DID ALIENS ABDUCT AL?
Mark Steyn says that Gore is getting even
weirder, sighing and lying and looking like a pantomime dame. He'll lose big time
New Hampshire THERE are times, frankly, when I feel a bit of a sissy boy writing about US politics. Out there in the Middle East, my fellow foreign correspondents are climbing into their flak jackets and dodging the flying rocks. In Belgrade, they're swept along in the throng as the crowd storms parliament. And over here? We're discussing Al Gore's make-up. Granted, it's pretty scary, but it's not actually life-threatening.
Some years ago, when my fellow pundits began writing about 'the feminisation of politics', I don't think they meant that we'd all be sitting around the television set watching Al in the first formal presidential debate and tutting, 'Who does your make- up, girlfriend?' For the record, it was Kriss Soterion, a former Miss New Hampshire who now runs Kriss Cosmetics & The Stu- dio of Holistic Beauty down in Manch- ester, NH. Poor old Kriss, who gave the vice-president a heavy foundation with rouged cheeks that would have seemed a mite excessive on a pantomime dame, says that it was because he'd got sunburnt while in Florida, ostentatiously holed up — a la Big Brother — with a team of 'ordi- nary people' helping him to prepare for the debate. Following her smear job on Al, she was invited on to The Tonight Show to make up host Jay Leno so that he looked like Tammy Faye Bakker, the heavily caked former wife of a disgraced televan- gelist who self-destructed in a hooker scan- dal some while back. But Kriss turned it down. As for Al's pancake, she would like to make up for her make-up, but she fears she'll never get another chance, and now seems to be going through some existential crisis, riddled with self-doubt and ques- tioning her calling. She told the New Hampshire Sunday News that her catas- trophic touch-up of Al has caused her to 'think deeply about society's obsession with physical appearance' and 'the psy- chology of make-up'. 'It just makes me think about the whole thing, about wearing masks,' she said. 'It's kind of a fascinating subject, to analyse why we hide behind it in the first place.' This is not a subject Al wants to discuss at this stage in the elec- tion cycle.
The word from his spinmeisters was that for the second presidential face-off Al would be appearing without his face on. At the time of writing I haven't actually seen this latest debate, officially because The Spectator has to go to press early, but unof- ficially because I plan to be watching the Mister Ed the Talking Horse rerun on Channel 173 that night. But it seems safe to say that if George Dubya Bush can underperform as woefully as he did in the first debate, he should be up another eight points or so by the weekend. Al can get a new make-up artist and learn to stop sigh- ing so contemptuously when his opponent speaks, but there are certain things he can't do. For example, several of those who watched the first debate thought that he'd been working out excessively. Like Sylvester Stallone, his neck was wider than his head — and given how big his head is, that's some neck. On the average Ameri- can television screen, Al's problem is that he looks 'too big'.
Apparently, he started working out last year because focus groups showed that men didn't think he was as much of a 'real man' as Bush. The Texas governor doesn't pump iron, but he does run every day, usu- ally in the afternoon after a light lunch and a couple of execution orders. On the whole, it seems to be a more electorally effective regimen. On the evidence of my own exclusive columnar daily tracking poll, Al is more unpopular with men than ever. As part of my new improved service to readers, each day I take a different num- ber from my town's phone book and dial it with every other US area code. For our post-debate poll, I used the number of my retired postmistress, Mary Etta. Not a sin- gle male respondent said he would vote for Gore, except a cranky old geezer in Florida whining about how much less prescription drugs cost in Canada (I helpfully suggested that in Goose Bay, Labrador, you could pick up a retirement condo for as little as $4,000), and a fellow in California, who sounded gay. (Unlike other polling organi- sations, which attempt to fit respondents into proportionately weighted demograph- ics, we just fit them into our own preju- dices, which our extensive research indicates is no less inaccurate.) A lady in Alabama suggested that might be Al's problem, too. 'Real men,' she told me, 'don't feel the need to pump themselves up like that, unless they're insecure about their sexuality, if you know what I mean.' As a southerner herself, she thought that Al's southern accent was entirely synthetic. 'He only talks in that slow drawl because if he talked in his real voice he'd sound . . . you know,' she said.
Massachusetts Democratic congressman Barney Frank, who is gay, conceded the size problem might be insurmountable. do not think he can shrink between now and the next debate,' he said. 'His size will probably remain a constant. Crouching maybe would be about it.'
Anyway, according to my most recent poll, Bush has locked up or is leading in states worth 265 electoral-college votes, while Gore is way behind with only 104. Bush needs only one more small state like New Mexico to stack up the 270 votes needed to win. As for Gore's tally, Califor- nia, Maryland, Minnesota and his own state of Tennessee have all fallen back into the toss-up category. At the moment, his base is very thin, unlike his make-up.
