Worst Book of the Year/Ferraro: My Story
Barnes, Fred
WORST BOOK OF THE...
...TAS's Annual J. Gordon Coogler Award FERRARO: MY STORY Geraldine A. Ferraro, with Linda Bird Francke Bantam Books/$17.95 Fred Barnes Turns out there was a lot more going on in the 1984 presidential campaign than I ever imagined...
...she asks...
...In other words, we are still penalized for saving and rewarded for going into debt...
...And the same signs were popping up at different points all over the country, along with the same hecklers...
...It was aimed, I am now in-formed, at persecuting a single Democratic candidate...
...And the Catholic bishops should have accepted this...
...Perhaps...
...Fools, are they...
...Oh, yes, one more thing...
...The Democrats had delivered federal goodies to them...
...Profits...
...There was harassment and razzing and all manner of unpleasant conduct by people who carried nasty placards...
...As you might guess, Ferraro can't explain that adequately...
...The fix was in, and it was scary...
...And earnings on stocks are reduced through capital gains taxes...
...When parents brought children, usually little girls, to her to be touched, that was "heavy...
...The violence was escalating...
...It certainly is true that the number of Americans who are perpetually in debt has reached epidemic proportions...
...On this one, the buck passes to the old family friend who'd been doing accounting chores for the family for years...
...It was quite another to have a high-profile Catholic woman support the issue, and so personalize it...
...We had bailed out Chrysler," Ferraro writes...
...to be spontaneous...
...Nor does she, or her co-author, write well...
...The sad truth is that under present tax laws, and given the government's pen-chant for inflating (therefore, devaluing) the currency, the "smart money" has plenty of reasons to avoid the kind of productive investments that would raise all Americans' standard of living...
...Reading my voting record without knowing the background did make me look far more liberal than I actually Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Was I devastated...
...What Ferraro faced was a pernicious and ubiquitous double standard...
...In the meantime, let me apply a popular journalistic test to the book...
...I had voted for the legislation...
...Blame him...
...Dividends, that portion of profits which goes to the owners, are taxed twice—first as corporate profits, then at the personal level as "unearned" income...
...This wasn't "meant to question Reagan's standing as a Christian," she adds disingenuously, "but the actions of his Administration...
...Ferraro has a penchant for crude slang...
...But when you're a self-flatterer in the extreme, with an irritating streak of self-righteousness, and are unreflective on top of it—that's going too far...
...Talented THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 31 people who come her way are often described as "dynamite...
...Then comes Election Day...
...Better to spend it now while it still has some purchasing power left...
...In short, "Reagan was unbeatable" What happened to all those great issues...
...He is mentioned once in the book, when he's described as standing beside Ferraro on stage and wiping away the tears as she speaks...
...But bad writing is forgivable...
...That they didn't could only have been the result of a conspiracy...
...It should have been en-titled: "I'm Great—It's Not My Fault I'm Not Vice President...
...As a bonus, we will also send you a free subscription to our monthly journal Imprimis...
...Former Treasury Secretary William Simon explains: "If the purchasing power of the dollar is going to be cut in half in a decade (by inflation), it makes little sense for me to hold that dollar in a savings ac-count...
...Yet President Reagan could make an idle quip about dropping the Big One on the Soviet Union and get away with it...
...Ferraro is aghast...
...He was a "friend of the Reagan White House, whose nephew, according to the Village Voice, was employed by the Reagan-Bush reelection campaign, supporter of Reagan's policies in Central America [and] defender of our role in Vietnam...
...In fact, it pays me to consume not only everything I have but also what I don't have—in other words, go into debt...
...A full moon must have arrived around Election Day because there was bizarre behavior on the part of voters, who were irrational to the point of voting against their own beliefs...
...But this doesn't necessarily suggest a flaw in the national character...
...She doesn't make connections...
...This was a Chrysler plant...
...Irrelevant," Ferraro declares...
...Getting the drift...
...She hasn't the foggiest idea why she and Walter Mon-dale were trounced in the election...
...Well, that's it in a nutshell, Ferraro's version of the campaign in which she was the nation's first woman vice presidential candidate Boy, did she suffer, and so did her husband and children and mother...
...Nowhere was the double standard more apparent than over this issue...
...On the one hand, the perception was that men could speak with more authority than women on foreign affairs...
...Meanwhile, losses are written off...
...And that's not all...
...Yet it simply isn't proper for someone to try to impose her religious beliefs on the public at large...
...Dame," Ferraro contends...
...The really awful thing that all those Catholic bishops and White House types and Republicans and journalists did was take a hard look at Ferraro's record...
...She maintains that all the issues were on her and Mondale's side...
...Vice President Bush plainly lost to her in their single debate, for instance, but hordes of people thought he'd won...
...I've read worse books...
...Nope...
...No incumbent President has ever been turned out of office in a year of economic growth...
...It's no surprise to find a political figure who lacks a serious interest in long-term voting patterns or ideology or political motivation...
...Over and over, folks blamed her or husband John Zaccaro for matters that became controversial...
...But Ferraro goes well beyond that...
...Though they may have been involved in military combat, they had never been pregnant...
...For a series of 36 of these award-winning essays, send $10.00 to Alternatives, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242...
...She shows up for the Columbus pay parade in New York City and is shunted far to the back...
...But their views on abortion were respected and taken seriously, whereas women's attitudes toward national security were not...
...Having said that, she turns three pages later to Bush's brazen flashing of his wallet at a campaign rally in Ohio, during which he stated, "It's who puts money into this and who takes money out...
...But it should be noted further that the interest we earn on our savings is taxed as "unearned" income, while the interest we pay on our debts is a tax writeHillsdale College Hillsdale Michigan 49242 off...
...Just as she dreamt that all those bad guys were plotting against her throughout the campaign...
