promise by allowing a vote on the resolution — or whether he buries the resolution to spare Barr the embarrassment of voting on it. Should H.R. 35 pass the House, a similar resolution could be introduced in the Senate, for the edification of Majority Leader Lott.

So no more excuses, please. This proposal doesn’t abrogate the Bill of Rights or institute racial preferences or even cost a penny. It is probably the cheapest, easiest test of racial decency that conservatives will ever face.

Let’s all hope they don’t fail.

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Joe Conason blogs in Salon several times a week and writes a weekly column for the New York Observer. His latest book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush." More Joe Conason.

Tuesday, Feb 23, 1999 7:04 PM UTC

Flynt's revenge

The porno king and Official Republican Humiliator tells why he did it, the real reason the Washington Post ran his ad and what he'd do if he had five more lives.

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On the 10th floor of Larry Flynt’s oval, black-glass Beverly Hills headquarters,amid Persian rugs, lush velvet curtains, carved pseudo-royalistfurniture and reproductions of romantic paintings peering from ornate giltframes, silence reigns. Flynt, the dark prince of pornography andself-declared mortal enemy of the Republican Party, is waiting, dwarfed by hisenormous desk, signing checks and pushing papers at the far end of hisoffice, an eye-shaped room that could easily house a family of four. His blond, freshly scrubbed assistant, Stephanie, leads the way with the cheerfulpragmatism of a Midwestern housewife showing off the farm. She takespapers from his hand. He fumbles with a pen, peers through cloudy visionand asks if Salon has any affiliation with the Drudge Report. Or is Salonactually the Drudge Report?

Flynt’s less-than-lucid demeanor suggests that he might be one of those men, like the sickly Boris Yeltsin or the deranged, aging Chairman Mao, who continues to wield power but only as a feeble puppet. His handshake has the limp-boneddelicacy of an aging aristocrat. The whole impression is one of suchstartling vulnerability that it seems peculiar more journalists haven’tobserved the paradox of this lithium-muted, handicapped terror. The manwhose political scandals and fleshcapades have created firestorms ofcontroversy now sits quietly in a wheelchair and tries to remember just whowill interview him next.

But if this is the first impression, it is also a fleeting one. For out ofthis slow body comes a flood of words: familiar, witty sound bites roll offhis tongue, one after another. Like anyone who has bathed in the limelightfor decades, he’s a pro at getting his message out.

It’s been nearly 25 years since Flynt launched Hustler, the first skinmag aimed at the rough-hewn libidos of his working-class brethren; 21 yearssince he was shot and paralyzed by a right-wing sniper outside the Georgiacourthouse where he was fighting an obscenity case; 12 years since hisfourth wife, Althea, ailing from AIDS, drowned in a bathtub and Flynt, afteryears of pain relievers and erratic behavior, began a sobering lithiumtherapy; 10 years since theSupreme Court upheld his right to publish a cartoon that suggested JerryFalwell lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse; two years since Milos Forman portrayed him as a charismaticfree speech martyr in “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and his daughterTonya, protesting the movie, publicly accused him of sexual molestation;and four months since he placed an ad in the Washington Post offering up to$1 million to anyone who could prove they had an “illicit sexual relationshipwith a congressman.”

His latest crusade to reveal the hypocrisies of Republican politiciansbegan explosively, when Speaker-designate Robert Livingston shocked Washington by abruptly retiring after he learned that Flynt was going to publicize his extramarital affairs. But the next bombshell was something of a dud. Flynt went after Bob Barr, revealing that the rabid Clinton-hater and anti-abortion zealot had refused under oath in the divorce of his first wife to reveal whether he’d had sex with his current wife (his presumed mistress at the time) and that he had paid for his wife’sabortion. But the media ho-hummed the revelations. Flynt was a victim of the expectations created by his success: Having created an appetite for think-pink scandals, he laid a PR egg by merely demonstrating hypocrisy. And since then, Flynt’s assertions that he has the naughty goods on a varying number of other Republicans — in our interview, he claimed 12 — has begun to ring hollow.

