Dole Man versus The Comeback Kid
Thomas Fleming
THE CHOICE by Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster, £16.99, pp. 462
There has not been a presidential election this boring since Wendell Wilkie ran against Franklin Roosevelt, on the plat- form that FDR was doing a great job but should step aside and let someone else finish it. Despite all the dire predictions that Bill Clinton would either self-destruct or go to jail before his term was out, the President has easily reclaimed his title as 'the comeback kid'. Americans, it seems, have finally grown up politically, and they no longer care what kind of scoundrel runs their country, so long as unemployment is falling and taxes are not rising. Bimbos, bribes, and buffoonery — the President's career in a nutshell — mean nothing to us. (Nero was popular, too, and for years after his assassination any Perkin Warbeck could make a brief career simply by claiming to be the late emperor.)
Bob Woodward has, once again, spent many a tedious hour interviewing the friends of Bill, and the results are exactly what one imagined: a President who cannot make up his mind on any major issue, a henpecked husband bullied by a wife ('this articulate woman of great intelli- gence, talent, stamina, and genuine caring') who has imaginary conversations (more like seances) with Eleanor Roosevelt. This was the big news hyped by the publisher, but the First Lady comes out not so much as crazy as an over-the-hill Sixties kid who plays at being grown up — the offspring of Wendy and Peter Pan.
Clinton's best policy moves would seem to be dictated by Dick Morris, a Republi-
can political consultant who taught the New Democrat to talk like the old Reagan. In the past two years, Clinton has sounded tough on crime and illegal immigrants, concerned about 'family values,' and pragmatic on welfare and budget reform. Predictably, he is running to the right of Bob Dole.
In the other corner are the Republicans who continue to dream about the good old days before the shelf-life of the Reagan- Thatcher revolution had run out. It was clear, in 1992, when Republicans persisted in backing an ailing and dispirited George Bush, that the Stupid Party was determined to live up to its name. For the Republicans, Clinton's election meant two things: bar- ring acts of God (who has apparently lost interest in American politics), Bob Dole would be the nominee in 1996, and Clinton would be re-elected. None of the challengers had a chance: Phil Gramm, the economist who flunked elementary school, Steve Forbes, the billionaire who wanted to make the rich richer, Lamar Alexander, who attracted the Prozac and Valium vote, and — most improbably of all — Pat Buchanan, who asked Republicans to sup- port a man who said what he believed. Woodward does not even try to understand 'I was always perplexed') the appeal of Mr Buchanan, whose crusade provided the
only interest of the campaign. On one page alone, he twice accuses the candidate of 'racism, bigotry, and sexism'. Like him or not, Buchanan ran the only serious campaign, and the successful smear- job done on him reveals the impossibility of political dissent in the United States.
No, the 'Dole Man' (as his campaign song proclaimed him) is the only choice for the Republican Party, a politician who has worn himself out selling his votes to corporate interests: Gallo Wineries, Philip Morris Tobacco, Archer Daniels Midland. Hardly a word of this, of course, from Woodward, the leftist journalist who brought down Nixon and is now gunning for Clinton. Woodward actually seems to like Dole, and why not? By Woodward's account, Dole has betrayed everything he ever claimed to stand for and cannot even seem to remember from one day to the next what his positions are or were on gun control, abortion, and tax cuts.
In his personal style, Senator Dole is a maverick, hard to corral. After carefully rehearsing the words that his speechwriters have given him to mouth, Dole is capable of ignoring the speech and dithering through a series of incoherent irrelevancies peppered with stinging one-liners. But this independence does not extend to policies, much less to principles. Even more than Clinton, Dole is under the thumb of his wife (a slightly more amiable version of Hillary) and his handlers. His break- through speech on the immorality of Holly- wood was scripted by Mari Will (wife of the columnist George Will), who larded the Kansan's speech with references to films he had never seen. In his confusion, poor Dole thought True Lies was wholesome family entertainment. More recently the Dole campaign, with assistance from con- servative culture guru William Bennett, repeated the attack on pop culture. Taking no chances this time, Dole actually saw Independence Day, a film even my children despised for its puerility, before he pro- nounced it inspirational.
Bob Woodward has made his career doing journalism based on off-the-record sources like his famous Deep Throat. It is a style that says to the reader, 'Trust me. I'm an honest man.' But Woodward's books are also written in the style of cheap fiction, reporting conversations he never heard, giving us the innermost thoughts of people he hardly knows. Even if Woodward were trying to be honest, it is a dishonest style of journalism which, combined with his hyped-up narrative technique, obscures, rather than clarifies, the issues confronting the voters. Even a few chapters of The Choice should be enough to convince any serious journalist that Bob Woodward is incapable of critical thought. This is a non- book about a non-choice.
Thomas Fleming is Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Previous page
