CLINTON YES, TRANSVESTITES NO
Mark Steyn explains who were the
real winners and losers of the American mid-term elections
New Hampshire IT was a good night for gays in South Port- land, Maine, where voters passed a new ordinance protecting homosexuals from discrimination. It was a bad night if you fancy a post-prandial smoke just up the road in Portland, where voters rejected a ballot article to repeal the city's no-smok- ing-in-restaurants ordinance.
It was a good night for Bill Clinton, who survives — at least until the next intern, or until the body of Kathleen Willey's myste- riously vanished cat turns up. Ken Starr's agents recently found a skull in her garden and had the FBI conduct forensic tests, but it proved to be a dead skunk. It was a bad night for Newt Gingrich, who's in worse shape politically than that skunk.
It was a good night for professional wrestlers. Jesse 'The Body' Ventura was elected, on Ross Perot's Reform party ticket, as Governor of Minnesota. 'I'm no longer "The Body"; he told cheering sup- porters. 'I'm now Jesse "The Mind" Ven- tura.' It was a bad night for transvestites. In Indiana, Republican Congressman Dan Burton easily won re-election, kicking the pert silk-camisoled ass of Democratic can- didate Bob Kern, a drag-queen who likes to dress as a Charlie's Angel.
And it was a bad night, frankly, for me. In the wee small hours, I put on my Farrah Fawcett wig, prosthetic breasts and flared catsuit and nervously ventured out on to the streets of New Hampshire's capital city, Concord. But passers-by still jeered, 'Hey, aren't you that guy who said the Republicans would pick up Senate seats in California and Wisconsin and another 15 in the House?'
Well, they should have. But over the weekend Hillary Clinton was campaigning furiously to get out the `women's vote', while her husband was out doing the same for the 'African-American vote', already targeted by the party's saturation advertis- ing buy on black radio stations: 'When you don't vote, you let another church explode. When you don't vote, you allow another cross to burn. When you don't vote, you let another assault wound a brother or sister. When you don't vote, you let the Republi- cans continue to cut school lunches . . . Vote smart. Vote Democratic for Congress and the US Senate. Paid for by the Missouri Democratic party, Donna Knight, Treasurer.'
Donna's money was well spent. The unusually high black turnout saved a lot of white bacon in tight Democratic races, including Senator Fritz Hollings's tough re- election battle in South Carolina. African- Americans will doubtless be relieved by the Democratic senator's victory over John Inglis: that'll be one fewer Republican bombing their churches, lighting up crosses on their lawns, assaulting their brothers and cutting their school lunches. On the other hand, it does mean six more years of 76-year-old Senator Hollings's somewhat old-school southern Democrat views on race: not so long ago, he told a T'V inter- viewer from Columbia that foreign imports were destroying the jobs of his state's 'dark- ies'. In 1993, a discussion on GATT led him into some more general observations on international get-togethers: 'Everybody likes to go to Geneva. I used to do it for the Law of the Sea conferences and you'd find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they'd just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva.' The head of the South Carolina branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People de- nounced Senator Hollings as 'mentally sick', but nonetheless half the state's Democratic voters are black and on Tuesday the 'dark- ies', whether or not of the cannibal persua- sion, turned out for their man.
Meanwhile, it's the Republicans who are eating each other. There's talk of the con- gressional delegation demanding the heads of Newt, Trent Lott and House Majority Leader Dick Armey. 'If they're big enough, let 'em try,' scoffed Congressman Armey in the early hours of Wednesday morning. They will. The national leadership failed the party. If the impeachment debacle teaches us anything, it's that the Lotto- Newtians can't communicate in the modern media — and facing this election they were too scared even to try. Reviled as church bombers and lunch cutters, they're paral- ysed by awe of Bill Clinton. They caved in on his ludicrous demand for $1.2 billion for '100,000 new teachers' because they thought if they tried to resist it, they'd look bad — no matter that America already spends more per pupil on education than any other industrialised nation and it's got the dumbest kids on the planet, thanks in large part to unionised teachers of the kind the President wants 100,000 more of. The Republicans have all the issues, but the Democrats have all the soccer-mom-friend- ly, fluffy, feel-your-pain language. And, at the national level, that's what counts. In the Eighties, Democrats liked to mock Ronald Reagan's acting — the Bedtime for Bonzo jokes — but it's President Clinton who has the impregnability of the trulY appalling ham actor. The other day, he said in all seriousness that the Middle East peace accords in Maryland were part of his journey of 'personal atonement' for the Monica business. Gee. Maybe a couple more blowjobs and he'd have brought peace to the Balkans and ended Third World poverty. At a rational level, the President is absurd, but on TV, between the soap operas and the TV movies, he fits in more easily than Republicans. As an example of the Clinton command of spin, Tuesday night was immediately hailed as a historic victory for the Democrats. That's fine, if you don't mind a victory in which the other side wins. Just for the record, that's what the Republicans did, albeit messily and incoherently: neverthe- less, they control