But none of this has dampened the latest revival of the manwho once ran for president with the slogan “A smut peddler who cares.” Asurvey published in late January in the Washington Post revealed that Flynthas been one of the more popular figures to emerge from the scandal. Forty percent approved of the Flynt investigation, with 46 percent saying they wanted the media to report his findings. While these might not benumbers that could win landslides, they’re higher than the dismal approval ratings for many Republican pols, to say nothing of the Attila the Hun-like depths occupied by Linda Tripp and Kenneth Starr.

This makesLarry Flynt an especially happy guy these days. While sipping black coffee in aneggplant jacket and trademark diamond watch, Flynt discussed Thomas Paine,whom he might out next and what he would do if he had five morelives.

You’ve had a dual career, both as publisher of pornography and as a public figure involved in politics. Is politics somethingyou’ve always been interested in?

Yes. Since I was achild I’ve always questioned everything in my life, whether it be authority, politics, religion or whatever. I sort ofinadvertently got involved in this First Amendment battle, and it’s beengoing on now for over 20 years. I think I had to stand in acourtroom and listen to a judge sentence me to 25 years in prison before Irealized that freedom of expression was something that could no longer betaken for granted. And that was back in 1977, and since then I’ve beentotally uncompromising on First Amendment issues.

I’m so passionate about the First Amendmentbecause I see it as the cornerstone of our democracy. The First Amendmentgets its vitality and meaning from the unrestricted right of free choice.Majority rule will only work if you’re considering individual rights.You can’t have five wolves and one sheep vote on what they want tohave for supper, because the sheep will lose every time. I’ve always seenmy role as protecting that sheep, those individuals.

Like you, a lot of people connected to the sexindustry have ended up getting into political battles, often over the FirstAmendment. Why do you think this is?

I’d be less thantruthful if I didn’t say that part of it is that they’re protecting theirlivelihood. But I think many of them very stronglybelieve in what they’re doing. You see, so many people think that their civil rights and their civil liberties are part of theirbirthright. They take them for granted.But when somebody that’s in thebusiness I’m in is faced with prosecution, harassment by the police, thenall of a sudden he becomes aware that what we take for granted is notreally there. And that many of the freedoms we’ve gained can be lost as easilyas they were gained.

Why did you embark on your latest crusade to out Republicans?

I kept seeing that 70 percent of the peopledidn’t feel that the president should be impeached. It started with thispartisan effort to impeach, and I thought, the mainstreammedia is ignoring this 70 percent of the people. Because the editorialists were asking for Clinton’s head. And even though they would flash thepolls on the television, nobody gave any credence to the significance of that. And I felt these people don’t have a voice. Andthat was really the deciding factor in me placing the ad in the WashingtonPost. Because I wanted to demonstrate that hypocrisy crossed party lines.And that despite the fact that the pundits and the legal scholars weretalking about perjury and obstruction of justice, it was a case about sexand it had always been a case about sex, and I think the American people didnot want to impeach, came to that conclusion long before Congress ever did.Because people have had incidents in their own family or friends where youknow affairs have taken place. Sometimes, you know, you forget andforgive, and sometimes you go your separate ways, but it’s something like –everybody knows someone in their family who has cancer. Everybody knowssomeone who has had an affair. So it was something that people could identifywith.

- – - – - – - – - -

You came out with the two exposés on Livingston and Barr. What happened to the rest of the ones you promised?

This is the exclusive part of the interview. After
Livingston and Barr, the trial had started in the Senate. My initial
objective was to expose the hypocrisy, and then I felt to further expose
people would only be to cause embarrassment. And not only that,
I didn’t want to piss the Senate off, because I was in the president’s
corner and wanted to see him beat this in the Senate. So we just sort of
sat on what we’ve got. We’ve got about a dozen active investigations going
on now. I’m not sure how much of an appetite there is
for what we’ve got, but the reason why we’re continuing is — they’re all
Republicans, of course — is when the election rolls around, we’re going to
make sure that all the information that we have is made available to whoever
they’re running against.

