McCAIN IS FROM MARS, BUSH IS FROM VENUS
As the campaign hots up, Mark Steyn reflects
on the mystery of a world in which insiders suddenly become outsiders
New Hampshire EVERY morning, round about ten, the phone rings. 'Hi, I'm calling from ABC/NBC/PBS/WZZZ-AM Presque Isle, Maine. We saw Mark's piece attacking John McCain and we'd like him to take part in a discussion on McCain's popularity with the media.'
`He's all McCained out,' says my assis- tant. 'Can't you get someone else?'
`We would if we could,' says the producer. `You don't happen to know any other columnists who are anti-McCain, do you?'
Alas, it's a lonely life out here in the anti-McCain Rolodex. I've attacked every- body's favourite 'maverick' in The Specta- tor, the Telegraph, Canada's National Post, America's National Review, the American Spectator, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Dead Man's Gulch Weekend Shopper & Baptist Mission Newsletter. . . . I've written more anti-McCain pieces than any other guy on the planet. That loser Bush owes me big time. If he ever makes it to the White House, I'm expecting, at the very least, the ambassadorship to Chad. But I fear it's a waste of time speculating about the baubles of the Bush administration. Last week, in the Delaware primary, Dubya got 50 per cent of the vote, which is pretty impressive in a four-man race. But no one cared. The big story was McCain coming second with 25 per cent, even though he'd declined to campaign in the state and had gone out of his way to insult them, insisting that he not only wouldn't be making appearances in Delaware but that he didn't even bother looking out of the window at the insignificant backwater as the Metroliner zipped through it en 'Oh look, darling, his first outmoded technology.' route from New York to Washington. No wonder the media love him• at last they've got a candidate who's as dismissive of the electorate as they are.
According to Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, McCain is the new Ronald Rea- gan. According to the New York Times, he's the new Robert F. Kennedy. According to TV Guide, he's the new Rachel from Friends. According to Gay Bath-house Monthly, he's the new Robert Mugabe, but hey, that's no reason not to support him because, say what you like, he may be a ferocious homophobe but at least you know where you stand with a straight- talking straight like that. McCain is the new Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the new Teddy Roosevelt, and, if you haven't written your Why-McCain-Is-The-New-[insert name of president here] column yet, you'd better hurry 'cause all the good ones are gone and you'll be down to 'Why McCain is the New Chester Arthur'. Stung by accusations that they're hanging off the senator's zipper like Monica Lewinsky, the press has been doing its best to report McCain's 'dark side'. It emerged last week that a couple of months back he told budget committee chairman and fellow Republican senator Pete Domenici that 'only an asshole would put together a budget like this'. Senator Domenici rose to his feet and said, with wounded dignity, that in all his years in the Senate no one had ever called him that. 'I wouldn't call you an asshole unless you really were an asshole,' said McCain.
Of course, for many in the press, that's just another reason to love him• a Republi- can who thinks other Republicans are ass- holes is the kind of Republican the entire country can unite behind. On Saturday, in South Carolina, it's only the GOP that's holding a primary, but, under the state's rules, independents and registered Democrats are allowed to vote in it which is a bit like letting Labour activists participate in a Tory leadership contest. Indeed, the husband of the woman who heads the Al Gore campaign in South Car- olina has announced that he'll be partici- pating in the Republican primary in order to vote for McCain. The state's Republi- cans prefer Bush, but who cares? Whether he wins or not depends on how many non- Republicans turn up on the day.
The trick in this campaign is to be the designated 'outsider'. Not a real outsider like Alan Keyes, the African-American radio fulminator, or Steve Forbes, the bil- lionaire geek who blew $60 million of his own money for the privilege of coming third in Delaware, but an insider whom the other insiders in the media decide to tout as the outsider. This year, the insiders' out- sider is McCain, while Dubya is dismissed as the candidate of the 'Republican estab- lishment'. Of the 55 Republican senators, 39 have endorsed Bush and only four McCain. But friends don't come much more fairweather than senior Republicans, and, if Bush loses again in South Carolina, many of them will be jumping ship. On Monday, for example, California's secre- tary of state — the highest-ranking Repub- lican in the whole crazy place announced he was switching from Bush to McCain. It would not be inconceivable to find Senator Domenici, a month or two down the line, heading up the 'Assholes for McCain' committee.