It's fair to say most of the US media, unlike your humble correspondent, aren't predicting a Bush victory. Some of them, indeed, are still cranking out the 'Stick a fork in him. He's done' pieces that were so ubiquitous three weeks ago. This is because, from their point of view, Gore is doing everything right. For years, they've droned on that the gender gap to worry about is the one Republicans have with women. In the meantime, they've somehow failed to spot the yawning gender chasm the Democrats have with men. White rural men, in particular, loathe Gore. The crack- er I spoke to in West Virginia, a tradition- ally Democratic state, said he'd rather move than live under a Gore administra- tion. 'Where to?' I asked. 'Where you from?' he said. 'Canada,' I said. 'Can you get me in?' he said. 'Canada can't be worse than Al Gore.' The fellow from Tennessee was equally unenthusiastic. 'But he's your man,' I pointed out. 'Quit saying that,' he said. 'What's Tennessee about Al Gore?'
I didn't inquire whether these chaps were stump-toothed losers who liked nothing better than a jigger of moonshine and a bunk-up with their sister, but they're not the sort of 'moderate', 'independent' swing voters the networks book for their post- debate vox pops. The ones on television tend to be soccer-mom types with 'con- cerns' that the candidates need to `address'. Asked about Dubya's resilient poll numbers, the pundits profess them- selves mystified, because all the 'issues' supposedly favour Gore. But Issues' is defined very narrowly — education, child care, prescription drugs, etc. On the issues my chums down south care about, Al is off the graph. It's very difficult for a Demo- crat to be elected to the White House without carrying one or two southern states: every successful Democratic candi- date in the last 40 years has done well down there — it's the difference between, on the one hand, Clinton and Carter, and, on the other, Dukakis, Mondale and McGovern. But Al is heading for a total blow-out south of the Mason-Dixon line, and there's no mystery about why: he wants mandatory photo-ID licences for gun-buyers, a three-day waiting period, a limit on handgun purchases to one a month. Conversely, he's very much in favour of gays in the military, immigration rights for gay partners, and taking away your one-ton pick-up and replacing it with an energy-efficient electric shopping cart. How do you reckon that plays in Dixie?
Gore could have balanced his own non- bubba image by selecting as his running mate a moderate southern Democrat such as Louisiana senator John Breaux. Instead, once again, he overpandered to the media by choosing Joe Lieberman, thereby get- ting plaudits for being 'bold' and 'coura- geous', instead of picking a dullard in a grey suit like Dick Cheney. But the best thing about Lieberman was his willingness to depart from Democrat orthodoxy on issues such as education and social securi- ty, and, by the time he'd renounced all his previous positions to fall into lockstep with Gore, the two men looked like an unbal- anced ticket of northeastern liberals with zero appeal in the south. The media don't see it that way, not just because they fall into the same category, but also because, according to them, many of the women's `issues' favour Gore. This may be true, but many of these women's 'issues' — educa- tion, say — are matters that are not within federal jurisdiction. Nonetheless, as part of their contribution to the dumbing down of the American political process, the press now demands that a president have detailed policies not on, say, missile defence, but mainly on questions properly left to states, counties, towns, school boards, police chiefs and municipal recre- ation committees. Dubya has been sport- ing enough to go along with this. He claims, for example, that he will 'institute zero-tolerance policies for persistently dis- ruptive students'. Presumably, under a Bush administration, my school principal will be calling the leader of the free world and saying, 'Mr President, we have a prob- lem with the Steyn boy again.' I don't believe for a moment that Dubya seriously thinks he has the constitutional authority to regulate behaviour in every school dis- trict in the country. It's just his contribu- tion to the general phoneyness the media now require of a presidential campaign.
That may be why the press has been so tolerant of Al Gore's propensity for lying — or, as most commentators discreetly call it, 'exaggerating'. When some soccer mom wants to know what you're going to do about your daughter's high school, the proper response from a presidential candi- date is, 'You moron, take that up with your school board and come back when you've got something pertaining to the global geopolitical responsibilities of the chief of state.' But, once you've accepted that this phoney playing-field is the ground over which you're going to fight, it's no surprise that everything else becomes phoney, too. Even so, Al's accelerating productivity level of falsehoods is impres- sive. Why does he lie so much? 'I have no idea,' said Art Torres, chairman of the California Democratic party. 'I'm not a psychiatrist.' So they asked an actual psy- chiatrist, in Gore's Tennessee. 'I think it's like the false-memory syndrome,' he said, `when people end up believing that they were abducted by aliens.'
Personally, I can believe Al Gore was abducted by aliens. It's believing he invent- ed the Internet and the Strategic Petroleum Reserves that's more of a stretch. Unlike Dubya's 'gaffes', Al's go mostly unreported by ABC, CBS and NBC, and get buried on page D73 of the New York Times. But some- how they're getting out, through talk-radio shows and right-wing websites and a whole alternative network that flies below the big boys' radar. Al Gore is forever demonising `Big Oil' and 'Big Tobacco' and the Repub- licans' reliance on them. But he's silent about his own dependence on 'Big Media'. They're the ones who pronounced Dubya a dummy, decided he was finished, concluded that references to Gore's lies were 'nega- tive' and `mean-spirited', and declared on the night that Al won the debate, never noticing his lurid make-up. And none of it's made any difference. Gore's done every- thing they wanted and he's heading for oblivion. The story of this election campaign `Bloody Keegan — quitting before we had a chance to demand his resignation.' — and the best news for the American political system in many years — is the impotence of Big Media. Bush is on course to win big, and on 8 November Big Media will be looking pretty small.
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