Especially Bob Barr. I think the mainstream
media gave Barr a pass on this. We not only demonstrated he did not
tell the truth under oath, but he allowed his own wife to have an
abortion — he even drove her to the clinic and paid for it. And he’s one of the most ardent abortion foes in
Congress — he stood on the floor of the Congress to say abortion is
equivalent to murder. I have all
the documentation on him. So I was very disappointed in the way the
mainstream media dealt with that, because we spent a lot of time in the
investigation. Some of them covered it — it wasn’t across the board,
because some of them covered it very well.

So are you going to make the facts public?

We’re publishing a one-time issue — a
one-shot called the Flynt Report. And in addition to having the people who
we have exposed, we are going to take other investigations that have either
come out on their own or been exposed by other people and include them in
the issue. The public can turn from page to page and see all the mug shots
of people who have had affairs. We’re working on it now. It’ll probably be out in the next two or three weeks.

Do you think you might go after Democrats?

A friend of mine who lives in Washington told me something many years
ago. He said, Larry, when it comes to scandal, the conventional wisdom is
that it’s sex with Democrats, and with Republicans it’s
money. But he said in actuality it’s the complete opposite. And
apparently that was evident in the ads. We only got one Democrat out of
all of the 38 leads, there was one Democrat and 37 were Republicans.

You’ve also said you might go after the media.

I said recently that I would
start investigating the private sex lives of media personalities. All the
media moguls better look out. There are a couple of people in the
media that the press doesn’t lay a glove on. Apparently [one prominent anchor] is like a rabbit — I mean, he’s got a revolving
door to his office. And many of them have been
divorced four or five times.
A lot of the divorce transcripts are available. Sam Donaldson
has been married three times, OK? But Donaldson was really
sanctimonious about Clinton. Clinton took the time out of his
schedule to visit him in the hospital one day when he was recovering from
cancer. So when Sam interviewed me for “20/20,” I said, “It
must be tough to be your friend.” I’m not saying that we’re going
to do it, I’m just saying there’s a possibility that’s a little intriguing.

According to a poll in the Washington Post recently, you’re
one of the most popular figures to come out of the scandal. How does that feel?

I got a kick out of that. I really have been vilified for close
to a quarter of a century. Things started turning when the movie came out
about my life, and I wrote my autobiography. But I was not prepared for people’s reactions when I ran that ad in the Post and exposed Livingstone. I have personalized license plates on my car, and people run right out
in the middle of the street because they want to say hello or shake my hand.

I get probably around 1,000 letters a
week, and absolutely no negative mail. And every time I go out to eat at a restaurant, I
have people come up to me and thank me for what I’m doing.
It confirms what I always felt, that those
people felt Clinton should not be impeached did not have a voice.

- – - – - – - – - -

Do you feel that the public’s growing acceptance and
consumption of pornography had an effect on how they responded to
the Clinton scandal? Like, “What’s the big deal, I
saw that on a movie last week”? Do you think the public would have
been so open 25 years ago?

Probably not as much. I think an awful lot of people viewed the scandal in
this manner, that it was just about sex.

Do you think pornography has changed people’s attitudes toward
sex?

I think it’s helped. I think we’ve come a long way. I think
people have been desensitized to a large degree. I think that’s good. I
think that’s healthy.

Getting back to that Post thing you mentioned, you know the New
York Times would never have run that ad. And the Post would never have run that ad. And there’s an interesting story behind all of that. In 1976, after the Wayne Hayes-Liz Ray debacle, where he had this girl on the payroll who didn’t know how to type or answer the phones, and then Wilbur Mills with Fannie Foxe in the Tidal Basin, I submitted a similar ad to the one I ran in the Post in October. I submitted it and they rejected it. So I asked a friend of mine named Rudy Maxa, who was working for the Post at the time, to go talk to Ben Bradlee and see if he would reconsider running the ad. Bradlee just ran him out of his office, he said, “I’m not doing nothing for Larry Flynt.”

So I wrote a letter to [Post publisher] Katharine Graham, saying, This is what the First
Amendment is all about, guarantees and everything. And after Watergate, how can you in good conscience refuse to run an ad which is
clearly about the First Amendment. So I got a handwritten note back from her —
I’ve still got it to this day — saying, Mr. Flynt, please resubmit
your ad.