the House and Senate, the first time the party's held on to Congress for three terms since the 1920s. In reality, there was no way they could do spectacu- larly well on Tuesday. It's true that in the shah year of a presidency, the non-White House party is supposed to pick up seats. But that's usually because most two-term Presidents are re-elected with landslides and drag in a lot of third-rate party hacks in their wake; the ferry brings in the garbage, as they say. What follows two Years later is usually a natural correction. But, unlike the Nixon and Reagan land- slides of '72 and '84, President Clinton was re-elected with less than 50 per cent of the vote, against a weak Republican candidate and a third-party spoiler. For Congression- al Democrats in '96 there were no presi- dential coat tails; the only garbage the Clinton ferry brought in was his own. Hence, there was no correction. Instead, there's only the ongoing erosion of the Democratic party during the Clinton era: the Republicans cleaned up in '94, consoli- dated in '96 and held on in '98. In 1996, the President hogged the Democratic National Committee's millions for his own re-elec- tion, bankrupted the party and drove it fur- ther into debt by forcing it to spend much of the last two years raising dough to com- pensate for the Asian funny money they had to send back. By now, it will have 9eeurred to Democrats in Congress that, if it hadn't been for this President subordi- nating everything to his own self-interest, they might have won on Tuesday. Already, the party's House leader, Dick Gephardt, has been at pains to emphasise that he's not ruling out impeachment. In the end, the Democrats scored two Important victories. They installed Gray Davis as governor of California, ensuring that they'll control the state's Congression- al redistricting process for the year 2000, Which, if they operate in their usual shameless way, could be worth another 10 errYniandered House seats for them. And 111 the south, they've finally stumbled upon a form of redistributive taxation which, in electoral terms, works. In Alabama and South Carolina, GOP governors went down to opponents who promised to intro- duce state lotteries and were fulsomely .I.eked by the gambling lobby. For Democrats lotteries are a way of squaring Iti.e circle: you can promise low taxes and a,,ligh spending. If you raise a guy's taxes by ;0130 a week, he gets mad. But, if you let nun blow 300 bucks a week on lottery tick- ets' he's happy as Larry. One night in A ngitst, when the 19-state Powerball lot- 'et)! Jackpot stood at $261 million, I drove Worlds 0! Manhattan and straight into the backed longest traffic tailback. Cars were aeked up all the way from the Connect- Fyut border, because residents of New ha°1rlic' a state which doesn't have Power- tiej' *Were desperate to buy a last-minute we!' in a state which does. The odds on inning were about 80 million to one, but ndY seemed fussed. Maybe if the Democrats found a way to turn the elec- tion into a lottery, more than 38 per cent of the electorate would bother to vote: if, say, your ballot matches the results in five different races, you win $261 million; instead of spending zillions on attack ads, the special-interest groups could pony up to increase the jackpot.
But, other than fleecing the poor to throw money at the teachers' unions, the Democrats still haven't figured out a sur- vival strategy in an era of Republican state government. If Tuesday was a Democratic revival, how come a Republican governor won in loyally Democrat Massachusetts, while in the supposedly liberal enclave of hippy-dippy Vermont the Republicans now govern eight of the ten largest states: the big ethnic story of the night is not the black turnout for Democrats but the Hispanic vote for the Bush brothers in both Florida and Texas. A Democratic party already weak among blue-collar whites can't take traditional ethnic client groups for granted.
The voters want a Congress that will do more than rename an airport after Ronald Reagan,' says Dick Gephardt. 'The people are saying, "Get back to our agenda of health care, education and social security."' Really? The most you could say about this Tuesday was that it was a 'status quo' elec- tion and, at the congressional level, the sta- tus quo means no legislation and an ongoing impeachment inquiry. Most voters seem content with a congress that does nothing but rename the odd airport. They're not so approving of impeachment, but, significantly, exit polls show just under 40 per cent want the President to resign, which suggests they'd rather have an impeachment inquiry than intrusive federal legislation on tobacco, health care, hate crimes, etc. In 1984, President Reagan's slo- gan was 'It's morning in America.' In 1998, it's morning in America and we're sleeping in; don't do anything to wake us up.
On election night at his hotel in New York, defeated Senator Al D'Amato crammed too many buddies — Ed Koch, Libby Patalci and others — into his eleva- tor and, consequently, it stalled just above the 40th floor. After half an hour, Mayor Giuliani's emergency services managed to rescue them. And there's the election in a nutshell. After the gains of the last four years, the Republicans' express elevator has ground to a halt. If they want to, as my old pal, Broadway maestro George Abbott, did in a similar situation at the Algonquin on his 100th birthday, they can hoist themselves up through the hatch, pull their way up the elevator chord and scram- ble out on the floor above. That's how any further electoral gains are going to be made — slowly and incrementally, step by step up the staircase. Whether or not the Republicans have the stomach for it is another matter.
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