It was a fairly quirky meditation on the Clinton presidency
– how I felt when Clinton first got elected and how I was feeling at the time I
was writing most of the poems, during the impeachment brouhaha. It follows a trajectory of wild
hopefulness and euphoria, to frustration and disbelief at the way the man was
hounded, to greater disbelief when proceedings against him kicked into high
gear – mixed with some distaste and disappointment in him for giving them the
means to do that to him.
The book ends with the following poem:
Legacy
The danger of disloyal oppositions
is that they rend the country they would wrest
control of, caution lost, at the behest
of leaders who ignore old “superstitions”
about the need, at times, to come together
behind a president; no greater good
can move them than the spilling of his blood.
The fall appears so close,
they don’t care whether
they have Right on their side, or if the nation
is pained by their attempts to immolate
the man we chose to be our Head of State;
they seek a Revolution! Liberation
from Constitution, decency, the past . . .
Dogfights may come and go. Disgust may last.
Yes, it does take a very special kind of wonk to write
sonnets about these things.
The title of the book came from a line by Peggy Noonan,
Reagan’s speechwriter. She wrote
George Herbert Walker Bush’s “kinder/gentler/thousand points of light” convention
speech. She wrote Reagan’s speech
about the Challenger. She earned
my abiding anger and enmity when she had him say, about the Contras in
Nicaragua: “They are our brothers, these Freedom Fighters. They are the moral equivalent of our
Founding Fathers, and the brave men and women of the French Resistance.” (Of
course, the resemblance was uncanny!
Except that the Contras liked to rape, torture, mutilate and dismember
civilian peasant families that supported the Sandinistas, who were
democratically elected in 1984 . . .) I guess it was in her autobiography
(which I was wonky enough to read) that Noonan said that it’s beyond
rationality; you just get one President in this life, whom you really feel that strongly about, and Reagan was
hers. For whatever odd reason, I
guess Bill Clinton remains mine.
Every year, I’d look forward to his State of the Union
address almost as if it were some special treat that was being saved up for
me. And in recent weeks, I found
myself feeling that way about his impending appearance at the Democratic
Convention. His presidency
was, I'm figuring, the closest I’ll ever come to being president because
sometimes he’d say something that I was thinking, that no one else in politics
and the media was articulating. I
felt (and I’m sure lots of Americans have felt) that he thinks like me – except
he’s much, much smarter.
When Bill Clinton was first running for president, I
pondered what I’d say if I were up there accepting the nomination. I thought people weren’t talking enough
about how President George Herbert Walker Bush acknowledged that Clinton was
impressing people with “the vision thing.” I thought, I’d get up at the podium and say: “The Ship of
State has lost its moorings. It’s
drifting through a fog because there is no one at the helm who has a vision of
where it should go.” He didn’t say that.
But he talked about how GHW Bush mocked the way he spoke for the dreams
of average people as “The vision thing” and went on about: "I hope nobody plows a field
without a vision, I hope nobody raises a child without a vision . . ." It was like what I’d been thinking, but
less pretentious and more positive.
When Richard Nixon died, I found myself feeling inexplicably
sad. I heard the first line of his
memoirs reverberating in my head, in Nixon’s voice: “I was born in a house that
my father built.” (The memoirs are actually quite readable, possibly because
they were ghosted by the young Diane Sawyer, almost as rhetorically gifted as
Peggy Noonan. Why aren’t people
more aware that Sawyer is a former Nixon aide? Why do Democrats and lefties continue to let her interview
them and make them look bad – the Dixie Chicks, Al Gore, Howard Dean? They seem to line up to book spots
opposite her, like lambs to the slaughter. And why is she married to Mike Nichols – how does that even
work? But I digress.)
I wondered what Bill Clinton would say in his eulogy in
Yorba Linda, since he and Hillary had been so passionately anti-Nixon when they
were younger; Hillary was even involved as an aide, I think, with Watergate
impeachment proceedings.
Bill Clinton got up and said: “Richard Nixon begins his
autobiography with the words: ‘I was born in a house that my father built.’”