So I resubmitted the ad and they ran it. Now when we were preparing the ad that ran this year, my lawyer said, the Post is not going to run this ad. Because it makes it
look like they’re sort of endorsing what you’re doing. And I said well,
we’ll see. And they ran the ad, and I know the reason why they ran the ad is
that there were still some people at the Post that were there in 1976 when I
went over Bradlee’s head and got the ad ran.

Has this episode whetted your appetite
for more kinds of political investigation? Or are you ready to return to
your business?

I need to return to my business. What a lot of people are not
aware of is I have 16 foreign editions of Hustler, and a lot of my
other magazines have been published in foreign countries as well. So I
travel a lot as a result of that. We have just opened our new store,
Hustler Hollywood [a sex emporium and gourmet coffee bar] over here on Sunset, and they’re doing phenomenally well. It makes women as well as men feel comfortable shopping there.
They don’t feel like they’re going into a sleazy little shack with blacked-out windows and all the peep shows and all that. It’s a totally different
atmosphere. We intend to open a new one every three months across the country.

My plate’s full. I’m opening a casino. I’m launching a new fashion magazine in May called Code. It’s a fashion magazine for black males, the GQ for a black man. And there’s not one on the market in the United States.
We think that we’re tapping into something really, really good
there, because black men are much more fashion-conscious than white men are. So we have really high hopes for it. I’ve had 32 different magazines now. Each year we’ll come out with approximately three new magazines. And if one is a success, we’re happy, because the mortality
rate is really high in magazine publishing. One of our new magazines, Taboo [about fetish culture], is doing very well.

What’s your worst fear about America’s future?

What concerns me most about America today is the apathy that
exists, especially among young people. We as a nation only respond to
crises. We never deal with our problems, whether it be the Vietnam War or
civil rights or anything else, we never deal with them until they’re ready
to explode. And that’s why as I speak at college campuses around the country
I make an attempt to get young people to start thinking about how much harm
apathy can really do.

There seems to be a polarization between one part of
America, which is increasingly liberal and open about sex,
and another part, an increasingly vocal and politically powerful minority of Republicans. It’s a tension that has existed in our culture for a long time. How do you think it’ll be resolved?

I can’t believe that even though they’re in the
minority, these are the agents that are driving the chaos. Roughly about
30 percent of people in this country are Clinton haters. They
want his head on a platter. They’re uptight, anal-retentive.
I call them the Falwellians of the world. And when I
think of the prospect of somebody like Ralph Reed and Pat
Buchanan running the country, I just thank my lucky stars every day that these people are in the
minority. Although I’m disturbed that they’re 30 percent.

People ask me why I’m a
Democrat. In this century, all our individual liberties, the civil rights
that we’ve gained, have come under Democratic administrations, not
Republican administrations. So I find it very difficult to see why anyone
would be a Republican. They’re so callous and bigoted and insensitive to
both race and gender. I hope there’s no increase in their popularity.

I read your comment in Esquire that women are smarter and harder workers and more caring than men. If that’s the case, why do you think that men still have more power in our society?

Well, things were worse before. A century ago, women didn’t even have the right to vote and were really second-class
citizens. And women, having been repressed, used and manipulated by men, wind up learning how to function in a man’s world. If women understand what they’re up against in the corporate and political structure, out of pure shrewdness they can make their way through it. Men are often just straight ahead, take no prisoners. Women have to be a little bit more cunning.

- – - – - – - – - -

Hustler made its name by what some people consider to be
sexist and violent depictions of women, cartoons of
women being chopped up and so on. While most people would defend your right to do that, is
there a line over which you won’t walk?

One cartoon comes to mind that was passed around by the feminists
in New York City. It was a couple of guys out deer hunting,
and one guy says to the other one, “Well, we just bagged another one,” and there’s three women on the top of the car.

Now maybe I’m missing something, maybe I’m insensitive, but I
thought the cartoon was funny.

Do you ever see stuff and say, “Uh-uh, I’m not
publishing that”?