For the most part, Dubya is taking it all lying down — and in his own bunk, too. The other day, a microphone caught the governor telling someone he was going back to Texas to sleep in his own bed and see his girls. It's reminiscent of 1996, when Bob Dole's aides were divided over whether he should do more meet-the- people town meetings or more TV-orient- ed photo-ops. Bob split the difference and flew back to Bal Harbor, Florida, to work on his tan. By the day of the election, he was the most orange candidate in the his- tory of the Republic. You can't blame Dubya for being a little aggrieved at being recast as this year's Bob Dole, when he's done everything the media has been telling the GOP to do for years. On the morning after the 1998 congressional elections, ABC's Cokie Roberts, as good a barome- ter of the received wisdom as any, sternly lectured conservative commentator Bill Kristol on how Republicans had to stop pandering to 'angry white men'. 'There aren't enough of you,' she pointed out. The Republicans who'd done well were fellows like young George W., who'd cam- paigned in Spanish and reached out to African-Americans and spoken in more touchy-feely language, which supposedly appeals to 'soccer moms' and thereby reduces the party's 'gender gap'.
In other words, Dubya is the Republican candidate the press has been demanding for years. He talks about 'compassionate conservatism' and 'an America where no child is denied the right to dream' and all the other Clintonian hogwash that's proved so effective in recent years. Voters want to hear about the issues, say the press, and Dubya's obliged: no sound- bites, no negative ads, just policy after pol- icy on extending 'excess benefit' provisions, Title I funding, the need for IROs for HMOs — or is it vice versa? If you want detailed policy on every issue, Dubya's your man. If you want bullshit soundbites, go with McCain and his catch- phrase campaign about the 'iron triangle' of 'special interests', 'big money', 'pork- barrel politics', all of which are feel-good words which mean whatever the listener wants to hear in them. His big issue is `campaign finance reform', but his propos- als have veered all over the map. True, his anti-tobacco bill was comprehensive, but only in an insane, off-the-graph, Hillary's- health-care kind of way. And, if you ask him about anything else, he pretty much wings it, and usually manages to sneak in a reminder that he's a veteran. In Tuesday night's debate, Alan Keyes tried to pin him down on abortion and the need to end the killing of the unborn. 'I've seen enough killing in my life. A lot more than you have,' McCain snapped. Er, yes, but how about answering the question?
One day the media will tire of McCain as they tired of Dubya. My best estimate would be about two weeks after the sena- tor's nominated as the Republican candi- date, when they'll suddenly remember he's a pro-life, pro-gun, anti-gay conservative. But, in the meantime, it gets tiring carrying the anti-McCain torch single-handed, so let me cite the one bit of the senator's campaign I like: pace Cokie Roberts, he is an 'angry white man'. He has no dis- cernible interest in 'soccer moms' or their piffling concerns about how to make their boomer lifestyles even more pampered. In defiance of the growing `feminisation' of politics (of which Tony Blair is a prime example), this guy has the guts to stand up and say the job of the President of the United States is not to waffle on about wussy programmes for federal bicycling- helmet regulation but to attend to big manly subjects like war.
In 1996, Bill Clinton was reported as having read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus several times, and he made sure he conducted a scrupulously Venu- sian campaign, leaving Bob Dole looking like a hard-hearted old Martian. It was assumed that this time round things would be much the same: Bush, Bradley and Gore are all Venusian candidates. But the Martians have returned, in the shape of a profane misogynist POW who, for all his faults, doesn't shy away from lambasting Clinton and Gore as liars and cowards. He may be the last best hope for America's lost manhood: McCain is from Mars, Bush is from Venus, Gore is from Uranus, but right now the Venusian view of politics is in full retreat.
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