Clinton went on to give a graceful eulogy to a self-made man who wrote eleven
of his twelve books after leaving office and never lost his sense of public
service. He didn’t distort or
gloss what he found problematic about Nixon, yet he was able to give a classy,
substantive eulogy – proving, again, that his mind works a little like mine,
except that it’s bigger and better.
I wrote to
Tony, my virtual pen-pal in England, about Bill a few days before last week’s
convention with the following deep thoughts:
“I continue to write in my mind his upcoming speech in
Charlotte. I’m thinking I’d like
Bill to compare Barack Obama to one of Bill’s political heroes: FDR. FDR came in after Hoover and he did not
cure the Great Depression over night, but he did give people hope, and he did
mitigate it significantly, and a return to the policies of Herbert Hoover in
the middle of all that would have been a disaster. (In fact, they tried a touch
of austerity in 1936 and things crashed again.) And I’d like him to compare
Obama’s stimulus, however inadequate, to the austerity measures you folks in Europe
have been dealing with, and what a disaster they have been, and how Obama’s
approach has helped. I’d also like
him to talk about the Republicans speaking of “Chicago style tactics” and such
– and remind the audience that if you are President, you are President of the
whole country and you really should not bash any quarter of it on the way to
getting there. Maybe he could be self-deprecating and say something like: “I
tried to increase gay rights, but in the end I had to compromise and endorse
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Barack
Obama has gone all the way, letting gays openly serve in the military, and now
under him our party endorses gay marriage and full gay rights. I tried to give all Americans
healthcare. Hillary and I broke
our hearts trying to do that.
Barack Obama has actually gotten it done.” And maybe he could take on
the danger of wholesale lying in speeches, with Paul Ryan as a case in point,
and the danger of turning social security into a voucher program, and the
danger of disloyal oppositions.
Sometimes I think like Bill, but sometimes not – we’ll see if he
broaches any of those themes.
Being twelve times smarter and more statesmanlike than I am, he’ll
probably say something simple and fresh and startling, and less partisan and
more constructive.”
Well, I didn’t call it exactly. The Roosevelt stuff was more implicit than explicit, in
everybody’s speech at the convention; I’d have played up that angle more. Other people talked about health care
more than Bill did, and gay rights.
There was no reason for Bill to do a belly-crawl, as I was envisioning –
but he did give his imprimatur to Obama’s presidency, and more or less to
Obama’s handling of the economy, and compared it to his own, which is maybe
more on people’s minds than FDR.
He did talk about opponents who will not work with you, and the
destructiveness of that, more than other people who spoke, and he’s certainly
in a position to know about that stuff.
He of course did it in a low-key, humorous, understated way, whereas I
would have been more vindictive.
He exulted in the number crunching that he does so well, that gives him
such joy: taking complicated facts and figures and breaking it all down for the
rest of us.
But the best thing about it all was that one got the sense
that he and Obama are working together now at least in part from inclination,
not just from necessity. He
probably does feel that Hillary has been treated with respect, and he’s gotten
over feeling protective and angry on her behalf, and Obama has come to appreciate
both of them more. He was even
doing some of that Clinton lip-pursing stuff in his acceptance speech; maybe
they’re really hanging out. The
Clinton/Obama chill for years was painful for the party, a sense of: Mommy,
Daddy, why are you fighting? It’s
good to put it behind us. And what
a party that convention was! All
those real, direct, honest, funny, thought-provoking speeches, all those cool
people one admires, people one knew of and people one had never heard of, what
an amazing contrast to the Republicans’ tepid Stepford show down in Tampa!
Romney can’t win this, right? In past years, we the Democrats were the ones with the
wooden, unlikeable candidate. Now
it’s them. My biggest fear nowadays, when a
race is very close, is about computerized, touch-screen, easily-hacked voting
machines with no paper trail such as we have here in Tennessee. I think I fear those more than the
various voter suppression gambits that are being openly tried this year. I’d like to start a campaign to keep
the media from “adjusting” their exit polls, if polls show Obama ahead on
Election Day – as they “adjusted” their exit polls in 2004. I don’t see exit polls as some accurate
gauge of how people voted, but they’re a useful potential canary in a coalmine
that we can’t afford to lose again. But I’ll sound off on that cause, I guess, in some other blog
post . . .