You have to understand what Hustler is. It’s basically a
heterosexual magazine with erotic photo features. Now aside from that, we have our outrageous political satire and parodies and cartoons, which have all identified Hustler and set it apart from all its competitors. And it’s very much a humor magazine as well as a sex publication. We’re real iconoclasts. Being offensive is part of our editorial philosophy.
When we sit down at an editorial meeting once a month, we say, “OK, who
haven’t we offended this month?”

So there’s no line you won’t cross?

There’s absolutely nothing sacred. Obviously
we stay away from things like child pornography.
But other than that, it’s very much on the cutting
edge.

When was the last time you were offended? Has
that ever happened?

Are you asking me if there’s anything I wouldn’t run that I ran
before? Back in the ’70s, when Betty Ford had a double mastectomy, we had a
drawing of the White House, this was at Christmas time, with a silhouette of
a woman standing in the window of the White House, and the caption on there
was, “All I want for Christmas is my two front tits.” And probably if I had it to do all over, I would not have run the cartoon. I lost my own mother to
breast cancer. That was really pushing it. But I can’t think of anything else.

Is sex still as interesting to you as it was when you first
started the business?

More.

Really? Why is it more?

I don’t know. It just is. I guess what you could say is it’s not necessarily that sex is more interesting, women are more interesting.

So you consider yourself a big fan of women?

Very much so.

How have your attitudes about sex changed since you were young?

Not much.

When you were 20 you had the same kind of
perspective that you do now?

I think when you’re young, you might have certain fantasies.
Maybe as you get older they might mature a little bit. But the fantasies are
still the same.

If we lived in a world that was completely free of sexual
repression, and was just a land of free love and free lust, do you think
you would be in the business you’re in now?

No, I don’t think I would be in the business that I’m in. I’ve
thought about that before. It’s probably very hypocritical for me to be fighting to make sex acceptable. On the other hand, I want to keep it legal. This is something I really believe in. I think that many of our problems are
caused by sexual repression, not sexual promiscuity. Especially a lot of the
line of behaviors you see in society. Most of your hardened criminals, the one thing they have in common, they’re all sexually dysfunctional. You see very little reported on that, but it’s true.

What people have inspired you?

There have been no individuals in my era that have had a major
influence on me, but historically I see Thomas Paine as the father of
our country. With many people, it’s George Washington, but all of the ideas
of our democracy came from Thomas Paine, and I think his book “The Age of
Reason” is probably one of the most important books ever written.

If you had five lives to pursue five different careers, what
would be your five lives, other than this one?

A gynecologist, an evangelist, a brain
surgeon, a lawyer. I could be a bum for a few years.

Why do you think human beings have such a strange relationship
to their needs for reproduction, such a
complicated relationship to sex?

The one
medium that we use to communicate with more than anything else is sex. You’d
think we’d make an effort to understand it a little bit better. And other
than the desire for survival, the strongest single desire we have is for
sex. It’s important to explain how the repression and guilt came about. The church has had its hand on our crotch for 2,000 years. And the government is moving in that direction. Feeling that if they can control the pleasure center, they can control you.

But it’s like the genie’s out of the bottle now with the Internet
and the
way we communicate. The elite doesn’t really have the ability to dictate
anything to us about our mores. Since the
Victorian era, the rich and the privileged
have always had their erotic bound editions of pornography. But today, the newsstand and the video store has
become the poor man’s art museum. And governments around the world are having trouble dealing this. Because the effort before was to always
control the people. Now it’s obvious as we move into this era of wireless
communication that we aren’t going to be able to control the people.

Speaking of being controlled, is there
anything that you feel like people haven’t understood about you, or that the
media has misrepresented?

Anyone who interviews me feels
immediately they have to distance themselves from me by calling me a
pornographer or a smut peddler. That’s just the nature of the
media, that’s just the way they are. It’s mainly the stigmatism associated with Hustler. There are efforts to constantly reinforce the fact that this guy is just a smut peddler, he’s not to be given any credence for anything else. I like to remind them I’m a smut peddler who cares.

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Carol Lloyd is currently at work on a book about the gentrification wars in San Francisco's Mission District. More Carol Lloyd.

Page 275 of 285 in Republican Party

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