...In the end, a martyr was produced, Geraldine Ferraro, crucified on the cross of her womanhood...
...What of it...
...This effect is relieved somewhat as inflation declines...
...Ferraro doesn't understand what kind of shape the country is in, either...
...But 55 percent of them voted for Reagan's vision...
...It was tough, tough going...
...Yet these same men also felt entitled to speak out just as forcefully on abortion...
...The economy was in dreadful shape, the threat of a nuclear or conventional war far greater with Reagan in the White House And voters agreed with her and Mondale about what to do—spend more on social programs, negotiate a nuclear freeze, and so on...
...Are we simply hedonistic spendthrifts with little regard for the future...
...If that episode wasn't embarrassing enough, she also harkens back to the time she confronted workers at a Chrysler plant in Illinois...
...I could actually hive one...
...It was one thing for Catholic men to speak in the abstract about a woman's right to abortion, as Governor Mario Cuomo would so eloquently in his speech at Notre...
...Ferraro claims she couldn't get a fair shake, what with everybody out to get her...
...Fewer of them bought the Reagan vision of America [than men did], because they understood they were not equal to men within it...
...That wasn't the worst of it...
...Her constituents voted "for the Republican presidential candidate, not against the Democratic vice-presidential candidate" Women didn't come flocking to the Democratic ticket, as predicted, once a woman was on it...
...Or something like that—it's the only-story-I-know-about test...
...It was all too organized...
...Why, that had no business coming back to haunt her in 1984, since the idea came from a man who'd worked for the Federal Election Commission once...
...Clearly, the laws must be rewritten to reward savers, not penalize them...
...Even egomania isn't so bad...
...Or the snarled financial situation of Ferraro & Zaccaro, notably the fact that they had to pay $53,461 in back taxes to the federal government in 1984...
...At the core was sexism...
...Unfair, sexist, not my fault, etc...
...The country was not presently at war...
...The Bible sets out "the judeo-Christian principles we should live by: to care for the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked," but Reagan is "doing exactly the opposite" with domestic budget cuts, she says...
...Ferraro demands that she not be judged a bad Catholic because shedisagrees with the church on abortion...
...Bad legal advice was responsible for that...
...Ferraro's book, 340 pages of it, is a prolonged whine...
...Mario Cuomo could talk about abortion...
...Folks often say they don't know much about journalism, but they do know what happened down in their neighborhood the other day and the press account of it had the facts all confused...
...Youcan bet if there had been an Italian male vice-presidential candidate of either political party, the New York Italians would have made a big deal over him," she notes...
...After all, Archbishop O'Connor of New York City, Ferraro's leading antagonist on the abortion issue, had been a registered Republican until right before the election...
...What it does suggest is that there is little incentive to save...
...Then, a few pages later, she recalls her criticism of Reagan for failing to live up to Christian principles...
...it happens all the time in political memoirs...
...it's an occupational hazard in politics (and journalism...
...was," she writes...
...But women are no fools," Ferraro insists...
...Okay, so she voted for the wild-spending budget of the Congressional Black Caucus...
...My vote on the Black Caucus budget ex-pressed my principles—that funds for nutrition for kids, for education, and for jobs programs were just as important as funds for defense" Abortion was the real club used against her, though...
...What a cynical statement on the democratic process," she huffs...
...citizen saves much less of his income than his counterpart in any other industrialized nation...
...It Just Doesn't Pay he average U.S...
...Never happened, says Medley...
...How could any politician be so crass as to think that a vote is affected by whether one is making some money or not...
...which are the rewards for risking our savings and which are in large part used to upgrade facilities, are heavily taxed...
...Fritz Mon-dale had led the fight from the White House...
...She joked about Italian men and got hammered for it in the press...
...But why the vehemence of O'Connor's (and everybody else's) attacks...
...Give me a week or two, and I'm sure I can come up with some names...
...Not fair, Ferraro says...
...I'm willing to concede she dreamt it...
...More unfair still was the notion that a woman wasn't experienced or tough enough to handle foreign policy and defense matters...
...How dare any of them vote for Reagan...
...When she likes something, she is "into" it...
...I wanted to make a statement about the President's priorities," Ferraro explains...
...Personally, I have always been against abortion," Ferraro writes...
...Me, I don't know many people who worked for the Ferraro campaign, but I do know Richard Medley, an economist who served as a speechwriter for her...
...I can pay back my creditors in the future with dollars that are worth less than the ones I borrow...
...I'm not suggesting that Ferraro purposely made up the Medley episode...
...Thanks to oppressive tax laws and the government's own fiscal irresponsibility, it just doesn't pay to save...
...The same is true in business...
...And she just doesn't get the hang of what's going on in American politics...
...Maybe I'm being too rough on Ferraro...
...Now, I don't mean unreflective in the conventional way that most politicians are unreflective...
...Political analysts thought less of her candidacy because her own congressional district in Queens went solidly for Reagan-Bush...
...I mean, she wasn't really for that budget, exactly...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986...
...I covered the dang thing, but I never knew, for example, that there was a conspiracy afoot, a cabal involving the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the White House, the Republican party, and the press...
...There was violence, or at least the constant threat of it...
...WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR...
...Jimmy Carter never shifted this much blame, even when he accused the malaise-afflicted American people of causing nearly all of his administration's problems...
...These were the guys whose jobs we had saved...
...Ferraro, at any rate, comes off as one in this book...
...But, if truth be told, there was always someone else at fault—no flies on me...
...Could I, in good conscience, make the decision to continue or terminate a pregnancy for somebody else...
...Or the money Zaccam borrowed from an elderly widow's estate, of which he was conservator...
...The trick she pulled of illegally taking money from her immediate family to finance her race for Congress in 1978...
Vol. 19 • January 1986 • No. 1
